RIO DE JANEIRO – President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil has been continuous for many months follow in the polls ahead of the country’s important presidential race. And for many months, he continuously question its voting systemwarned that if he loses the election in October, it will most likely be thanks to a stolen ballot.
Those statements mostly considered talking. But now Mr. Bolsonaro has enlisted a new ally in the battle against the electoral process: the nation’s military.
The leaders of Brazil’s armed forces suddenly began to raise similar doubts about the integrity of the elections, despite little evidence of fraud in the past, increasing tensions already high tension about the stability of Latin America’s largest democracy and rocking a country that was suffering from a military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985.
Military leaders have identified for election officials what they say are several loopholes in the voting system. They were given a seat on a transparency committee that election officials created to ease concerns that Mr Bolsonaro had stirred up about the vote. And Mr Bolsonaro, a former army captain who has filled his cabinet with generals, has suggested that on Election Day the military should conduct its own parallel counting of votes.
Mr. Bolsonaro, who was talk affectionately about dictatorshipalso sought to clarify that the military answers to him.
Election officials “invited the armed forces to participate in the electoral process,” Bolsonaro said recently, referring to the transparency committee. “Have they forgotten that the supreme head of the armed forces is named Jair Messias Bolsonaro?”
Almir Garnier Santos, Commander of the Brazilian Navy, told reporters last month that he supported Mr. Bolsonaro’s position. “The president of the republic is my boss, he is my commander, he has the right to say whatever he wants,” said Garnier Santos.
With just over four months to go before one of the most consequential votes in Latin America in years, a high-stakes conflict is brewing. On one side are the president, some military leaders and many right-wing voters who say the election is open to fraud. On the other hand, foreign politicians, judges, diplomats and journalists are sounding the alarm that Mr Bolsonaro is setting the stage for a coup plot.
Mr Bolsonaro has added to tensions, saying his concerns about the integrity of the election could cause him to dispute the result. “A new class of thieves has emerged who want to steal our freedom,” he said in a speech this month. “If necessary, we will go to war.”
Edson Fachin, a Supreme Court judge and Brazil’s top election official, said in an interview that claims of an unsafe election are baseless and dangerous. “These problems are artificially created by people who want to destroy Brazilian democracy,” he said. “What is at stake in Brazil is not just an electronic voting machine. What is at stake is the preservation of democracy.”
Mr Bolsonaro and the military said they were only trying to protect the vote. “For the love of God, no one should engage in undemocratic acts,” Mr. Bolsonaro said. “A clean, transparent, safe election is a matter of national security. Nobody wants to have doubts when the election is over.”
The Brazilian Defense Ministry said in a statement that “The Brazilian Armed Forces act in strict compliance with the law and the Constitution, and are directed to defend the motherland, ensure constitutional power and communicate through any of these rights, law and order.”
Mr. Bolsonaro’s tactics appear to have been drawn from the books of former President Donald J. Trump, and Mr. Trump and his allies have been worked to support Mr Bolsonaro’s fraudulent claims. Two men reflect one broader democracy slips back going on around the world.
The riots last year in the United States Capitol demonstrated that peaceful transfer of power is no longer guaranteed even in mature democracies. In Brazil, where democratic institutions are much younger, the military’s participation in elections is heightening fear.
Mr. Garnier Santos told Brazilian newspaper O Povo that “as naval commander, I want the Brazilians to make sure their vote counts,” adding, “The more checks, the better for Brazil.”
One Report of the Brazilian federal police How detailed? two generals in Bolsonaro’s cabinetincluding his national security adviser, tried for years to help him uncover evidence of election fraud.
And on Friday, Brazil’s Defense Minister, Paulo Sérgio Nogueira, sent a 21-point proclamation to election officials, criticizing them for not taking the military’s stance on election security seriously. “The armed forces are not properly acknowledged,” he said.
So far, Mr Bolsonaro’s comments have gone further. In April, he falsely repeated that officials counted votes in a “secret room”. He then suggested that voting data should be provided to a room “where the armed forces also have a computer for counting votes.” The Army has not commented publicly on the idea.
Since military support can be crucial to a coup, a common question in political circles has become: If Mr Bolsonaro opposes the election, will the 340,000 members of the armed forces How do you react?
“In America, the military and the police respect the law, they protect the Constitution,” said Mauricio Santoro, a professor of international relations at Rio de Janeiro State University, referring to Mr. Trump’s statement about an election. send stolen. “I’m not sure the same thing will happen here.”
Military officials and many politicians dispute any notion that the military would support a coup. “He will fall. He won’t have any support,” said Maynard Santa Rosa, a Brazilian army general who served 49 years in Bolsonaro’s cabinet. “And I think he knows it.”
Sérgio Etchegoyen, a retired army general close to the army’s current leaders, called out concerns about a coup alarmist. “We might think it’s bad for the president to question the ballots,” he said. “But it would be much worse if, every five minutes, we thought democracy was at risk.”
Some US officials are more concerned about the roughly half a million police officers across Brazil because they are often less professional and more supportive of Bolsonaro than the military, according to a State Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the matter. private conversations. .
Any claim of a stolen election could be met with public skepticism unless the race is tight. One survey 2,556 Brazilians at the end of May showed that 48% supported former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, compared with 27% supported Mr. Bolsonaro. (If no candidate captures half of the votes, the top two finishers will go to the final on October 30.)
The same poll shows 24% of respondents don’t trust Brazilian voting machines, up from 17 percent in March. Fifty-five percent of respondents said they believe that the election is prone to fraudincluding 81 percent of Bolsonaro’s supporters.
In the 37 years of Brazil’s modern democracy, no president has been as close to the military as Mr Bolsonaro, a former army paratrooper.
As a congressman, he hung portraits of the leaders of the military dictatorship in his office. As president, he tripled the number of military personnel in civilian positions in the federal government close to 1,100. His vice president is also a former general.
Last year, as he intensified his criticism of the electoral system, Mr sacked defense minister and three top military commandersinstall loyalists in their place.
New Defense Minister quick consideration in the election processsupport Mr. Bolsonaro’s promote the use of printed vouchers in addition to voting machines, this will make recounting easier. Brazil is one of the few countries that relies entirely on electronic voting machines – 577,125 of them.
While Mr. Bolsonaro and his allies acknowledged their lack of evidence of past fraud, they pointed to a number of problems: some anomalies were noticed in the voting results; in 2018 hacked the election court computer, which did not connect to the voting machine; and general dismissal of election officials for concerns.
Diego Aranha, a Brazilian computer scientist who tried to hack the machine for research, said that the lack of paper backups made it more difficult to verify the results, but overall the system remained safe.
Brazil’s Supreme Court ultimately rejected the use of printed ballots, citing privacy concerns.
Last year, when election officials formed an “electoral transparency committee,” they invited an admiral with a computer science degree to join. Instead, Brazil’s defense minister sent a general to direct the military to control the network.
Military representatives sent four letters to election officials with detailed questions about the voting process, as well as some recommended changes.
He asked about the machines’ tamper-proof seals, the computer code that underpins them, and the biometric technology used to verify voters. Elections officials said Saturday they would accept some minor technical proposals and study others for the next election, but other proposals misinterpreted the system.
Amid the back and forth debates, the former head of the electoral tribunal, Luís Roberto Barroso, told reporters that the military leaders “are being instructed to attack the Brazilian electoral process”, an assertion that Defense Minister Nogueira called it “irresponsible.”
The Electoral Court also invited European officials to observe the election, but canceled the invitation after the Bolsonaro government objected. Instead, Mr. Bolsonaro’s political party is trying to have an outside company test the voting system before the election.
Mr. Fachin, who now runs the electoral tribunal, said Mr Bolsonaro was welcome to conduct his own review but added that officials had checked the machines. “This is more or less like unlocking on an open door,” he said.
The Biden administration has warned Mr. Bolsonaro respect the democratic process. On Thursday, at the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, President Biden meets Bolsonaro first. Sitting next to Mr Biden, Mr Bolsonaro said he would eventually leave office “in a democratic way”, adding that the election in October must be “clean, credible and verifiable.”
Scott Hamilton, the top US diplomat in Rio de Janeiro until last year, wrote in the Brazilian newspaper O Globo Bolsonaro’s intentions are clear and dangerous: to undermine public confidence and set the stage for refusing to accept the outcome.
Mr Bolsonaro insisted that he was simply trying to secure an accurate vote.
“How do I want a coup if I’m already president?” he asked last month. “In Banana Republics, we see leaders conspiring to take power, coordinating with parts of the government to rig elections. Here it is quite the opposite.”
André Spigariol Reporting contributions from Brasília and Leonardo Coelho from Rio de Janeiro.
André Spigariol contributed reporting from Brasília and Leonardo Coelho from Rio de Janeiro.
