On Wednesday night with only four days left until the election, Brazil’s extreme-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, called an emergency press conference.

Beginning 20 minutes later than scheduled, Bolsonaro kept it (thankfully) relatively brief, delivering a whiney rant in which he claimed the election was being stolen by people led by former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the judiciary. However, this was more than an obvious attempt to set the grounds for a challenge to the election results — it was also an admission of defeat.

Bolsonaro has always made explicit his contempt for democracy and his dream of launching a coup. After the press conference, reports quickly surfaced that his advisers had talked him down from calling a postponement of the election and that he was holding another emergency meeting with the heads of the armed forces.

This followed the latest polling that indicates that Lula enjoyed a decent advantage, and a week of almost uninterrupted and completely self-inflicted disasters for the Bolsonaro campaign. The stage is now set for the inevitable challenge to the election results in what is already being called the third round of the election.

The latest bogus case of electoral fraud 

Bolsonaro’s latest accusation is that the PT (Workers’ Party) was allocated a vast number of slots by radio stations (radio and television adverts are free in Brazil and distributed according to the strength of a party in Congress and during the second round) in northeastern Brazil and the key battleground state of Minas Gerais, while those of the Bolsonaro campaign were refused.

The case was taken to Brazil’s Electoral Court and was promptly rejected for lack of evidence. Bolsonaro was given an additional 24 hours to present proof of electoral fraud and again failed to provide anything substantive.

Now Bolsonaro and his cronies are claiming that the TSE (Electoral Court), headed by one of his archenemies, Judge Alexandre de Moraes, is actively sabotaging their campaign through “fake news” and working to secure a Lula victory. Bolsonaro even went as far as claiming that the missing radio slots secured Lula’s first-round victory.

There are more than a few problems with the allegations of the Bolsonaro campaign:

• Several of the radio stations in question are owned by Bolsonaro supporters;
• The radio stations are relatively small, broadcast to sparsely populated parts of the country, and the very medium is on the verge of obsolescence in a campaign dominated by social media; and
• It seems that the Bolsonaro campaign (quite possibly deliberately) failed to submit the material to be broadcast on the said radio slots.

This manufactured scandal is not getting the juices of the Bolsonaro base flowing in the same way as accusations of a satanic gay communist international conspiracy seem to do.

In a campaign where the government and its allies have spent billions on buying off Congress through the so-called “Secret Budget” and at least $12-billion in emergency social payments to buy votes, this scandal is akin to the most egregious dive of Bolsonaro supporter Neymar’s career.

Indeed, the money is coming from cutting future programmes for the poor, from lower prices for prescriptions to the budget for daycare centres. This is also an election where employers and pastors are using their power to intimidate their employees and flocks to vote for Bolsonaro.

All of this indicates that Bolsonaro believes he cannot win the election and is now set on doing all that he can to call the results into question. Already, pro-Bolsonaro WhatsApp and Telegram groups are being flooded with stories of the missing radio slots and calls to suspend the elections.

A political gangster steps in

A week ago, the momentum was with Bolsonaro. He had performed significantly better than expected in the first round of the election, he had billions to spend on emergency social payments in a blatant attempt to buy votes, and the election was being fought firmly on his terrain of conspiracy, slander and religious rhetoric: which candidate was backed by Satan, etc.

This all changed last Sunday, after the Scarface-like intervention of one of Brazil’s most well-known political gangsters and fanatical Bolsonaro supporters, a parasitical creature named Roberto Jefferson, the leader of the PTB (Labour Party of Brazil), who has been part of every government since Brazil returned to civilian rule.

Last week saw Bolsonaro forced on the backfoot following his sexualised comments about adolescent Venezuelan girls and the news that Finance Minister Paulo Guedes would not adjust the minimum wage to keep pace with inflation, but this was all overshadowed by Jefferson’s intervention.

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On Sunday morning, Jefferson, who was under house arrest for threatening the Supreme Court, got out of bed, presumably poured himself a cup of coffee, and decided to go live on social media and violate the conditions of his house arrest. In a brief video, he called Supreme Court Justice Cármen Lúcia “a used-up prostitute” and implored the virtuous citizens of Brazil to take a stand against judicial tyranny in defence of family values.

Amid (the correct) suspicions that Jefferson had an arsenal of military-grade weapons (more than 7,000 bullet cartridges were found) at his domicile and was planning attacks in the run-up to the election, the Supreme Court ordered the Federal Police to arrest him and return him to an actual prison.

A group of Federal Police officers drove out to the small city in the interior of Rio de Janeiro that Jefferson calls home, arrived at his house and were promptly greeted by three hand grenades and more than 50 shots from an assault rifle. Two officers were injured. The Federal Police, armed with Glocks, did not return fire. Jefferson then released another video claiming that the Supreme Court had gone too far and that he would rather die than submit to judicial tyranny.

An eight-hour standoff followed, only ending when a fraudulent priest who had been deployed as Jefferson’s candidate for president to help Bolsonaro in the debates, suddenly arrived and negotiated for Jefferson to hand himself over to the police. To add to the bizarre scene, a crowd of Jefferson supporters clad in green and yellow had gathered outside and brutally assaulted a cameraman.

But just who is Roberto Jefferson? To sum up his long and debauched time in public life is a challenge. He is, in his own words, “a close personal friend” of Bolsonaro and one of the supposed coordinators of his re-election campaign as the (unofficial) leader of the PTB, one of the most corrupt parties in the land. Jefferson is also, among other things, a complete and utter scumbag with multiple convictions for corruption, a notorious snitch, a biker, a gun nut, an anti-Semite and a total lunatic who has been at the heart of the greatest scandals in Brazil over the past 30 years.

In many ways, Jefferson’s trajectory matches that of Brazilian democracy:  he made his start in politics as a talk show host in the early 1980s, before joining the PTB and being elected to Congress. The PTB used to be an actual party with a union base before it was handed over to former dictator and president Getúlio Vargas’ deranged reactionary niece by the Military Dictatorship when it reintroduced a multiparty system in the late 1970s, and transformed into a “physiological party”, meaning it rents itself out to the highest bidder.

A selection of Jefferson’s political highlights follows.

• He sobbed during the impeachment hearings of his ally Fernando Collor de Mello;
• He was supposedly at the heart of the horse trading used to change the constitution to allow Fernando Henrique Cardoso to run for a second term;
• He nearly brought down the first Lula government by ratting out on the monthly payments that he and his corrupt friends in Congress were receiving to vote for government policies;
• He tried to ride the anti-corruption wave against Dilma Rousseff; and
• He has reinvented himself as an extreme rightwing, firearm-toting, Harley Davidson-riding, coup-threatening supporter of Bolsonaro.

The Bobby Jeff/Bolsonaro bromance from hell

There is some media speculation that Jefferson’s stunt might have been premeditated, in a failed attempt to get Bolsonaro’s base riled up against the Supreme Court, but there is no doubt that his antics have damaged Bolsonaro’s campaign.

Bolsonaro initially responded by calling the shooting and grenade-tossing at Jefferson’s house “an unfortunate incident” and sending the minister of justice to Jefferson’s house to try to resolve the issue, before changing tack and calling his ally “a thug”.

The Jefferson episode brought all the ugly violence, crude threats and anti-democratic fanaticism of the Bolsonaro movement into the limelight. And as much as Bolsonaro can try to deny it, the president and Jefferson are close allies, and one of the president’s main supporters going Tony Montana on police doesn’t help his image of being pro-law and order, nor does it convince the military to step in to stop a Lula victory.

Bolsonaro and Jefferson’s relationship goes back decades, and since 2019, Jefferson has been one of the principal leaders of the most radical part of Bolsonaro’s support bases, consistently posing with guns, threatening the Supreme Court and issuing deranged missives calling for a coup. Now with Jefferson in prison, unrepentant and doubling down on his insults and threats against the Supreme Court, Bolsonaro is desperately trying to change the subject.

What comes next?

The second round of the election has been, if it wasn’t clear already, somewhat dominated by judicial interventions by the Supreme Court and the Electoral Court. And yes, there are grounds for a reasonable critique of judicial overreach: the Electoral Court’s interventions bring to mind the worst excesses of football’s VAR (video assistant referee), when the match officials take a proactive role in the game, disrupting its flow and issuing inconsistent and contradictory decisions about handballs and penalties.

It was always going to be a Sisyphean task trying to regulate this campaign. Bolsonaro, as I have pointed out, has spent billions in blatant attempts to buy votes, shown contempt for any legal standards governing disinformation, commands a vast communications infrastructure funded with illegal donations from wealthy allies, and has the support of the country’s fast-growing churches, as well as several of its largest media empires. Even when Lula’s campaign has overstepped, its sins are dwarfed by the scale of the Bolsonaro campaign’s shenanigans.

The interventionist role of the courts testifies to the power of the extreme right and the weakness of an opposition that has often proven too weak to hold Bolsonaro to account through political means, while the other institutions are not working, having been co-opted or bought off by Bolsonaro or are actively supporting him. As such, the courts could be forced to intervene in a way that might stop the election from being stolen, but could set the grounds for Bolsonaro’s third round.

A Lula victory is by no means certain, but the intervention of Jefferson against democracy might have secured the future of Brazilian democracy. However, this will not be a mass triumph for pro-democratic forces; it is in large part the result of self-inflicted injuries committed by the Bolsonaro campaign.

There will be months of legal challenges, protests and quite possibly violent challenges to the eventual election result (61% of Bolsonaro supporters say they won’t accept the election result if Lula wins).

Bolsonaro thinks he is losing; that at least should give those who believe in democracy some cause for hope, but frankly, I am exhausted. DM