Flavio Bolsonaro Ordered to Surrender Passport After Election Loss

Brazilian Senator Flavio Bolsonaro said on Oct. 26 that federal police requested he turn over his passports after he visited his father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is under house arrest.The senator, defeated Sunday by incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in a runoff election for the president’s seat, said he intended to comply with the order and that he “never thought about leaving the country.” He claimed that the request stemmed from a ruling by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes.“I was ordered right on the street to hand over my passports, and I’m also prohibited from leaving the country,” Bolsonaro said in a video posted on Instagram.He said that Moraes’s ruling was based on remarks from his younger brother Eduardo Bolsonaro, who said on a podcast last week that Flavio should leave the country if he lost.Former President Jair Bolsonaro is under house arrest, serving a 27-year prison sentence for an attempted coup, after Brazil’s Supreme Court granted the measure on humanitarian grounds because of his ill health.Election Results, ChallengesLula won a fourth term in Sunday’s election in a result that defied polls, with Flavio Bolsonaro challenging the result announced by Brazil’s electoral authority.Lula has not addressed Bolsonaro’s claims that there was unequal treatment of voters because a last-minute extension of voting time was not applied across all polling stations.After his win was announced on Sunday, Lula thanked Brazilians and said he would govern with respect for everyone.“No one is required to like the president-elect, but he must govern for everyone,” he told supporters. “This was a defeat for denialism and lies.”Citing his age and experience, Lula pledged: “I want to make a commitment: I will deliver the best term any president has ever served. I will dedicate myself 24 hours a day to making this the country that everyone dreams of.”President Donald Trump said Brazil’s presidential runoff on Oct. 25 looked “rigged.”“Elections have to be indisputable,” Trump told reporters Monday. “And it looked very bad to me. I didn’t take sides, I didn’t endorse anybody. I watched the election and it looked so corrupt. So terrible.”Lula won with 51.8 percent of the total vote—a lead of nearly 4.4 million votes. The electoral authority reported that Lula earned nearly 64.3 million votes, while Flavio Bolsonaro garnered 59.8 million. Nearly 4.2 million votes were declared invalid.Flavio Bolsonaro was ahead by more than 2.2 million votes in the first round of voting earlier this month, with 47 percent of the vote but falling just shy of the 50 percent needed to avoid a runoff.Bolsonaro, 45, refused to concede. He announced Sunday night that he would seek to annul the results of the election, criticizing the actions of a Supreme Court justice appointed by Lula who unilaterally ordered a two-hour extension of voting just before polling stations were to close.“It is impossible—it is IMPOSSIBLE—to recognize the election results in the context of how these things happened,” Bolsonaro told supporters.The late decision caused widespread confusion as many polling stations began closing. Bolsonaro further claimed that his poll watchers were removed from secure ballot-counting rooms once the decision was issued.In further comments on Monday, Bolsonaro said he “will ask for the revocation of Lula’s ticket for all the abuses he committed.”“The competition has to be fair, but that is not what happened. It wasn’t me who lost; it was the system that won,” Bolsonaro said.His party on Monday accepted the result, while noting that the questions raised “need to be duly clarified within a balanced and democratic political debate.”Jill McLaughlin and Reuters contributed to this report.