BRASILIA (Reuters) – Brazil’s Senate President Rodrigo Pacheco criticized President Jair Bolsonaro on Friday for his attacks on the Supreme Court and defended the country’s voting system that the far-right leader has sought to discredit.
Pacheco said Bolsonaro must respect the results of next year’s election even if he fails to change the all-electronic voting system – which the president groundlessly claims is vulnerable to fraud.
“Any threat, however slight, to this democracy will be promptly rejected by the Senate,” Pacheco said in a GloboNews television interview.
Bolsonaro has railed for weeks against the electronic urns used in Brazil, without providing evidence of fraud. He has pushed for the adoption of printed receipts that can be counted if any election result is disputed, and threatened not to accept the result if the system is not changed.
In his worst set-back in Congress since taking office in 2019, a committee on Thursday voted to shelve a constitutional amendment backed by Bolsonaro that would have adopted printed ballots.
The Senate head said anyone advocating a “democratic retreat” or the suspension of next year’s elections would be seen as an “enemy of the nation.”
Pacheco offered to mediate the growing clash between Bolsonaro and the Supreme Court, but said that no-one, not even the president, had a right to attack the top court.
“I think a majority in Congress at this moment want to maintain the electronic voting system,” he said.
Despite Thursday’s reversal in the lower chamber, Bolsonaro kept up his offensive on the judiciary on Friday. He told businessmen at a luncheon that the top court wanted a return to corruption under a socialist government that would curtail freedom of the market.
With his popularity falling after overseeing the world’s second-highest COVID-19 death toll, opinion polls show Bolsonaro trails former leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, though neither of them has officially announced they will run.
(Reporting by Eduardo Simoes and Anthony Boadle; Editing by Mark Potter)
