A few hours after touching down in Miami on Wednesday, Flavio Bolsonaro issued a statement declaring he was the “true president” of Brazil. He claimed he had been the victim of an electoral coup staged by Brazil’s Supreme Court and President-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who won last weekend’s election by more than 4 million votes. That, in Bolsonaro’s view, left him with no other choice but to flee.
Read moreFlavio Bolsonaro declares himself Brazil's 'true' leader after landing in Miami According to several news outlets, the Bolsonaro family had already left Brazil on Tuesday. Their journey took them through both Argentina and Ecuador before they got on the private jet that would eventually fly them across the continent and keep the embattled far-right politician at arm’s length from Brazilian justice. Although Bolsonaro’s whereabouts, and the destination for his escape, were initially shrouded in mystery, his ally US PresidentDonald Trump appeared to almost have been waiting for him, greeting him with a US visa more or less the moment he arrived.
Bolsonaro currently faces a string of investigations in his homeland for suspected money laundering, corruption, and for having illegal accepted campaign funding from a donor network connected to US Vice President JD Vance. By choosing the US exile route, however, Bolsonaro could deal a devastating blow to “Bolsonarism” – the macho ideology championed by his father, ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, and which glorifies the strong man who stops at nothing when the going gets tough. But Bolsonaro junior is hardly the first in the family to have sought refuge in the US as soon as his political fortunes start to fade.
His father did so in 2022 – just two days before Lula was inaugurated for a third presidential mandate – after facing a number of criminal probes. And last year, his brother Eduardo went into “voluntary” US exile after accusations he had sought to convince Washington to impose sanctions on Lula’s Brazil. Fiona Macauley, a Brazil expert at the University of Bradford, labelled the escapes, and especially the latest one, as “very negative” for the Bolsonaro family brand.
Larissa Peixoto Gomes, a specialist in Brazilian politics at the University of Edinburgh, said it looks “really bad”, especially to undecided voters “who were key” in the elections. Indeed the Bolsonaro family's multiple escapes make president-elect Lula, who has himself been subject to investigations and even served time in prison before finally being acquitted, look even stronger. But experts say they could potentially set up a parallel or shadow government in the US, mimicking the Cuban or Venezuelan opposition in exile models.
However, Janaina Maldonado, a Brazilian politics expert with the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA), said that “the Brazilian scenario is completely different from what we had in Venezuela and what we have in Cuba”, making both her and her peers very sceptical that such plans would actually work. Not least because much of the international community – save Trump who suggested the election was “rigged” – has already recognised Lula as the legitimate winner. Macauley said that in contrast to the Cubans and Venezuelans in the US, most Brazilians living there are economic migrants and are not looking for a leader to rally behind.
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