Fears are growing that Jair Bolsonaro could refuse to accept defeat in Brazil’s crunch election this Sunday after his politician son claimed Brazil’s far-right president was the victim of “the greatest electoral fraud ever seen” amid unproven allegations of foul play.
The assertion from the president’s senator son, Flávio Bolsonaro, was almost identical to language used by Donald Trump – Bolsonaro’s most prominent international backer – after he lost the 2020 US election to Joe Biden.
Trump used false claims of widespread voter fraud to decry “the greatest fraud in the history of our country from an electoral standpoint”. Weeks later, on 6 January 2021, pro-Trump extremists stormed the Capitol in a failed bid to overturn the result.
Many suspect Bolsonaro plans to follow a similar script if he loses to his leftist rival, the ex-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who won the election’s first round on 2 October and currently leads the polls by a margin of between 4% and 5%.
Long-running fears that Bolsonaro – who has spent years attacking Brazil’s democratic system – might contest the result intensified on Monday after his communications minister, Fábio Faria, summoned journalists to denounce what he called “a grave violation of the electoral system”.
Without offering evidence, Faria claimed local radio stations in north-east Brazil had broadcast thousands more campaign adverts for the Lula campaign. “You need to get out and vote because we are being hamstrung,” he told supporters.
On Wednesday Brazil’s chief electoral justice, Alexandre de Moraes, rejected a petition from Bolsonaro’s campaign demanding the supposed irregularity be investigated. Moraes called instead for an investigation into whether the “unsubstantiated” claims were designed to “disrupt” the election.
But Bolsonaro doubled down on the claims, telling reporters the electoral process had been “unbalanced” in Lula’s favour.
“One side – my side – has been really disadvantaged,” claimed Bolsonaro, who Trump recently endorsed as “one of the great presidents of any country in the world”.
Flávio Bolsonaro compared the alleged campaign against his father to the failed attempt to assassinate the rightwing populist during 2018’s election, which he won.
“Bolsonaro has been knifed for a second time,” Bolsonaro tweeted, vowing: “We will win these elections, despite the attempt to manipulate the result.” In a second post, the senator claimed his father was the victim of “the greatest election fraud ever seen”.
Another pro-Bolsonaro senator, Lasier Martins, tweeted: “Postponing the election is the only solution!”
Thomas Traumann, a Rio-based political expert, called Bolsonaro’s claims of radio fraud “pure nonsense” and said he was convinced Bolsonaro was preparing to challenge the result of what is widely seen as Brazil’s most important election in decades.
“I have zero doubt – zero. He’s going to contest this,” Traumann said. “The question is the scale of the violence that challenge causes” among radical Bolsonaro followers.
Traumann added: “Trump is his idol and his model. And what did Trump do? He contested, he didn’t accept defeat, he called people on to the streets and encouraged violent protests and left power without backing down and continued to engage his followers so they didn’t recognize the authority of the new government and thus kept his base fired up. This, for me, is Bolsonaro’s roadmap.”
International observers are also fretting over how Bolsonaro might react if he loses when 156 million Brazilians return to the polls this weekend.
In a recent interview with the Guardian, the former US ambassador to Brazil Thomas Shannon voiced concern over Bolsonaro’s undermining of the electoral process.
“For me that can only have one purpose, which is to try to prevent an election from happening or change their course or outcome,” Shannon said, adding: “Bolsonaro and his team have looked very closely at what happened on January 6 trying to understand why it was that a sitting president failed in his effort to overturn election results.”
Shannon said he saw clear parallels between the politics of both countries. “The United States and Brazil are kind of like mirrors that reflect each other. Whatever happens in the United States happens in Brazil and whatever happens in Brazil happens in the United States.”
Brian Winter, a Brazil specialist who is editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly, said Bolsonaro’s questioning of the election’s fairness was “100%” Trump-inspired.
“They have noticed that January 6 and Trump’s continuous denial of the election has not cost him his future – as a matter of fact it may have saved it. Because this image of invincibility is so important to both of these movements – and the only way that Donald Trump could lose and survive was by insisting that he didn’t lose,” Winter said. “The Bolsonaros may have come to the same conclusion.”
Winter still believed it was possible Bolsonaro would not lose at all, pointing to how first round polls underestimated his support. Lula won the 2 October vote with 48.4% but Bolsonaro did much better than expected, taking 43.2% rather than the 36% or 37% pollsters had forecast.
“I still think this thing is going to go down to the wire and that you are going to have 215 million people simultaneously having heart attacks on Sunday night as the numbers come in,” Winter said.
“I still think he could win. I don’t think it’s the most likely outcome – but we’ll see.”
