Flavio Bolsonaro Rejects Election Results, Questions Whether Brazil Will Have Elections Again in Greenwald Interview

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. “There’s no logic to what happened; there’s no mathematical or statistical explanation or anything for Lula to have more votes than he did in the first round,” Bolsonaro asserted. “It’s impossible unless there was manipulation, but we’ll never know because it won’t be investigated. And who can talk about that? Me, because I’m here.” Bolsonaro noted that his father was imprisoned, in part, for challenging the integrity of the 2022 presidential election, and insisted he “did nothing illegal.” “I didn’t lose the election to my opponent. This election was taken over by the system against him. That’s why I’m here because, in Brazil, there’s nothing you can do,” Bolsonaro said. The senator also questioned why Brazil used an electronic-only voting system, noting that only one other country on the planet, Bhutan, used a similar system. “In 2030 — if we even have elections, I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he mused. “If there’s an election the way it was in 2026, there are going to be millions of Brazilians who have doubts. Why not resolve those doubts?” Bolsonaro repeated a line that he has used in several public statements since leaving Brazil, insisting, “I did not leave Brazil, I left for Brazil,” and arguing that only by leaving the country could he denounce what he saw as a dictatorship in his country. “The reality in Brazil for the past few years is that these aren’t investigations, they’re persecutions,” he asserted. “The Supreme Court, as you know, is compromised. The Superior Electoral Court is also dominated by the government; the Federal Police have been taken over by the government. The Federal Prosecutor’s Office has been taken over by the government — everything has been taken over by the government.” Sen. Bolsonaro insisted that he would continue to do his legislative work from Miami and that he had already attended Senate sessions virtually. He did not offer a timeline for when he would return to Brazil and described his father Jair’s decision to return after the 2022 election as a “mistake,” as it resulted in a 27-year prison sentence on dubious charges of “crimes against democracy.” Greenwald challenged Sen. Bolsonaro repeatedly on his finances: how he would be able to afford a city as expensive as Miami, how he paid for his flight out of Brazil, and what he would do to survive in the United States. Sen. Bolsonaro repeatedly stated that he expected to “work, like all Americans do,” noting that he is a lawyer and has established businesses in the past. He declined to offer any details on his secret flight out of Brazil, however, other than denying any communication with foreign governments. “I want to fight for my country here, in America, where I think I’m in a better position to do that, to be an active voice, to speak to you here in freedom, which I could not do in my country,” Bolsonaro insisted. 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