Brazil: Jair Bolsonaro Posts, Then Deletes, Claim Lula ‘Was Not Elected by the People’

Towels with images of presidential candidates Lula da Silva and Jair Bolsonaro are display
Alexandre Schneider/Getty Images
Frances Martel

Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s official Facebook page posted, and hours later deleted, a video of an interview on Tuesday with the title “Lula was not elected by the people,” questioning the legitimacy of the 2022 election and current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

The post in question was a shared post from a separate account and appeared on Bolsonaro’s Facebook page, reportedly, for about two or three hours before it was mysteriously deleted. Multiple Brazilian news outlets have confirmed that Bolsonaro’s account posted the video.

The video follows a tumultuous weekend in the country in which thousands of Lula opponents, most of them fervent supporters of the conservative Bolsonaro, attacked the headquarters of the nation’s Congress, Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF, its supreme court), and the presidency, leaving a trail of wreckage that left the STF building unusable and caused irreparable damage to historic artifacts. The riot evolved from a protest by an estimated 5,000 people demanding the military remove Lula from power.

Lula da Silva served as president from 2003 to 2011 previously, enacting a radical socialist agenda and — according to convictions in multiple courts — taking bribes while in power. The STF overturned his ultimate conviction, which resulted in a nearly 25-year prison sentence, in 2021, allowing him to run for president against Bolsonaro last year. Lula opponents argue that his convictions should disqualify him from holding public office and the Brazilian constitution allows the military to oust him via a “federal intervention.” The Brazilian armed forces have not responded favorably to the calls for his removal. Some opponents also claim “irregularities” occurred in vote-counting and election software processing that swung the election from Lula to Bolsonaro.

Bolsonaro, currently in Florida, condemned the riot on Sunday as akin to leftist behavior. He then appeared to support the protesters’ demands, however, by sharing the social media video questioning Lula’s election.

“Lula was not elected by the people, he was chosen and elected by the STF and the TSE [electoral court],” the caption on the video Bolsonaro posted, shared from a Facebook account under the name “Maria Leal,” read. “Lula was not elected by the Brazilian people.”

The video included in the post contained a snippet of an interview with an attorney named Felipe Gimenez, from November 2022 in which the lawyer claims that the Brazilian people did not “have power over the process of vote-counting.”

Gimenez also claimed that the source code in the electronic voting machines could not be independently verified, a core claim of the Brasilia rioters. A group of them draped a banner over the Brazilian Congress reading, “we want the source code.”

 

The post disappeared from Bolsonaro’s Facebook account by Wednesday. G1, a news service under the Globo network, reported that the post had 110,000 views before it was apparently deleted.

The post would be the most aggressive statement questioning the election that Bolsonaro has made since losing in October. Bolsonaro never publicly conceded the election, however, and vanished from the public eye for days in the aftermath of the election. The president did not participate in Lula’s inauguration, breaking a historic tradition in which the outgoing president drapes the official presidential sash over his successor following the swearing-in ceremony.

Reports on Bolsonaro’s post in Brazilian media emphatically repudiated its contents, insisting that the election that resulted in Lula’s return to power was free and fair, and questioning its integrity undermines Brazilian democracy. The Brazilian armed forces investigated the election at the Bolsonaro administration’s request and published a report in November. The report stated that military investigators did not find any evidence of fraud or irregularities but did find a “possible security risk” that resulted in its inability to verify the full authenticity of the results.

“There was a possible security risk in the generation of programs in electronic voting machines due to the occurrence of computers accessing the TSE network during the compilation of the source code,” the Defense Ministry said in a statement. “As a result of these findings and other obstacles listed in the report, it is not possible to guarantee that the programs executed in the electronic voting machines are free from malicious insertions that alter their functioning.”

Following the publication of the military’s findings, STF top judge Alexandre de Moraes proclaimed the report as proof of clean elections.

“The electronic voting machines are a cause of national pride and the 2022 elections prove the efficacy, fairness, and total transparency of the counting and totaling of votes,” de Moraes announced.

Bolsonaro flew to Florida on December 30, multiple reports have suggested. He confirmed his stay in the Orlando area on Tuesday following his hospitalization. Bolsonaro survived an assassination attempt in 2018 in which a socialist stabbed him repeatedly in the abdomen, leaving severe scarring that has resulted in a sensibility to intestinal blockages. He was reportedly hospitalized in Florida with severe abdominal pain.

On Sunday night, presumably from Florida, Bolsonaro condemned the riot in Brazil’s capital, comparing it to mob violence commonly practiced by the left.

“Peaceful protests, according to the law, are part of democracy. However, destruction and invasion of public buildings like those that happened today, just as those committed by the left in 2013 and 2017, are out of line,” he wrote on Twitter, referring to past leftist riots. “Throughout my mandate [presidency], I was always within the confines of the constitution, respecting and defending the law, democracy, transparency, and our sacred liberty.”

In comments to CNN following his hospitalization, he vowed to soon return to Brazil and insisted that he had left to merely enjoy a family vacation, not flee any potential legal persecution by Lula.

“I came [to the United States] to stay until the end of the month [January], but I intend to return,” Bolsonaro reportedly said. “I came to spend some time abroad with family but I have not had calm days. First, that lamentable episode happened yesterday in Brazil [the riot], and then this hospitalization of mine.”

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