Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro says he sees three options for his future: winning the 2022 presidential election, death or prison.
“I have three alternatives for my future: being arrested, killed or victory,” he said on Saturday, in remarks to a meeting of evangelical leaders. Bolsonaro later added that the first option is out of question. “No man on Earth will threaten me.”
Bolsonaro’s remarks come as he has been questioning Brazil’s electronic voting system and threatened not to accept the results of next year’s presidential election. He has been calling for the adoption of printed receipts, saying that electronic ballots are vulnerable to fraud.
Bolsonaro trails former leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in most polls.
In the meeting with evangelical leaders, Bolsonaro once again criticised Brazil’s electoral court. “We have a president who neither desires nor provokes a rupture, but everything has a limit in life. I can’t continue to live with this,” he said.
The head of Brazil’s electoral court, the TSE, on Wednesday said there is no problem with the electronic voting system, calling a discussion to adopt printed ballots “a waste of focus”.
The country’s electronic voting system was implemented in 1996 and has been widely praised for helping eliminate fraud and accelerate election results in a vast country more than 2.5 times larger than India. According to the TSE, more than 147 million voters spread across 5,567 municipalities used more than 400,000 voting machines to cast their ballots in last year’s municipal elections.
Bolsonaro also invited the evangelical leaders to show up at the planned 7 September nationwide marches to support him. Brazil’s huge evangelical voting bloc was crucial to Bolsonaro’s 2018 election victory.
