How the U.S. gradually stepped up its rhetoric around Brazilian elections

“We will continue to follow the [Brazilian] elections with the full expectation that they will be conducted in a free, fair, transparent, and credible manner with all relevant institutions operating in accordance with the constitutional rule,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Tuesday.

This is just the latest statement by U.S. officials in the way of placing trust in Brazil’s electoral system, which has for more than four years been under attack by none other than the country’s president, Jair Bolsonaro. Trailing in the polls, Mr. Bolsonaro has tried to muddy the waters and set the stage for challenging the results. 

While the Brazilian president has for decades disparaged the electronic voting system the country adopted in the late 1990s (and which has never faced credible allegations of massive fraud), the strategy he is using in many ways borrows from Donald Trump’s 2020 U.S. election playbook. 

To this day, Mr. Trump claims that the latest U.S. presidential elections were stolen from him — a conspiracy theory that incited the January 6 Capitol riot in 2021, an unparalleled assault on democracy in the country’s modern history. 

Last month, in a speech in Pennsylvania, U.S. President Biden specifically named MAGA Republicans as representatives of “an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” While Mr. Biden did not refer to MAGA’s foreign allies, the connections between far-right movements in the U.S. and Brazil are quite public.

In 2022, Brazil appears as a key battleground for the global far-right, which goes a long way in explaining Washington’s crescendoing rhetoric about Brazilian electoral integrity as of late.

The CIA message on the 2022 elections

In May of this year, Reuters reported that during a July 2021 meeting, CIA director William Burns told senior officials within the Brazilian government that President Bolsonaro should stop...