Bolsonaro backtracks and says he will serve as Lula’s opposition
The far-right candidate abandons his attempt to get Brazil’s presidential election annulled despite support from Trump over ‘rigged’ vote
Flávio Bolsonaro’s challenge to the outcome of the Brazilian election that gave President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva a fourth term lasted less than 24 hours. The far-right candidate on Monday withdrew his request to have the vote annulled, which he had pledged to do the night of the election after refusing to recognize the result. Instead, he will serve as leader of the opposition, after consulting with his father, former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is under house arrest for an attempted coup following the 2022 general election.
“The elections are over, but the struggle for a different country continues,” said Flávio Bolsonaro in a statement released by his team. Curiously, the far-right candidate reversed his challenge to Lula’s victory shortly after receiving the only significant support for his claim: that of U.S. President Donald Trump, who said that the Brazil election looked “rigged.”
Silas Malafaia, a pastor and leader of the Assembly of God, one of the evangelical churches that most promoted the Bolsonaro family, was downcast on Sunday night. But despite his disappointment at Lula’s victory, the highly influential preacher did not challenge the result. Malafaia posted a video on his social networks in which, with a grave expression, he begins: “Lula has won the election. May God have mercy on the Brazilian people.”
Malafaia’s case illustrated the isolation in which Flávio Bolsonaro found himself in his early refusal to concede defeat and to seek the annulment of the results. Internal and external allies turned their backs on the far-right candidate in his denunciation of what, he said, had deprived him of the victory that the polls had predicted and his supporters had taken for granted. The Liberal Party (PL), the Brazilian political force under which the far-right senator ran, also recognized the presidential election results on Monday.
Court statements also foreshadowed that the initiative was doomed to fail. Only Donald Trump, almost 24 hours after the polls closed, moved to back his complaints. ““Elections have to be indisputable and it looked very bad to me. It looked like another rigged election, frankly,” the U.S. president said.
Bolsonaro is not abandoning the legal battle, but it will no longer be aimed at annulling the election. The new objective is to request the disqualification of Lula and his running mate, Geraldo Alckmin, for “abuse of economic power.”
Bolsonaro also alleged that after visiting his father, who remains confined to his residence in Brasília, he was “surprisingly” approached by the Federal Police and ordered to surrender his passport within 24 hours. Shortly after, it emerged that Supreme Federal Court (STF) Justice Alexandre de Moraes, the Bolsonaro family’s nemesis, has banned the defeated candidate from leaving the country. The measure is part of an investigation into an alleged money-laundering scheme orchestrated by a lawyer close to him. Moraes justified the measure by citing statements from another one of Bolsonaro’s sons, Eduardo, who is based in the United States and who suggested his brother should also leave the country. Flávio said he intends to remain in Brazil and accused the judge of acting for political reasons.
The main argument of Jair Bolsonaro’s eldest son to question the election’s integrity was the decision by another STF justice, Cristiano Zanin, to delay the closing of polling stations by two hours in response to complaints from Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT) that right-wing local governments had deliberately reduced transportation services to hinder voting. Bolsonaro supporters struggled to explain why there was so much outrage over a measure that they themselves later requested, after the PT did so. And on Monday they faced another damning fact. According to data from the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), which oversees the count, the two-hour extension produced only 34,000 additional votes, in part because many electronic ballot boxes had already closed. The current president won by almost 4.5 million votes.
Bolsonaro supporters emphasized that the justice who extended voting hours years earlier had been Lula’s defense lawyer in the case that led to his imprisonment. But Zanin was by no means alone in the judicial leadership in this instance. The vote totals were certified by the TSE president, who is also an STF justice, Kássio Nunes Marques—hardly a leftist: he was appointed to the post by Jair Bolsonaro—and during the campaign he made decisions that were strongly criticized by the PT, such as the temporary suspension of the WhatsApp group Exército do Lula, which with 10 million followers has been key to the mobilization that allowed the president to overturn his first-round defeat on October 4.
Only the most extreme wing of Bolsonarism enthusiastically embraced the phantom of fraud, typically younger followers who are also the most successful on social media. Their star, Nikolas Ferreira—25 million followers on Instagram and a record vote-getter in the parliamentary elections on October 4—posted on his accounts Sunday night: “Let everything be clarified. Until then, Lula will not be my president.” But by Monday afternoon his tone had shifted: “Finally Lula will receive the cursed legacy of himself.” It seemed to foreshadow what his leader announced shortly after.
The more politically seasoned wing of Bolsonarism, by contrast, avoided agitation. The silence of São Paulo’s governor, Tarcísio de Freitas, a representative of the less aggressive Bolsonaro faction who won reelection on October 4 in a landslide, was telling. The mayor of São Paulo, the country’s largest city, Ricardo Nunes—who had rushed to support Bolsonaro on election night—was quick to recognize Lula’s victory. According to the newspaper O Globo, leaders of the Liberal Party (PL), the Bolsonaro family’s party, were already trying to persuade the candidate to acknowledge his defeat. Most leaders of the various evangelical churches—one of the far right’s major electoral pillars—voiced positions similar to Silas Malafaia’s.
Across South America, the right-wing presidents largely remained silent, including Argentina’s Javier Milei, who had made a flamboyant appearance in the Brazilian campaign with his usual barrage of insults directed at Lula. The rest congratulated the winner: Colombia’s Abelardo de la Espriella, Chile’s José Antonio Kast, Peru’s Keiko Fujimori and Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa.
Besides evangelical pastors and far-right influencers, the greatest signs of dismay over the results came from the financial market. Sao Paulo’s stock exchange had to suspend trading for a time and the real depreciated 10% against the dollar and the euro. After Bolsonaro’s first-round victory, markets had been euphoric. The country’s economic elite eagerly anticipated the cuts to public spending of up to 250 billion reais ($46 billion at Monday’s exchange rate) promised by the PL candidate.
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