The defeated Brazilian presidential candidate, Flávio Bolsonaro, once again questioned this Friday the legitimacy of the recent elections in his country, describing the results as “mathematically impossible,” and assured that the victory of the president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was achieved through “a goal with his hand.”
“There are many inexplicable things in these elections, which are mathematically impossible to have happened in the real world, unless, as I said, there was a goal with a handball,” the far-right expressed in a live broadcast on his social networks.
Without presenting evidence of the alleged fraud, which he promised he would explain “very soon,” Bolsonaro called for making Congress a “trench” from which to resist to “prevent or delay the great chaos that the current president of the Republic is going to establish.” According to the 45-year-old senator, Lula will end up being overthrown “sooner than many imagine” because of the “radical” economic measures he will take, among other factors that he did not detail.
According to Bolsonaro, the current economic scenario “is much worse” than that experienced during the mandate of former President Dilma Rousseff, who governed Brazil from 2011 to 2016, when she was dismissed by Congress. The opponent thanked the support of the almost sixty million voters who supported him at the polls and did not rule out challenging for power before the regular constitutional deadlines, alluding to a possible early departure of the re-elected president.
"If necessary, I will be available to contest the Presidency of the Republic again. And I'm not talking about 2030, I'm talking about before that," he concluded. During his speech this Friday, the senator, whose term ends next February, explained that he left his country for the United States with his wife and two daughters after being notified of the ban on traveling abroad and of the order to surrender his passports, the diplomatic and the ordinary one.
According to his story, the notification occurred on the Monday after the vote and at the end of a thirty-minute visit to his father, former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is serving house arrest for orchestrating an attempted coup d'état after losing the elections against Lula in 2022. "I looked at my father's face and told him: 'The persecution has begun,'" said the former candidate.
In that sense, he stated that he fled to “continue, at least, having an active voice” from abroad, since, according to him, in Brazil there is a “regime of exception,” with institutions “completely kidnapped.” Lula was re-elected with 52% of the votes compared to 48% for the former candidate of the Liberal Party (PL), a difference that translated into more than four million votes.
The leader of the Workers' Party (PT), who will govern for the next four years, led a historic comeback, after having fallen behind the far-right by two million votes in the first round of the elections. Flávio Bolsonaro has not accepted defeat, while the leadership of the PL and his own candidate for vice president, Alfredo Gaspar, have done so.
Since the results were known, Bolsonaro has requested the annulment of the elections; then he announced that he would denounce Lula's candidacy for alleged abuses of power; and, later, from the United States, he released a letter in which he proclaimed himself the “true president-elect of Brazil.” That letter, which he later replaced with a version in which he called himself the “leader” of Brazil, caused rejection from his own party allies, who claimed not to know or approve of the letter.
