Jair Bolsonaro (Image: AP/Suamy Beydoun)

We look with trepidation to the Brazilian election. According to election eve polls, far-right President Jair Bolsonaro looks likely to lose to left-wing candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (a former president, and commonly known as Lula).

At the time of writing, Lula has pulled just ahead. Bolsonaro initially held the lead, but the areas from which Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT) traditionally draws its highest levels of support are also the slowest to report — when PT last won in 2014, it didn’t pull ahead until hours after the count began.

Bolsonaro has long been miles behind in the polls, and has been claiming that the election will be subject to fraud for just about as long. He claimed Brazil’s electronic voting system is “easy to rig“. He’s attacked Brazil’s Supreme Court and is clamping down on the media and other entities.

This all feels a little ominously familiar. Former US president Donald Trump used, note for note, the same playbook in 2020 — using the shrinking of his early lead as “evidence” that his long-stated belief that he was going to be the victim of electoral fraud was bang on, calling into question the vulnerability of electronic voting systems and encouraging his supporters to do something in response.

The fear is, as has long been reported, that these parallels continue to play out to the logical conclusion: Brazil suffering a riot similar to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol building.