American diplomats have informed former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) that the United States plans to quickly recognize the winner of the elections in Brazil, two sources told Reuters news agency.
According to them, agility is an attempt to discourage questioning the results that could lead to an institutional crisis or chaos in the country. The US State Department did not respond to requests for comment on the report.
Lula met on Wednesday (21) with the head of the US embassy in Brazil, Douglas Koneff. According to reports, the issue of the national electoral system was one of the central themes of the meeting, held in a hotel in the capital of São Paulo.
One of the sources says that the PT, leader in the polls, commented that the recognition of the result would be an important move to minimize the impetus of Jair Bolsonaro (PL) to contest the election. The current president has insisted, without evidence, that the electronic voting system is susceptible to fraud.
Lula would then have heard from Koneff — the chargé d’affaires who heads the American mission while there is no ambassador for the country in Brazil — that Washington’s intention is to recognize the winner of the elections regardless of the result, as soon as the president of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) make the official announcement.
The same assurance was heard by former Chancellor Celso Amorim, PT’s main foreign policy adviser, from ambassadors from Latin America and the Caribbean. The message was passed on in side conversations and in the farewells of a meeting with diplomats from the region this Thursday (22), officially scheduled to present Lula’s ideas on foreign policy in a possible new government.
Koneff’s meeting with Lula had been under negotiation for weeks. Previously, Lula had two meetings with foreign diplomats: one with Russia, India and South Africa and another with France, Germany, Switzerland, Poland and the Netherlands. The head of the American embassy, in turn, has already met with two other presidential candidates: Ciro Gomes (PDT) and Simone Tebet (MDB).
Still under the effects of the attack on the Capitol led by Donald Trump supporters at the beginning of last year, the Joe Biden administration has sent signals of support for the work of the TSE (Superior Electoral Court) in the face of Bolsonaro’s attacks on electronic voting machines.
Washington’s main gesture took place in July, when the embassy released a note stating that Brazilian elections are a model for the world and that Americans trust the strength of the country’s institutions.
The statement was published shortly after Bolsonaro gave a presentation at Palácio da Alvorada for heads of diplomatic missions in Brasília in which he repeated lies and conspiracy theories to discredit the electoral system.
Months earlier, William Burns, director of the CIA (American intelligence agency) had told aides of the president that his attempts to question the electoral process were not well regarded by the US. The message was not well received at the Planalto Palace.
These were not the only frictions between the Biden and Bolsonaro administrations. The Brazilian is an admirer of former President Donald Trump and was one of the last to congratulate Biden on his victory in 2020.
In the first year of the relationship, the two countries engaged in negotiations on the environment, a point of strong interest for the Democrat, but the conversations cooled down due to the persistence of negative numbers of deforestation in the Amazon.
Nine days before the elections, Lula once again increased his advantage over Bolsonaro and is ahead in the polls of voting intentions with differences that go up to 16 percentage points. According to a Datafolha poll released this Thursday, PT continues to have a chance to settle the election in the first round.
Bolsonaro once again raised suspicions about the voting system after a period of relative calm. In the most recent episode, he stated that, if he doesn’t win the elections in the first round, “something very wrong” would be happening in the TSE – no poll points the current president as leader of the polls, neither in the first nor in the second round.
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