‘Amateur morons’: Flávio Bolsonaro’s short-lived ‘president-elect’ claim met with mockery
0 / 29
English
中文
Flávio Bolsonaro had hoped that by Sunday night people would be calling him the next president of Brazil.
（暂无翻译）
Instead, the far-right politician’s decision to flee to the US after losing the election and – for 58 minutes – to declare himself “Brazil’s true president-elect”, has made him a laughing stock, with Brazilian newspapers and commentators raining a barrage of scornful adjectives down on the conquered candidate.
（暂无翻译）
“If it served any purpose at all, Flávio’s foolishness liberated the democratic right from a family of coup-mongers, which for far too long held it hostage to their reckless folly and irremediable disdain for Brazil,” the conservative Estado de São Paulo newspaper thundered on Friday.
（暂无翻译）
Bolsonaro fled to Miami on Tuesday night, 48 hours after being beaten by his leftwing adversary, the incumbent president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, by 4.4m votes. Lula’s victory has been recognised by rightwing leaders from around the world, including El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, not to mention Bolsonaro’s own party and many key allies.
（暂无翻译） （暂无翻译）
But on Wednesday after landing in the US, Bolsonaro published an outlandish letter – reportedly produced with the help of ChatGPT – in which he declared himself “the true president-elect of Brazil” and made phoney claims about election fraud.
（暂无翻译）
Perhaps most bizarrely, he claimed he would continue to lead Brazil’s opposition from abroad, comparing himself to Charles de Gaulle, who in the 1940s led a French government-in-exile against the Nazis from London, and the 19th-century Cuban independence hero José Martí, who challenged the Spanish empire from New York.
（暂无翻译）
“They were all treated as criminals by the regimes they confronted. History called them something else,” Bolsonaro said, also likening himself to Venezuela’s Nobel laureate María Corina Machado and Rui Barbosa, a Brazilian politician who went into exile in London in the late 19th century after challenging an authoritarian president known as “the Iron Marshal”.
（暂无翻译） （暂无翻译）
Just under an hour after Bolsonaro’s proclamation was first published on social media, a corrected version was issued, altering his claimed status to “leader of Brazil” – reportedly after he was upbraided by Trump administration officials keen to avoid a full-blown diplomatic split with Brazil’s actual leaders.
（暂无翻译）
The amended letter also updated the out-of-date Brazilian coat of arms that had been used erroneously in the letterhead of the first version referring to the “United States of Brazil” – a name the South American country has not used since 1967.
（暂无翻译）
Bolsonaro’s flight – and his brief but bogus claim to be “president-elect” of one of the world’s largest democracies – prompted an outpouring of opprobrium and ridicule.
（暂无翻译）
“[This letter] seems to have been written by a foolhardy, loony halfwit,” Flávia Oliveira, a prominent political commentator, told the network GloboNews.
（暂无翻译）
The Estado de São Paulo’s leader writers said: “Flávio’s letter isn’t worth the ink of this newspaper, but there’s no way the embarrassment can be ignored,” before savaging a man they called “a con artist of the highest order”.
（暂无翻译）
The Rio broadsheet O Globo said Bolsonaro’s “shameful and sneaky” decision to abscond laid bare the “pathetic” nature of his political movement, Bolsonarismo, while the Folha de São Paulo said it exposed the true nature of the “authoritarian, ignorant, incompetent” Bolsonaro family.
（暂无翻译）
José Casado, a columnist for the conservative magazine Veja, wrote: “The comedy storyline has already guaranteed him a spot in the pages of political satire.” Merval Pereira, a conservative columnist for O Globo, called Bolsonaro “a madhouse Napoleon”.
（暂无翻译）
Even Silas Malafaia, a pugnacious televangelist who is close to Bolsonaro’s jailed father, Jair Bolsonaro, had harsh words.
（暂无翻译）
“Bolsonaro’s kids are jackasses … A bunch of amateur morons,” Malafaia was quoted as saying by O Globo. Some observers see Bolsonaro’s post-defeat getaway as proof that his dispirited movement is dead.
（暂无翻译） （暂无翻译）
“I think Bolsonarismo was defeated once and for all,” Lula’s chief foreign policy adviser, Celso Amorim, said this week, calling the result “the last gasp of a radical, irrational, lying right wing”. The Estado de São Paulo’s editorial board agreed.
（暂无翻译） （暂无翻译）
“Flávio belongs to the past and will soon vanish into the basement of political irrelevance from which he should never have emerged,” they predicted, urging conservatives to ditch Bolsonaro and throw their weight behind his ally Tarcísio de Freitas, the São Paulo governor. Others warned Bolsonarismo would remain a powerful political force, even if the Bolsonaro family’s leadership of the far-right movement was now in doubt.
（暂无翻译） （暂无翻译）
Social media users were also merciless in their reaction to Bolsonaro’s short-lived claim to be “president-elect”.
（暂无翻译）
One meme invited supporters to attend his January inauguration – at Cinderella Castle in Walt Disney World, Orlando. Another parodied his movement’s fascist-inspired slogan “God, homeland and family”, which became “Goodbye, homeland and family”. Donald Trump has declined to publicly recognise the result of an election he has called “a very great embarrassment to the people of Brazil”.
（暂无翻译） （暂无翻译） （暂无翻译）
But a US diplomatic cable obtained by the Folha de São Paulo called Lula’s victory “surprising but definitive”. Asked if he saw Bolsonaro as Brazil’s “rightful” leader, the US president replied: “I won’t get involved.”
（暂无翻译） （暂无翻译）
仅供学习使用，如有侵权请联系删除 · 查看原文