’IF I CAN’T PARDON HIM, AT LEAST I CAN BE HIS CELLMATE’: FLAVIO BOLSONARO REFUSES TO RECOGNIZE LULA VICTORY
BRASÍLIA — Senator Flávio Bolsonaro declined on Monday to recognize the results of Sunday’s presidential election, which President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won by more than four million votes, and said he would petition to have the result annulled — a course of action that, in his family’s experience, ends in a specific place.
“It is impossible to recognize the election results, given the circumstances under which things unfolded,” Bolsonaro told journalists. The circumstances center on a decision, taken late on Sunday by a Supreme Court justice appointed by Lula, to extend voting by two hours in response to alleged irregularities in voter transport. Bolsonaro’s campaign is also on record requesting an extension of voting, in its case because of heavy rains in the conservative-leaning south. Both extensions were granted. Only one is cited in the petition.
The destination of the strategy was never in doubt, because the candidacy itself was the first route to it. Bolsonaro ran, explicitly, on freeing his father. He promised to seek a broad amnesty for the former president and the others convicted over the coup attempt, and to use the presidential pardon power himself if Congress did not act — a pledge Lula attacked throughout the runoff, observing that his opponent could not pardon just one man. Sunday’s result foreclosed that route. The petition opens the other one.
Election analysts in Brasília were unanimous that the annulment effort will fail, noting the size of the margin and the authorship of the extensions. They were equally unanimous about what the effort is for. Brazil has run this sequence before, recently, in the same family. In 2022, the candidate’s father, then-President Jair Bolsonaro, declined to concede his own loss to Lula; on January 8, 2023, his supporters stormed the presidential palace, Congress, and the Supreme Court; and the former president was subsequently convicted of plotting a coup and sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison, where he remains. The son’s refusal was described by Reuters as following “his imprisoned father’s lead.”
The younger Bolsonaro’s campaign has been careful to frame the petition as a legal remedy rather than a mobilization, though preparations consistent with mobilization were observed. Political scientists, asked to project the strategy’s trajectory, laid out what they called the established timeline. A defeated Bolsonaro contests the result. Supporters gather in the capital. Institutions are tested, then entered. Prosecutors assemble the record. Under the precedent timeline — defeat in October 2022, conviction in September 2025 — the process takes approximately three years, which would place a reunion in 2029, comfortably inside the father’s twenty-seven-year sentence.
President Lula, speaking in São Paulo, adopted a conciliatory tone. “I won’t speak of national unity, because that doesn’t always fit the reality of this country,” he said. “No one is obliged to like the elected president, but he was put in place to govern for everyone.” The new Congress, returned in the same election, is packed with allies of the defeated candidate’s family, and is expected to govern alongside him in the same spirit.
The administration of President Trump, whose State Department led a campaign to return the Bolsonaros to power, had no immediate comment on the annulment petition or on the timeline.
Bolsonaro closed his remarks to journalists by addressing, for the first time, the question of what the strategy offers him personally if the petition fails and the precedent holds. “This way, even if I don’t win the election I’ll have more quality time with my dad,” he said.
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