BRASÍLIA, Brazil —
Brushing off accusations of abusing Brazil’s
national day to bolster his reelection campaign, President Jair Bolsonaro presided over massive, politically charged festivities Wednesday, telling
supporters that polls showing him trailing are “a lie”.
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Brazil is deeply
divided heading into October’s elections, with the far-right incumbent behind
leftist ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in opinion polls but looking
determined to flex his muscle with an Independence Day show of strength,
including military parades in Brasilia and Rio de Janeiro and rallies by his
supporters across the country.
After taking in
a giant procession of soldiers, tanks, and tractors down the Esplanade of
Ministries in Brasilia, Bolsonaro gave a fiery speech to a sea of
green-and-yellow clad supporters massed in the capital.
The ex-army
captain denounced polls from leading public opinion institute Datafolha — whose
latest shows him trailing Lula 45 percent to 32 percent — as “a lie”, and
called the election campaign “a battle of good against evil”.
“They won’t
return to the scene of the crime,” he said, referring to the controversial
corruption charges that have dogged Lula, the charismatic ex-metal worker who
led
Brazil from 2003 to 2010. “The people are on our side — the side of good.”
Bolsonaro was
later due to attend another military parade in
Rio, where backers had already
flooded the avenue along iconic Copacabana beach as throngs prepared massive
motorcycle and jet-ski processions — two of the president’s favorite hobbies.
Bolsonaro’s open
hostility toward the supreme court and electoral authorities was a recurring
theme.
“Brazil is
facing huge tension because they’re trying to install communism, with help from
the courts,” said one Bolsonaro supporter in Rio, 53-year-old businessman
Claudio Berrios, draped in the Brazilian flag and sporting a military-style
camouflage shirt.
‘Tense, potentially
violent’
Last year on Brazil’s national day, Bolsonaro caused controversy with a
fiery speech saying “only God” could remove him from office and vowing to stop
heeding rulings by supreme court Justice and top electoral official Alexandre
de Moraes, whom the president considers an enemy.
That September
7, Bolsonaro supporters broke through a security cordon in Brasilia on the eve
of the festivities and threatened to invade the supreme court.
“September 7 will
be politicized by definition this year, coming in the home stretch of the
campaign,” said political scientist Paulo Baia of the Federal University of
Rio de Janeiro.
“It will be
tense and potentially violent,” he told AFP.
Critics accuse
the president of blurring the line between his official duties and his campaign
with the festivities.
In Rio, a group
of pastors from Brazil’s powerful Evangelical Christian community has rented a
stage where the commander in chief is expected to address the crowd.
Donations have
also poured in from another largely pro-Bolsonaro group, Brazil’s giant agribusiness
sector, to help fund Independence Day events across the country.
The Bolsonaro
camp has been highly active on social networks, urging supporters to turn out
en masse for the day.
Bolsonaro’s
congressman son Eduardo raised eyebrows on Twitter Monday by calling on
Brazilians “who have legally purchased guns” — a contingent his father has
sought to expand with aggressive gun-control rollbacks — to enlist as
“volunteers for Bolsonaro”.
Such comments
have added to fears of violence around the election if Bolsonaro, who regularly
attacks Brazil’s voting system as fraud-ridden — without evidence — follows in
the footsteps of his political role model, former US president
Donald Trump,
and refuses to accept the result.
Lula apparently plans to
keep a low profile Wednesday, but has rallies scheduled for Thursday and a
meeting with Evangelicals, a key voting bloc, on Friday.
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