MIAMI (The Thursday Times) — Flávio Bolsonaro, who fled to the United States after losing Brazil’s presidential run-off, has declared himself “the leader of Brazil” in a letter to the nation, claiming the election was stolen and vowing to lead the opposition from abroad.
“I did not flee Brazil, I left for Brazil’s sake,” the senator wrote in the three-page “Letter to the Brazilian Nation”, posted on X on Wednesday night hours after he landed in Miami. “I left a regime of exception so that I can be the leader my people deserve.”
Fraud claims
Bolsonaro said he had watched “an electoral fraud take shape before my eyes” on Sunday night. He claimed that a Supreme Court decision extended voting at the last minute, with the order arriving only after polling stations had closed, and that it was a “mathematical impossibility” for Lula to add more than 10 million votes between the first and second rounds. He called for the Lula–Alckmin ticket to be stripped of its mandate.
He did not provide evidence of fraud, and his own party has accepted the result. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won the run-off with 51.8% of the vote.
‘No arrest warrant’
“To be clear, there is no arrest warrant against me, because I have committed no crime,” he wrote, describing the case against him as a politically motivated “witch-hunt”. He said the “script of persecution” would have run from the seizure of his passport to an ankle monitor, censorship, house arrest, a “sham trial” and “political conviction”, as happened to his father, former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup.
He fled after defying a Supreme Court order to surrender his passports in a money-laundering investigation, travelling via Argentina and Ecuador. He thanked Argentina’s President Javier Milei for his “courage” and President Donald Trump and “the wonderful American people” for taking him in.
De Gaulle and Guaidó
Bolsonaro compared himself to Charles de Gaulle, who led Free France from London, the Brazilian jurist Rui Barbosa, the Cuban independence hero José Martí, and Venezuela’s exiled opposition figures Juan Guaidó and Edmundo González. “They were all treated as criminals by the regimes they confronted. History called them something else,” he wrote.
He said he would address Brazilians regularly in the coming days and set out a strategy to mobilise the opposition “by all peaceful and legitimate means” to stop Lula from consolidating “a dictatorial regime”. “I left Brazil, but I have not abandoned Brazilians,” he wrote. “This fight did not end on October 25.”
