Flavio Bolsonaro's Liberal Party acknowledged Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's runoff victory on Monday even as Brazil's Supreme Court ordered the defeated candidate to surrender his passports and barred him from leaving the country.
Brazil's Liberal Party recognised Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's presidential runoff victory on Monday night, breaking with its own candidate's refusal to accept the result. Party president Valdemar Costa Neto said in a signed statement that the party recognised the result proclaimed by the electoral court, while maintaining that the issues it raised should be properly clarified.
Flavio Bolsonaro, who lost Sunday's runoff, had announced he would seek to annul the election over a Supreme Court decision to extend voting by two hours. Brazilian media reported he has since been persuaded to drop the annulment bid after allies and lawyers told him the argument was legally weak, and that he will instead file a case seeking to disqualify Lula's ticket for alleged abuse of power. That case had not been filed when the reports were published.
Separately, Supreme Federal Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered Bolsonaro to surrender his passports to the Federal Police and barred him from leaving Brazil. Bolsonaro said in a social media video on Monday that he was served with the order as he left a visit to his father, former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is under house arrest. The ruling is part of an investigation involving Bolsonaro and lawyer Willer Tomaz over suspected money laundering and illegal foreign exchange transactions, and it also bars him from contacting Tomaz.
Bolsonaro said he would comply with the order while challenging it, denied he had planned to flee, and called the measure an attempt to intimidate him. He said the order followed remarks by his brother Eduardo, who said on a podcast in the United States that Flavio should leave Brazil if he lost. Bolsonaro said he never said that himself.
The official tally leaves little room for the annulment argument on arithmetic alone. Lula received 64,256,232 votes, or 51.79 percent, against 59,826,041, or 48.21 percent, for Bolsonaro. Fewer than 35,000 votes, about 0.03 percent of the total, were cast during the two-hour extension, according to an analysis of electoral records cited in the coverage, and the electoral court's president said the extension had no impact on the result.
The dispute is also drawing in Washington. US President Donald Trump said on Monday that Lula's win looked like another rigged election, offering no evidence, while Brazilian media reported that the US State Department held back its customary congratulatory statement. The Liberal Party is expected to hold the largest bloc in both chambers of Congress, a backdrop that will shape Lula's fourth term when it begins in January.