A meeting between the two presidents in Los Angeles foreshadowed bigger trouble ahead, as Bolsonaro looks set to challenge the vote.
While the dominant plotline of last week’s Summit of the Americas was the leaders who didn’t attend the event, one president who was present—and even had a widely anticipated meeting with President Joe Biden—may soon pose a much more serious diplomatic crisis for democracy defenders in the U.S., the Americas and throughout the world. Indeed, Biden may well have been staring at an imminent foreign policy conundrum when he sat down for the first time with President Jair Bolsonaro a mere four months before Brazil’s presidential election.
The White House’s caution around the Bolsonaro meeting reinforced the complexity of the road ahead. A careful choosing of words by both presidents avoided a public confrontation in Los Angeles, but Bolsonaro’s statements before and during his stay in California underscored how far apart the two governments stand. Ultimately, the dynamics compelled the U.S. to leak to the press that Biden had directly defended Brazil’s electoral process during their private meeting. Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed sources, that Bolsonaro asked Biden for support in his campaign against leftist former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—a request that Biden, of course, ignored.
Bolsonaro’s intentions are clear: He wishes to discredit Brazil’s electoral process so that he may challenge and/or seek to overturn the result should he...
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