Ineligible, Bolsonaro gets honorary citizenship from governor ally
Far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro was awarded honorary citizenship of Minas Gerais state on Monday, by Governor Romeu Zema.
The motion to confer honorary citizenship to Mr. Bolsonaro in Brazil’s second most-populous state was approved by local lawmakers back in early 2019, just weeks after he took office as president. However, a ceremony had not yet been scheduled, despite the former president’s frequent trips to Minas Gerais during last year’s election campaign.
State lawmaker Colonel Sandro, a retired police officer and member of Mr. Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party (PL), authored the motion. Mr. Sandro was re-elected last year for a second term.
Mr. Bolsonaro was born in the city of Glicério, in the state of São Paulo, and served as a House member for seven consecutive terms (1991-2018), representing the state of Rio de Janeiro.
The PL formally challenged the result of last year’s presidential elections at the Superior Electoral Court. The move was inspired by a baseless conspiracy theory alleging that votes cast on older models of electronic voting machines were not properly auditable. However, as first reported by The Brazilian Report, the electoral court in fact made an extraordinary diplomatic effort to implement dozens of millions of new voting machines in 2022 — the ones conspiracy theorists understood would help Mr. Bolsonaro.
About two months ago, the Superior Electoral Court rendered Mr. Bolsonaro ineligible for eight years for spreading electoral disinformation to foreign ambassadors during a meeting at the presidential residence.
Speaking at a PL event in Belo Horizonte before the ceremony, Mr. Bolsonaro said that, despite his government’s supposed achievements, the “ballot boxes desired to show something different” — an expression that does not concede electoral defeat, due to ambiguity about whether “ballot boxes” means the will of the people or not.
Governor Zema, who declared support for Mr. Bolsonaro during last year’s runoff, recently compared the poorest Brazilian states to “cows who produce less,” and called for Brazil’s wealthiest and most populous states to form a closer political union.
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