MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Brazil: Two days before the deadline, Bolsonaro's party cannot register Flávio as candidate

“You saw that they falsified my party affiliation. The system will try everything to stop me, but it will not succeed, because God is in command,” Flávio Bolsonaro said

Brazil's Liberal Party was unable on Thursday to file Senator Flávio Bolsonaro's presidential candidacy with the Superior Electoral Court, after the electoral system recorded him as a member of a different party. The deadline for submitting candidacies expires on Saturday at 7pm.

A certificate issued by the court at 11:13 on Thursday listed the senator as a regular member of the Missão party since Wednesday, August 12, and recorded his departure from the Liberal Party on the same date. Official records had until then shown continuous membership of the PL since November 2021. The discrepancy blocked the registration procedure. The campaign's legal team also reported that the party temporarily lost credentialed access to the platform used to submit data to the court.

The Superior Electoral Court said in a statement that the change did not result from a breach of its affiliation system but from improper use of the tool by someone holding access credentials, and opened an investigation. The certificate itself specifies that affiliation data is entered into the Filia system under the parties' own responsibility and that the record carries “only a relative presumption of veracity.”

Flávio Bolsonaro released a video on social media. “You saw that they falsified my party affiliation. The system will try everything to stop me, but it will not succeed, because God is in command,” he said. His team requested immediate correction of the record and announced it would ask the Federal Police to open an investigation. The change was reversed hours later.

Missão, whose president and presidential candidate is Renan Santos, said in a statement it had been the victim of a fraudulent affiliation attempt. The party said its own system detected the irregularity and tried to cancel it the same day, a request the court rejected, and announced it would provide authorities and the press with a report containing access logs, emails and IP addresses. “The last thing we want is Flávio Bolsonaro affiliated to Missão,” Santos told the Metrópoles website.

This is not the first such episode. In an earlier case, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva appeared registered as a Liberal Party member in the electoral system. The police investigation concluded the change had been made by a 13-year-old who did not breach the system, according to the same outlet.

By Thursday, six presidential candidacies had been registered, among them that of Santos, who polls at around 3%. Campaigning officially begins on Sunday, with Lula holding an event in São Bernardo do Campo, in greater São Paulo, and Flávio Bolsonaro at Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro. The most recent CNT/MDA poll puts the president on 48% against the senator's 39.1% in a potential runoff.