Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said Thursday that the institutional crisis in the United States was caused by Americans’ “lack of confidence” in the elections, relaying accusations of “fraud” by his ally Donald Trump.
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“The votes by mail have multiplied because of the pandemic, there are people who have voted three, four times. It was the party there, nobody can deny it, launched the leader of the extreme right during an exchange with some of his supporters, at the exit of the presidential palace of Alvorada, in Brasilia.
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“It is this lack of confidence that has caused all the problems we are seeing over there,” he summed up, without directly citing the violence on Wednesday in Washington, when pro-Trump protesters invaded the Capitol, seat of the United States Congress.
Wednesday evening, he had already refused any comment on this subject. “I followed everything. You know I’m related to Trump, so you know my answer. There are many denunciations of fraud, ”he said, going against the almost unanimous condemnations of the assault on the Capitol around the world.
On Thursday, the Brazilian president also warned that his country would have “an even worse problem than the United States” if it continued to use the voting system with electronic ballot boxes in the 2022 presidential election.
“Fraud exists”, he insisted, reiterating that, according to him, he would have been elected in the first round in 2018 without supposed irregularities of which he has never provided proof.
Many specialists fear that President Bolsonaro will follow the example of his American counterpart Donald Trump by contesting to the end the legitimacy of the vote in the event of defeat during his quest for re-election in 2022.