Brazil's Flávio Bolsonaro won't admit he lost. Will he still refuse on 5 January?

What happened

Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party said it recognises the result proclaimed by the electoral court. Bolsonaro, like his father four years ago, has still not conceded defeat to Lula.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won by 4.4 million votes. In Brazil’s run-off on 25 October he got more than 64.25 million votes, and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro got 59.83 million. Bolsonaro told supporters: “I will request that these elections be annulled“. His reason was a judge’s order that kept polling stations open two hours longer. A study by Insper, a Brazilian university, found the extra hours added about 35,000 votes, less than 0.03% of the total.

On 26 October his own party accepted the result. Valdemar Costa Neto, leader of the Liberal Party, said: “We recognise the presidential result proclaimed by the electoral court“. The Folha de S Paulo newspaper reported that allies and lawyers told Bolsonaro his argument was legally weak and talked him out of the demand to annul the vote. He has not dropped it in public. In a video he said he would bring another case to have Lula and his running mate disqualified for alleged abuse of economic power.

The president of the Republic has a four-year term of office, and it shall commence on January 5 following the election year.

Constitution of the Federative Republic of Brazil, Article 82

Lula starts his fourth term on 5 January 2027. Article 82 of Brazil’s Constitution says a new president’s term begins on 5 January of the year after the election. Election officials and leaders in the region have recognised his win. So Lula takes office that day whether or not Bolsonaro accepts the result.

On 26 October a Supreme Court judge cancelled Bolsonaro’s passports. Judge Alexandre de Moraes banned him from leaving Brazil and gave him 24 hours to hand in his passports. The order refers only to a police inquiry into money laundering. When his Senate term ends early next year, he loses the legal protection that office-holders have.

Sources: theguardian.com

The Pattern

We looked for cases where a candidate for president lost to the sitting president by a wide margin, refused to accept the result and took it to a court. We found ten such elections since 2012, eight of them in Africa. Brazil’s own 2022 vote is not one of them, because Jair Bolsonaro lost by less than two points.

The Read

Nine of the ten losers had still not accepted defeat when the winner took office. The one exception moved fast: in Indonesia in 2019, Prabowo Subianto said he respected the Constitutional Court’s ruling on the day it threw out his complaint. In Ghana in 2012, Nana Akufo-Addo accepted the verdict too, but more than eight months after the vote. All ten complaints reached a court or council, and in Zimbabwe in 2013 the loser’s party withdrew its complaint. In six of the ten, the judges ruled or the complaint ended within 37 days. Only Kenya’s Supreme Court, in 2017, changed the result before the winner took office.

There are reasons for doubt. In none of the ten elections did the loser’s own party accept the result without him, as the Liberal Party did on 26 October. Eight of the ten were in Africa, and none in Brazil. Ghana’s Supreme Court heard two of them, with the same two men in swapped roles. Brazil’s electoral court has moved quickly before: in 2022 it gave Jair Bolsonaro’s coalition 24 hours to bring its full audit or see its complaint rejected. A quick ruling is what came before the one acceptance in Indonesia.