The coordinator of the government program of candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, former minister Alozio Mercadante, assured this Thursday that it will be “important” for the international community to recognize the results of Sunday’s ballot to neutralize possible actions by President Jair Bolsonaro, who accused of partiality to electoral justice.
“It is important that the world recognizes the results next Sunday,” Mercadante said in response to a question from Télam during a conference with the foreign press in São Paulo, alongside former Foreign Minister Celso Amorim and former Minister of the Environment and elected deputy Marina Silva.
When asked about the existence of a scenario similar to that of the United States with the non-recognition made by the defeated, Donald Trump, an ally of Bolsonaro, Mercadante maintained that the Workers’ Party and the opposition front “are prepared, with the hard core to rebuild democracy.”
“There is a very strong movement to respect popular sovereignty and democracy. The vast majority of the population has expressed support for the democratic system in the polls,” said Mercadante.
The former Minister of Education, Science and Technology and former chief of staff of Dilma Rousseff explained what the vote count will be like next Sunday, starting at 5:00 p.m.
According to Mercadante, Bolsonaro will be ahead of the start of the real-time digital count of the votes that are loaded into the computer system for a couple of hours until 70 percent is reached and Lula reverses the trend and position there.
Mercadante made this projection based on the polls that give Lula the victory on Sunday.
“We are growing in the final stretch. The institutions are acting rigorously to guarantee the outcome of the election,” Merchant said.
In this framework, the coordinator of the government program said that this is the most important election in history; “democracy is at stake” because the president historically “defends torture, dictatorship and censorship.”
He recalled that the results were not questioned in the first round won by Lula despite the fact that Bolsonaro insists on the vulnerability of electronic ballot boxes.
“It is a transparent, auditable process”he underlined.
He also repudiated the attempts to “create conflicts” by the Bolsonaro campaign over an alleged imbalance in the disclosure of advertising.
For former Minister Mercadante, Lula’s main adviser, there are attempts by Bolsonarismo to victimize themselves before the electoral justice system and he cited two cases, a shooting in the Paraisópolis favela in São Paulo and the arrest of former deputy Roberto Jefferson, an ally of Bolsonaro who threw grenades and fired 20 shots at federal police last Sunday in repudiation of the electoral court.
In the case of Paraisópolis, Mercadante referred to a shooting that occurred last week when the Bolsonarist Tarsício de Freitas, a candidate for governor of São Paulo, visited the place. As soon as the episode occurred, he denounced an attack.
A cameraman from Jovem Pan TV recorded the entire shooting and reported to the police and the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper that an agent from the Brazilian Intelligence Agency (ABIN) was an adviser to Freitas and had asked him to delete the images.
This shooting, according to the cameraman, was carried out by plainclothes police or intelligence agents, without identification, who killed a 27-year-old person with a history of robbery.
“They tried to make people believe that the opponents of Bolsonarismo belong to organized crime and even said it was an attack and now we know that a state intelligence agent was there illegally with a candidate,” Mercadante said.
