Bolsonaro's "fraud" claims getting louder as we approach his probable defeat
Socialist Inacio "Lula" da Silva has the advantage for this Sunday's second and definitive round of elections in Brazil. Its current President, Jair Bolsonaro, knows it very well.
“Not a hard choice at all”, reads one of the latest cartoons by the great Carlos Latuff (Credit: Brasil de Fato).
According to recent polls, Lula da Silva has slightly increased his lead over President Jair Bolsonaro. The leftist candidate from the Workers’ Party went from 51.1% of the vote, as stated two weeks ago in the AtlasIntel poll, to 52.0%, while his far-right opponent fell from 46.5% to 46.2%.
As the Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo explains, Bolsonaro is already attempting to “pave the way for a 3rd round of elections” in case he loses this Sunday. As expected he’s exploiting the rhetoric of the “persecuted, anti-system” candidate, a usual trait in today’s far-right politics all around the world. This is, of course, a brazen lie. His “Chicago-boy”, Paulo Guedes, was a gift to the Brazilian corporate elite and 1%.
Regarding the 99%, Brazil recently made it back to the UN Hunger Map after leaving it in 2014. It is the first time in history a country leaves the list of countries where hunger is widespread just to return to it years later. As Global Voices explains:
Between 2004 and 2013, policies to end poverty and hardship were implemented in Brazil and reduced hunger to less than half of the initial rate: from 9.5 percent to 4.2 percent.
The site also explains how a 2010 report congratulated Brazil for its leadership “among developing countries with the most efficient policies to reduce hunger”.
After his election victory in 2018 (facilitated by a protracted lawfare campaign against Lula and his party, orchestrated by judge Aldo Moro and the US Department of Justice), Bolsonaro scrapped most of the policies that lifted tens of millions of Brazilians out of poverty. Among them, “Bolsa Familia” was probably the most iconic.
Bolsonaro won the 2018 elections because Lula was unable to run, even as polls had him way ahead of the ex-soldier, and part of the last, US-aligned, Brazilian dictatorship. The so-called “anti-establishment” far-right candidate was also the first Brazilian President to visit the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where he saluted the American flag like a child visiting Disney World to take a picture of himself next to Mickey Mouse.
Years Preparing Brazil to dismiss this Sunday’s result
As our friends at the corporate media reported a few days ago, Bolsonaro has been preparing Brazil for an election “fraud” for many years. More recently, he’s accusing the authorities of allowing radios to air disproportionately more ads in favor of Lula da Silva.
To its credit, the New York Times managed to put together several videos, taken from the last 8 years, where we can listen to Bolsonaro criticizing his country’s electoral system. The fun part is that, in most of the videos, he clearly admits that he has no proof whatsoever of any kind of fraud. Even as he won the elections in 2018, he remained unforgiving, explaining how “hackers” tried to steal his victory but couldn’t.
The reason that explains this obsession with electoral fraud among many far-right candidates is very simple: they are traditionally unpopular and, therefore, unable to win democratically. Even as that trend changed in the last decades, Lula remains above him in public acceptance, despite the mainstream media/ judiciary campaign to incarcerate him and paint him as a corrupt politician. In fact, few people are aware of the fact that the leftist was acquitted of all charges regarding the Lava-Jato scandal; this is deliberate, media-induced ignorance.
Talking about unpopular far-rightists, take the example of Jeanine Áñez, who became the Bolivian de facto President after the coup that ousted Evo Morales. She was “virtually unknown” before taking power, but with a little help from the Organization of American States, the traditionally “anti-Communist” Brazilian and international mainstream media, and her friends inside the Bolivian military, she managed to put herself in power, although just for a year. Now she’s facing a decade in jail and Morales’ party, the Movement Towards Socialism, is back in power.
Brazil is not that different. Bolsonaro wasn’t winning the presidency against Lula but did so thanks to the US Department of Justice and its Brazilian cronies (Aldo Moro and Deltan Dallagnol, among others).
In the video below (September 2021, Portuguese), Bolsonaro explains how he only has 3 options for the upcoming elections: “victory, jail or death”. He specifically mentioned Alexandre de Moraes, Brazil’s chief electoral justice, stating that he won’t abide by any of his decisions.
He (among others VERY close to him) has good reasons to fear jail:
Corruption scandals have defined his tenure, and the rot starts at home. Two of his sons, who also hold public offices, have been accused by state prosecutors of systematically stealing public funds by pocketing part of the salaries of close associates and ghost employees on their payrolls.
But Bolsonaro also likes to repeat that he won’t let anyone imprison him, suggesting he will resist arrest -just like one of his political allies a few days ago-, or escape justice in some manner.
Is Roberto Jefferson’s violent reaction what awaits Brazil if Bolsonaro loses this Sunday? We will soon know.