BRASILIA (Reuters) – Brazil’s foreign ministry on Wednesday criticized an invitation extended by the country’s top electoral authority to invite the European Union to send observers for the elections in October.
Brazil has not in the past had its elections “evaluated by an international organization of which it is not a member,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.
The Supreme Electoral Court (TSE) told Reuters on Monday it had invited the European Union for the first time to observe the general election this year, when far-right President Jair Bolsonaro will seek re-election.
Bolsonaro has questioned the validity of Brazil’s electronic voting system and made baseless allegations of fraud in the 2018 race, stirring concerns that he may not accept the results of the October election. The EU is studying the invitation.
Opinion surveys show leftist former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva ahead of Bolsonaro, though his advantage has been eroded to 5 percentage points in the latest poll.
Other international groups and institutions invited by the TSE to send observation missions include the Organization of American States (OAS), the U.S.-based Carter Center, the parliament of South American trade bloc Mercosur and the Washington-based International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES).
The statement by Brazil’s foreign ministry, known as Itamaraty, said that the European Union, unlike the OAS, “does not send electoral missions to its own member states.”
The ministry said it was in constant dialogue with the TSE, including on the issue of observation missions, like the OAS, which was invited for the 2018 and 2020 elections, and the Mercosur parliament and the Carter Center.
The electoral authority had no comment.
(Reporting by Anthony Boadle; Editing by Aurora Ellis)
