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Brazil election: The US far-Right is acting to get Bolsonaro re-elected [1]
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Date: 2023-01
On 2 October, Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court announced that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the Leftist leader and former president, had won the popular vote in the first round of the country’s presidential election – receiving six million more votes than incumbent right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro.
The next day, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist and a family friend of Bolsonaro’s, took to his podcast, ‘Bannon’s War Room’, to raise allegations of electoral fraud. Bannon was joined by Matthew Tyrmand, a board member for Project Veritas – a discredited US group that uses hidden cameras to supposedly ‘expose’ leftist journalists – and Darren Beattie, a former Trump speechwriter who was fired in 2018 after it emerged he had met with white nationalists two years earlier. (Beattie told US media he had said “nothing objectionable” at this meeting.)
On the podcast, all three men expressed their doubts over Lula’s win. “There was fraud there,” Tyrmand said, based on the fact that early results had shown a lead for Bolsonaro before ballots from the north-eastern region, Lula’s stronghold, were counted.
Bannon agreed, claiming a Bolsonaro defeat was “mathematically impossible”, as his party had won eight seats in the simultaneous Senate election, becoming the largest bloc. There was evidence, Tyrmand suggested, of fraud in the electronic ballots to favour Lula.
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But this was not true. The US State Department considers Brazil’s electronic voting system, which has never registered a single instance of fraud since its introduction in 1996, “a model for the (Western) hemisphere countries and the world”. Electoral observation missions from the Organisation of American States, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, and the US Carter Center noted that the vote was democratic and held transparently and peacefully.
Regardless, disinformation campaigns spread like wildfire in conservative WhatsApp and Telegram groups. Brazil’s fake news migrated to the US, where it was picked up by ‘alternative’ right-wing media, like Bannon’s podcast. This is increasingly commonplace – dozens of Trump allies have established relationships with the Bolsonaro family over the past four years, and supporters of both men employ the same narratives, tactics and platforms to denigrate democracy.
A four-month investigation by Agência Pública, an independent Brazilian journalism agency, found alliances have been built on conspiratorial far-Right narratives, such as the threat of communism and ‘cultural marxism’, which support Trump and Bolsonaro's populist claims.
It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that Bolsonaro has been nicknamed ‘Trump of the Tropics’. The men share hardline views on crime, immigration and gun control laws, and have both launched attacks on the media and publicly shared claims that their enemies plan to oust them, against ‘the will of the people’, via electoral fraud. They are also friends. Bolsonaro supported Trump on his claims of widespread election fraud in 2020 and was among the last heads of state to recognize Joe Biden’s presidential win, doing so six weeks after the election. In return, Trump effusively backed Bolsonaro’s re-election bid. “He is a wonderful man, and has my Complete & Total Endorsement!!!”, Trump posted on Truth Social, the social media platform he founded, in early September.
Eduardo Bolsonaro, the president’s third son and a member of Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies, has also formed close ties to US conservatives. In August 2018, a few months before his father won the presidency, Eduardo met Bannon in New York, at the offices of Breitbart News, the extreme Right propaganda website, of which Bannon was once executive chairman. “We share the same worldview,” Eduardo tweeted after the meeting. “We are certainly in touch to join forces, especially against cultural Marxism.”
The following year, Bannon named Eduardo the South American representative of The Movement, a platform of rightist political parties that had until then been entirely European, which Bannon put together to “support populist nationalism and reject the influence of globalism”. While The Movement never really took off, it enhanced Eduardo’s status in right-wing circles, with Agência Pública counting 77 visits and meetings between him and key Trump supporters in the past five years.
One such supporter, Mark Ivanyo, the executive director of right-wing think tank Republicans for National Renewal, whose primary goal is building bridges between the US and global rightwingers, sees Eduardo as a key figure. Speaking to Agência Pública, Ivanyo described him as “our primary partner” in Brazil and said he was the keynote speaker at his think tank’s inaugural event in 2020.
The Brazilian connection to the 6 January riot
With neither Lula nor Bolsonaro having achieved more than 50% of the vote in the first round, Brazil will go to the polls in a runoff vote on 30 October. Whatever the result, “Bolsonaro has no intention of losing the election,” Thomas Shannon, the US ambassador to Brazil under Barack Obama, told Agência Pública. He believes he will follow in Trump’s steps and “try to find a way to stay in office”.
Shannon is referring in part to the events of 6 January 2021, when, having refused to accept electoral defeat, Trump encouraged his supporters to “fight like hell”. Hours later, a mob stormed the Capitol building in Washington in efforts to thwart Biden’s election. Eduardo Bolsonaro was in Washington at the time, and mystery still surrounds his “surprise visit”, as Brazilian paper O Globo described it, which the Brazilian embassy in the US said the foreign ministry was not aware of.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/brazil-jair-bolsonaro-us-far-right-donald-trump-steve-bannon-eduardo/
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