Bolsonaro questions Brazil's voting system before foreign ambassadors

President Bolsonaro, this Monday before the diplomatic corps accredited in Brasilia, whom he summoned to question the elections. CLAUBER CAETANO (AFP)

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro received some 40 accredited ambassadors in Brasilia at his residence on Monday, whom he had invited to detail in person his thesis that the voting system is not safe and criticize the electoral authorities in the process.

There are less than three months left for elections that appear especially tense, in which the far-right will face his predecessor Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

The leftist remains the clear favorite in the polls.

The president reiterated – without evidence, once again – his attacks on the voting system with which he was elected president in 2018 and before that, deputy during several terms.

As soon as the meeting ended, the Superior Electoral Court sent the diplomats a point-by-point response to Bolsonaro's accusations.

"The system is totally vulnerable," Bolsonaro told the diplomats, representatives of the United States, several European countries and the rest of the world, who attended an unprecedented session.

The opposition and his critics suspect that the president is bent on sowing doubts in the style of Donald Trump to question the result if he loses to Lula in the October elections.

Even more disturbing, Bolsonaro wants to involve the Armed Forces in the electoral count.

Bolsonaro's unfounded accusations against the Brazilian electronic voting system are old, but in the last year he has made them one of the axes of his electoral campaign.

What is striking, and what has created great controversy in Brazil, is that he summoned the ambassadors to share with them his criticism of a voting system that has not been affected by irregularities in more than two decades.

To date, no relevant case of fraud has been confirmed.

“I know that you want stability and this will only be achieved with transparency,” he told the ambassadors.

The representative of one of the Nordic countries later declared to the

newspaper : the presentation “did not change our way of seeing things”.

The diplomat recalled that "the system has worked well in the last 25 years" and added that he considers the act part of the electoral campaign.

The briefing organized by the president was mainly based on an old and well-known police investigation into a 2018 hacking attack on the Superior Electoral Court system, but, according to the investigators, did not change the results.

His speech, supported by a bilingual

with a spelling mistake in English that delighted Internet users, was broadcast live on social networks.

This Tuesday afternoon more than 400,000 Internet users had seen it and the comments were around 52,000.

In a Twitter trill, Lula accused Bolsonaro on Tuesday of wanting to "create Trump-style confusion in the US."

The leader of the Workers' Party (PT), which has been leading the polls by a comfortable margin for months, maintains that the far-right president "is trying to deceive the people to justify any nonsense."

Bolsonaro wants to create confusion like Trump did in the USA.

He wants to raise his pets where he has no fear.

He is trying to cheat or povo to justify a bobagem qualquer.

He is not afraid of the electronic ballot box, he is afraid of the Brazilian povo.

– Lula (@LulaOficial) July 19, 2022

In harsher terms, the

newspaper , one of the main newspapers in Brazil, has pronounced itself.

In an editorial titled

, he accuses Bolsonaro of "negotiating freedom with Congress to attack democracy", criticizes the complicity of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate and calls on the political class: "The reaction against the subversive escalation of the President of the Republic must start from the political community.

All party leaders must urgently express their appreciation for the basic rules of democracy."

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