Brasilia: Brazil‘s lower house of Congress late on Tuesday voted down a proposed constitutional amendment backed by President Jair Bolsonaro that would change the country’s voting system to require paper ballots, among other alterations.
Right-wing Bolsonaro has threatened not to accept the results of next year’s presidential election, which polls show him losing to left-wing former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, if the system is not changed, after he made unproven claims of fraud in the electronic voting.
Brazil‘s lower house of Congress voted down the proposal with 229 votes in favour, 218 against and 1 abstention, with dozens of lawmakers absent. The vote fell 79 votes short of the three-fifths majority needed to approve a constitutional amendment.
Flanked by the commanders of the armed forces, Bolsonaro stood outside the Planalto presidential palace as the military parade passed by. A Navy officer in combat gear walked up the ramp to hand him the invitation.
The sight of tanks by the presidential palace unsettled Brazilians who had lived under the 1964-1985 military dictatorship.
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The Navy said the parade had been planned long before the vote in the lower house of Congress was scheduled and it was meant to invite the president to an annual military exercise on Sunday.
Lawmaker Arthur Lira, speaker of the lower chamber of Congress, called the military parade ahead of a major vote a “tragic coincidence,” and he did not accept an invitation to attend the armed forces’ exercise.
Other lawmakers said the unusual military presence in front of the presidential palace was meant to intimidate them.
“Tanks in the street, precisely on the day of the vote on the paper ballot amendment, is real, clear and unconstitutional intimidation,” Senator Simone Tebet of the centrist Brazilian Democratic Movement party said on social media.
“Bolsonaro has turned a military training exercise into a political spectacle,” said leftist Congresswoman Perpetua Almeida, calling it a show of force in reaction to his dropping poll numbers. “This shot will backfire,” she tweeted.
(Reuters)