Will Bolsonaro go quietly?


Jair Bolsonaro has still not conceded the election, more than 12 hours after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. was declared the winner of Brazil’s presidential election. While the election was fairly close, with Lula getting 50.9% of the vote (60.3 million) to Bolsonaro’s 49.10% (58.2 million), the margin is large enough to be conclusive. Bolsonaro had earlier vowed not to concede and he and his three sons remained silent in the presidential residence.

Meanwhile, many of his prominent supporters have conceded that he lost and many world leaders (including Joe Biden) were quick to congratulate Lula on his victory, suggesting that they were trying to send a message discouraging Bolsonaro from harboring any hopes of staying in power using the military. Biden’s words are especially important given that Brazil’s military in 1946 staged a US-backed coup and then ruled the country until 1985. Bolsonaro is a former member of the military and has close ties to them.

Another factor is how quickly the results were known, by close to midnight on election night, giving little time for conspiracy theories about the election being stolen to grow, the way that they did in the US where the final results were declared after some days.

Comments

  1. Mano Singham says

    Will Bolsonaro go quietly?

    If he was going to , he would have done so by now.
    Bolsonaro and his ilk are the scorpion in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog

    [This comment was posted by Deepak Shetty. I had to delete the original of this post and then re-post. In the process, his comment to that post also got deleted so I had to put it back myself which is why it is appearing under my name. My apologies for any confusion! -- Mano]

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