President Jair Bolsonaro sat down for a contentious 40-minute conversation with one of Brazil’s most prominent establishment news programs, TV Globo’s Jornal Nacional, on Monday, at one point having to urge host William Bonner to “calm down” as he was accused of trying to stage a coup.
Jornal Nacional typically hosts extended conversations with every major candidate during presidential election season, which began last week in Brazil. Bolsonaro has consistently ranked second in national polling for months behind far-left socialist contender Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who served as president between 2003 and 2011. The 76-year-old was banned from running for office in 2019 after being sentenced to 25 years in prison total for using government funding to buy a luxury beachfront property, but the Brazilian Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF), the nation’s top court, overturned the convictions and the ban last year.
Lula will sit down with Bonner and co-host Renata Vasconcellos on Thursday.
Bonner opened the interview on Monday by accusing Bolsonaro of, among other things, “insulting Supreme Federal Tribunal Ministers [and] attacking, without proof, the Brazilian electoral system,” asking Bolsonaro if he hoped to “create an atmosphere that, in some way, would allow a coup.” The STF oversees presidential elections.
Bolsonaro’s first comment was to accuse Bonner of “fake news” for claiming that he had cursed against STF ministers, the former term for judges; Bolsonaro conceded that he had referred to one of them as a “scoundrel.”
Addressing the claims that Bolsonaro was attempting to stage a “coup” by asking for reinforcements to ensure a free and fair election, he asked, “if you could put one more lock on your door to avoid a robbery, would you do that or not?”
Bolsonaro has repeatedly called for further transparency in vote counting and assurances that any attempted fraud would fail. He has also joked that the radical left in his country is so determined to remove him from power that his only options in the 2022 race are “being arrested, killed, or victory.” A socialist nearly stabbed Bolsonaro to death during a campaign stop in September 2018, leaving him with chronic digestive system problems.
Bolsonaro noted to Bonner on Monday that he had no problem with investigations into potential voter fraud during the 2018 presidential election, which he won – “if there was fraud, I won, so the fraudster would be me.”
An agitated Bonner asked Bolsonaro about the role of the Brazilian armed forces in potentially ensuring election integrity. Bolsonaro is a retired Army captain and has often touted promoted for the nation’s troops and incorporation of retired servicemen into the nation’s government.
“The Armed Forces are one of the parts of this group that looks at [election] security,” Bonner told Bolsonaro, accusing him to attempting to abuse the military to stay in power.
“The big question is not even the presence of the Armed Forces, candidate, the big question is that you present yourself as a patron of the Armed Forces, and the way you attack the electoral system is what causes noise and what causes a certain uneasiness in the electoral environment.”
“Calm down, Bonner,” Bolsonaro replied.
Bolsonaro noted that STF Minister Alexandre de Moraes – who became the president of that court last week after years of persecuting Bolsonaro supporters with violent raids and criminal charges for alleged “fake news” – would be presiding over election integrity and was working closely with his defense minister, Paulo Sérgio Nogueira de Oliveira.
“We will have elections, Minister Alexandre de Moraes has just taken over. Tomorrow he has a meeting, it seems to me, with the Minister of Defense to address this issue of electoral transparency,” Bolsonaro said.
“You can be sure that there will be clean and transparent elections this year,” the president promised, taking credit for having “provoked” great election transparency and fraud prevention mechanics.
Elsewhere in the interview, Vasconcellos repeatedly accused Bolsonaro of mocking Chinese coronavirus patients struggling to breathe, exacerbating alleged manmade fires in the Amazon Rainforest, and generally questioning the logic of coronavirus lockdowns and business closures.
Bolsonaro embraced the latter as the hallmark victory of his first term in office.
“I didn’t make any mistakes in what I said. I said at the beginning of the pandemic that we should take care of treating the elderly, people with comorbidities, and the rest of the population [has to be] working,” Bolsonaro told Jornal Nacional. “That’s what I said and I wasn’t wrong. Today, many countries now say that the lockdown was a mistake, that people contaminated themselves much more at home than on the streets.”
“And another thing,” he continued. “There was talk of doing what in the lockdown? Lock down [for] one month, two months at most, to flatten the curve. The lockdown took more than a year and, to this day, people are still dying from [Chinese coronavirus].”
Bolsonaro ended the interview with a pitch to the Brazilian public recognizing that both the Chinese coronavirus pandemic and the Russian extension of its eight-year-old war with Ukraine had hurt the economy and sent inflation soaring, but “we did everything possible to make the Brazilian population suffer as little as possible.”
The president was greeted outside of the TV Globo studio by a crowd of supporters dressed in the colors of the Brazilian flag, green and yellow, and playing marching band music.
Brazilians will vote in the first round of their presidential election this year in October.
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