Bolsonaro backs off election challenge as his party concedes

• Flavio Bolsonaro dropped plans to challenge Lula’s victory, and the Liberal Party formally conceded defeat while criticising higher public spending before the vote.
• Bolsonaro then shifted to a new bid to disqualify Lula’s ticket, calling the result unfair and saying “the system won”, but the claim looks unlikely to succeed.
• He will organise opposition in Congress, while Flavio Bolsonaro was ordered by police to hand over passports and stay in Brazil amid a Supreme Court-linked investigation.

Flavio Bolsonaro abandoned plans to challenge the result of Brazil’s presidential election, while his Liberal Party went a step further and formally conceded defeat to re-elected President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

In a statement signed on Oct 26 by its president Valdemar Costa Neto, the party recognised the election result while criticising the increase in public spending in the run-up to the vote and its potential impact on the race.  

The statement marks a sharp retreat from Bolsonaro’s initial response to the Oct 25 vote, when he said he would seek to have the election annulled.

Bolsonaro’s decision to drop that challenge was initially confirmed by a member of his campaign.

A second person said the campaign had already known the challenge was unlikely to succeed but had kept it alive as a way to rally supporters.

Both spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to discuss the matter publicly.

Bolsonaro had said he would seek to have the election annulled after the Supreme Court ordered voting hours extended by two hours.

Both his campaign and Lula’s had requested the extension.

According to electoral authorities, just over 34,000 votes were cast after regular voting hours, a negligible number compared with Lula’s roughly 4.4 million-vote margin of victory.

In a social media video posted late afternoon on Oct 26, Bolsonaro said he would now seek to have Lula’s ticket disqualified, another long-shot strategy with little chance of success.

He said the case would centre on what he described as false information and the use of public funds for measures announced in the final weeks of the campaign, which he called “vote buying”.

“I wasn’t the one who lost. The system won,” Bolsonaro said.

Lula’s campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Bolsonaro’s allegations.

Bolsonaro also said he would organise the opposition to Lula’s government, pointing to the strength of his Liberal Party in both houses of Congress.

“I will bring together the elected lawmakers and senators to organise our strategy and turn the Lower House and the Senate into our fortress against the barbarity that is already taking shape with four more years of Lula,” he said.

In the same video, Bolsonaro said he had visited his father, former president Jair Bolsonaro, on the morning of Oct 26.

The elder Bolsonaro is under house arrest in Brasilia for attempting a coup after his own 2022 election loss.

Flavio said that after the meeting, he was served an order by the Federal Police requiring him to surrender both his regular and diplomatic passports and informing him that he was barred from leaving Brazil.

Flavio Bolsonaro said the order was issued by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, the same judge who sentenced his father to 27 years in prison.

Bolsonaro said the measure followed comments by his brother Eduardo, who said on a podcast that Flavio should leave Brazil if he lost the election.

In the same ruling, Moraes barred Flavio from contacting lawyer Willer Tomaz, according to a person familiar with the matter. The two are under investigation on suspicion of involvement in a money-laundering scheme. Both have denied wrongdoing.

The order was not public, and the Supreme Court did not immediately respond a request for comment. BLOOMBERG