RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Less than 40 days before the deadline set by the Electoral Court for political parties to secure registration to run in this year’s municipal elections, the leader of the ‘Aliança pelo Brasil‘ (Alliance for Brazil), a party that President Jair Bolsonaro is seeking to establish, concedes that it will not be able to run in this year’s elections. The TSE (Superior Electoral Court) had validated only 3,334 signatures by Wednesday – at least 492,000 are required to secure registration.
According to attorney Luis Felipe Belmonte dos Santos, second vice-president and the main operator for the inchoate party, over one million signatures have been collected, but they have not been recognized in the electoral registers. “Our part has been done, but the electoral registers are refusing all forms with notarized signatures. They claim there was no regulation. Furthermore, the system is constantly crashing. The registrars were not prepared for such a large volume (of signatures),” Belmonte said.
However, the TSE reported that the Alliance has submitted a total of 66,252 signatures – in addition to the 3,334 validated, another 48,127 are in the process of being ontested, 2,593 in the stage of reviewing by the registrars, and 12,198 have already been judged invalid.
In an attempt to achieve viability, the Alliance submitted a request to the TSE inquiring whether it would be feasible to waive the validation of signatures by the Electoral courts if the endorsement had been recognized by a notary public. The request is still being processed by the Electoral Court.
Faced with the challenge, the Bolsonarist discourse is now that there is no rush to register the party. “The president is not thinking about the next election, but the next generation. It is not a problem if it doesn’t happen now, because it would be a risk. There would be no time to form directorates, to affiliate and look for candidates in 5,700 municipalities in two weeks,” Belmonte said.
“The president doesn’t want quantity, but quality. He wants people he trusts to prevent what happened to the PSL from happening again,” the attorney said, in reference to the party under whose aegis Bolsonaro was elected president, and which he abandoned in November.
Absence
Belmonte argues that the Alliance’s absence in the 2020 elections will not have a significant bearing on Bolsonaro’s re-election project in 2022. “His name has weight and does not rely on mayors supporting him. The president must support specific candidates. The logic of having to elect many mayors to have a basis in the presidential race was shattered in 2018”.
The argument is shared by sociologist Murilo de Aragón of the Arko Advice consultancy. In his opinion, the absence of the Alliance will be felt by Bolsonaro in São Paulo, where the dispute is the most “federalized” in the country. In the capital of São Paulo, the president still has no representative to defend him in the debates. “It would be better for him to have a support network, but that won’t be decisive in 2020. As there is no party fidelity for mayors, they may change up ahead. Besides, today there is no agenda mobilizing the country, which leads to more municipalized elections,” he said.
Looking at a scenario in which there will be no Bolsonarist party at the polls, right-wing parties such as Patriota, PL and Republicans are seeking to affiliate Bolsonaro followers who plan to leave PSL. The Alliance’s coordination has already pointed out that in case it fails to obtain registration by March, it must release its pre-candidates to join the parties they want.
For Federal Deputy Junior Bozzella, a dissident from the group linked to the Planalto Palace, Bolsonarists were aware from the outset that it would be impossible to create a new party in time to run in the 2020 elections and they have committed “electoral fraud”.
“Either they deceived the president or the president and his allies carried out an orchestrated and malicious action to feed a tale according to which the institutions impose defeats on Bolsonaro, to encourage an aggressive and hateful militancy,” he said. In his opinion, Bolsonaro is not concerned about the municipal elections or about the chance of becoming unable to seek reelection.
Source: UOL