Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, the frontrunner in this year’s presidential election in Brazil, asserted on Friday that the results showing that incumbent socialist President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva defeated him were “impossible.” Bolsonaro questioned whether Lula would even allow a presidential election in 2030 in his first major interview with Brazilian media since escaping to Florida last week.
Bolsonaro sat down for nearly an hour with American journalist Glenn Greenwald with the Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo for a conversation published in full on Friday evening but recorded the day before.
Bolsonaro had stated in a social media message this week that he would soon offer public statements and extended interviews to offer his opinion on the election and the subsequent political crisis that it unleashed, which resulted in his departure to America. He also claimed that he had declined interview requests from outlets that did not agree to publish interviews in full, without edits, as Greenwald did on Friday.
Bolsonaro, son of imprisoned conservative former President Jair Bolsonaro, won the first round of voting in the Brazilian presidential election in early October, but lost the second round as a result of a significant boost in the left-wing vote.
While his political party accepted the results of the election, the integrity was compromised by a bizarre and unprecedented legal situation in which a justice on Brazil’s top court, Cristiano Zanin of the Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF), issued an edict allowing polling stations to be open for an extra two hours, granting a Lula campaign request. The STF does not have the power to issue such an order — much less any individual justice — and Zanin published the decree at 5:01 p.m., as Bolsonaro noted in his interview on Friday, meaning most polling stations were already closed.
On the night of the election, Bolsonaro declared it “impossible” to accept the election results and said he would challenge them. Minutes after the results were certified, another STF justice, Alexandre de Moraes, demanded that Bolsonaro hand over his passports to ban him from leaving the country. By early November, Bolsonaro was in Miami, Florida, where he met Greenwald for his interview.
Bolsonaro told Greenwald that he would not go so far as to declare himself the president-elect of Brazil, but that, given the irregularities, Lula could not do so, either.
