Bolsonaro refuses to accept Brazil election result, seeks annulment

Brazil’s incumbent president, Jair Bolsonaro, has refused to accept the result of the presidential runoff, which his rival Lula won. Bolsonaro said his team would demand that the election be annulled, the BBC reported.

“The election results cannot be accepted,” Bolsonaro said. He called the two-hour extension of polling station hours an unprecedented step that “will have to be explained.”

According to Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court, after all ballots were counted, Lula received 51.79% of the vote and Bolsonaro 48.21%. It is Lula’s fourth presidential election victory: he served two terms as president, from January 2003 to December 2010, and returned to power in January 2023. The road to victory was not easy: in the first round on Oct. 4, Bolsonaro finished ahead of Lula, and many believed Lula would not be able to turn things around in three weeks.

The end of the voting was marked by confusion. Just minutes before polling stations were due to close, a Supreme Court justice ordered voting extended by two hours. As the AP noted, some electoral commissions learned of this only after closing, and it is unclear how many votes were cast during the extra time.

The trigger was a complaint from Lula’s campaign: authorities in a number of cities with right-wing mayors, it said, were restricting voters’ access to public transport. In São Paulo in the southeast and Salvador in the northeast, buses were taken off their routes. Bolsonaro’s campaign, for its part, asked for voting to be extended in two states in the southeast and south of the country because of heavy rain.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz