“We want to correct faults, we want transparency, true democracy. I am being accused of a coup all the time (…) I am questioning before because we have time to solve the problem, with the participation of the Armed Forces,” said the president, who accompanied his speech with a PowerPoint presentation on the electoral system.
Bolsonaro gave a speech for almost an hour before dozens of ambassadors and diplomats from France and Spain, as well as from the European Union (EU), at the Alvorada Palace, in a meeting convened only to discuss the Brazilian electoral system.
Some embassies of Brazil’s main partners, such as Argentina, were not invited, for unknown reasons.
The far-right has turned the electronic voting system into a target of attacks due to its supposed vulnerability, which according to him could be used against him.
On several occasions Bolsonaro has said, without offering evidence, that there was fraud in the 2014 and 2018 elections, where the president alleges that he would have been elected in the first round.
– “Time to say enough is enough” –
Without explicitly mentioning Bolsonaro, the president of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), Edson Fachin, said shortly after in a speech that the political debate has been “reduced by narratives that tense the social space” and that there is an “unacceptable electoral denialism”. ”.
“It is time to say enough to disinformation. It is also time to say no to authoritarian populism, which endangers the conquest of the 1988 Constitution”, he added.
Bolsonaro will compete on October 2 with leftist former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who is the favorite in the polls.
“It is a pity that Brazil does not have a president who calls 50 ambassadors to talk about something that interests the country. (…) Instead, he tells lies against our democracy,” Lula tweeted shortly after Bolsonaro’s meeting with ambassadors.
Members of the Workers’ Party (PT) and some analysts believe that Bolsonaro’s position is part of a strategy to not recognize an eventual defeat and affect the electoral process.
The president cited on Monday an investigation opened in 2018 by the Federal Police (PF), a month after the ballot in which he was elected president, to verify a cyber attack against the TSE’s digital systems.
The investigation has not yet concluded, but according to the TSE, the PF investigation has already produced indications that the attack did not entail any type of manipulation of the electoral results and hardly affected the court’s internal system.
In a Senate hearing last week, Bolsonaro’s defense minister proposed a “parallel vote” on election day with a second ballot box that receives paper votes to avoid facing “an election under the cloak of mistrust.”
Brazil adopted the electronic ballot box system in the municipal elections of 1996. In addition to offering a more agile result to the paper vote, up to now no security problems have been verified.
The entrance Bolsonaro questions the Brazilian electoral system in a meeting with ambassadors was first published in diary TODAY.
