Haddad needs ‘fraud’ to win Brazil elections, says Bolsonaro

Brazil’s right-wing presidential frontrunner Jair Bolsonaro boasted that leftist opponent Fernando Haddad could only beat him by “fraud” in Sunday’s decisive election run-off. The former army captain heads into this weekend’s second round with a seemingly unbeatable lead in opinion polls, the latest of which by Ibope showed him leading Haddad by 57% to 43%.“He can get there by fraud, but through the vote he won’t make it. I’m sure of that,” Bolsonaro, 63, said in a video posted on Facebook.He also suggested Haddad’s Workers Party may be trying to “manipulate Ibope’s numbers” and warned his supporters to remain “wary” of the opinion polls.Bolsonaro’s suspicions were piqued by Ibope’s poll published on Tuesday, which said Haddad had cut his opponent’s lead from 18 to 14 points. That poll said that in Sao Paulo, where Haddad was mayor from 2013-16, the leftist was ahead by 51% to 49%.Yet Bolsonaro pointed to the October 7 first round results from Brazil’s biggest city, where Haddad garnered only 19% compared to the former’s 44%.It’s not the first time he has brought up the possibility of fraud, having done so 10 days before the first round of voting, before subsequently backtracking.However, when the results were announced, he then denounced “problems” with the electronic urns and blamed them for denying him an absolute majority.Earlier, going back on a prior pledge to follow the pullout by US President Donald Trump, Bolsonaro said he was not set on leaving the Paris climate accord if elected.Bolsonaro’s decision marks a surprising about-face for a candidate who enjoys strong support from Brazil’s powerful agribusiness lobby and has called conservation efforts a threat to Brazilian sovereignty.Speaking at a news conference in Rio de Janeiro, Bolsonaro also said he that he wanted to work with the United Nations to deal with a large influx of Venezuelan refugees in Brazil’s north.He said he did not want conflict with the neighbouring country, whose socialist government he has repeatedly criticised.Brazil’s most polarised election in a generation has stirred political violence and threats against journalists, while Bolsonaro’s policy pledges have raised alarm among many, including environmentalists. But Bolsonaro has been adopting a more moderate tone as he nears an increasingly likely victory in Sunday’s run-off election against Haddad.Bolsonaro had previously said that, if elected, he would pull Brazil out of the Paris climate accord due to disagreements over how the Amazon rainforest should be protected.Trump pulled the United States out of the accord in June 2017.Bolsonaro has now said he would respect the accord as long as he got assurances that Brazil would not cede sovereignty to native tribes or international jurisdiction over the Andes mountains, Amazon rainforest and Atlantic Ocean — the so-called Triple A region.“Let’s put on paper that the Triple A isn’t in play and neither is the independence of any indigenous land, and I’ll uphold the Paris Agreement,” Bolsonaro told journalists.This month, a group of non-governmental organisations including Greenpeace and WWF-Brasil signed an open letter saying that Bolsonaro’s proposals present a serious threat to Brazil’s environment that could lead deforestation “to explode.”