FASCISMO'S SLANDER
Bolsonaro’s vice president says there is no electoral fraud, but Lula should not have participated

Daniel Stewart -

The still vice president of Jair Bolsonaro, Hamilton Mourao, said Wednesday that while he does not agree with those who claim that there was fraud in the last elections in Brazil, he also believes that "one of the players", in clear allusion to the elected president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, should not have participated.


File - Jair Bolsonaro and Hamilton Mourao. - -/GDA via ZUMA Wire/dpa© Provided by News 360

"We agreed to participate in a game with another player who should not have played. If we agreed, there is nothing to complain about. From that point on, there is no point in crying anymore, we lost the game," Mourao said in an interview with the newspaper 'O Globo'.

In another moment of that conversation, Mourao, who was elected senator in the first round, insisted that although in his point of view there was no fraud, as has been denounced by those who since Sunday have been blocking some of the main highways of the country, there was "a player who should not have played".

In this sense, he stressed that the protests should have taken place when "the player who should not have played" was authorized. "There they should have taken to the streets, but they did not. There are 58 million non-conformists, but they agreed to participate in the game, so they have to calm down," he has said.

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Bolsonaro's allies and voters who have come out to protest the election results and even call for military intervention argue that Lula da Silva should not have participated in the elections due to corruption convictions that were later proven fraudulent.

Brazil's Supreme Court decided to release him and annul his convictions in March 2021, thus recovering his political rights, after it considered that the court that tried him lacked competence and later evidenced that there was bias during a process in which Judge Sergio Moro - Bolsonaro's former Minister of Justice - acted as a sort of prosecutor.

Mourao has taken stock of these three years as vice-president of Brazil, a position, he said, that has caused him some "frustration" due to the few powers at his disposal, unlike other presidential regimes.

"What I have learned is that you have to know what the role of vice president is. The Constitution says that the Executive is exercised by the president and his ministers, the vice president is just an appendix," lamented Mourao, who during these years has starred in several dialectical disputes with Bolsonaro.

However, he has denied that he has publicly argued with him and blamed it on their different visions of how to do things, since the ideology and thinking is the same. "I never stressed with him, nor did he take my sleep away. I drink whiskey every day before going to sleep, so I don't lose sleep," he has confessed.

"He's a more incisive guy, with more verbosity, I'm not. My way of doing things is different. He was always a deputy, in the House if you don't stand out in the fight, they swallow you and Bolsonaro's role was to stick his finger in others and he continues to play that role and I'm past that phase of life," he has argued.

Regarding the time it took Bolsonaro to come out and show his face after his defeat, Mourao defended that "everyone acts in his own way" and that if he took almost two days it is because he was looking for "the best way" to act "without incurring in offenses or illegalities".