Brazil’s Bolsonaro mocks pressures from left and right for his impeachment

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – On Thursday, July 1, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro mocked the pressure that left-wing parties and even right-wing groups have exerted for his impeachment and belittled the promoters, who he said “have nothing to do”.

In his usual Thursday social media broadcast, Bolsonaro alluded to the petition for an impeachment trial submitted to Congress the day before by eleven progressive parties and several right-wing movements that supported the government at one time but now swell the opposition.

Regarding the latter, he branded them as “ungrateful” and “traitors”, to later assure that he has the support of the “majority of the Parliament”, so that no attempt to oust him from power will be able to prosper.

“See the accusations. They say that I am genocidal, that I don’t wear a mask or that I ride a motorcycle” with hundreds of people, said the president in allusion to his non-compliance with the rules in force to combat Covid-19, which has already killed more than 520,000 people in Brazil.

According to Bolsonaro, those who promote his impeachment, who accuse him of 23 crimes, many linked to the government’s management of the pandemic, “are the same people who want those who were there before to return.”

He thus referred to former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who is for now comfortably leading all polls for the 2022 elections. He will be able to run thanks to a court decision that annulled the convictions against him for corruption.

Bolsonaro, who will seek reelection in 2022, assured that the Supreme Court “took a thief out of jail to become president through fraud” and reiterated his conviction that voting should return to paper ballots, as it was more than two decades ago, to be “reliable” and “auditable”.

According to the ultra-right leader, the electronic ballot boxes that the country adopted twenty years ago “are not reliable” and favor “frauds”. However, he admitted that he has no proof of his assertion.

Even so, he challenged them to “present some proof that there is no fraud” with the electronic ballot boxes and expressed confidence that a project being discussed in Parliament will allow a return to paper ballots.

He also reiterated that, if this were not the case, “there will be problems in the elections” and “convulsions in Brazil”, since he will only hand over power “to whoever wins cleanly”.

Bolsonaro, whose popularity is falling at the same time that Lula’s is rising, further criticized the Senate Covid CPI investigative committee, formed against his will, which is, in his view, trying to “erode the government.”

“It is stupid,” said the president, who considered it “shameful” that the federal government is being investigated and not the management of “the governors and mayors”, who “shut down everything” and “destroyed millions of jobs” with the “excuse” of the fight against Covid-19.