Brazilian voters have been urged by former president Donald Trump to re-elect President Jair Bolsonaro.
On Saturday night, Trump urged Brazilians to vote for Jair Bolsonaro on Truth Social, describing the Brazilian leader as a “wonderful and highly respected man.”
Trump endorsed Bolsonaro and urged the Brazilian people to vote for him again in a video that Bolsonaro himself posted, calling Bolsonaro “a terrific leader, a fantastic man, and one of the greatest leaders of any nation in the world” while highlighting his leadership of Brazil’s economy.
“Thank you, my friend Trump!” Bolsonaro wrote in the same tweet that included the footage of Trump. “We are now respected around the world and rely on the backing of free and successful countries rather than socialist dictatorships, as in the past, thanks to the support of the Brazilian people and our commitment to fighting for Brazil’s interests.”
Throughout their concurrent terms in office, the two presidents maintained friendly ties. During Bolsonaro’s 2018 campaign for Brazil’s presidency, some observers compared his demeanor and populist agenda to Trump’s, even going so far as to refer to him as “the Trump of the Tropics.”
Bolsonaro will now compete against former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who is currently leading by a significant margin in the most recent surveys. Given that Silva assisted in founding “the first significant socialist party in Brazil’s history,” according to the BBC, a da Silva triumph would follow a recent trend of successes by far-left parties and politicians in Latin and Central American nations. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s win in the 2018 Mexican presidential race and, more recently, Gustavo Petro’s triumph in the 2022 Colombian presidential election serve as previous examples of this tendency.
