Brazil’s Left-Wing Parties to Boycott Presidential Inauguration

By Lise Alves, Senior Contributing Reporter

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – As Brazilians prepare for the inauguration of Jair Bolsonaro, one of its most controversial presidents, left-wing parties PT and PSOL announced Friday their Congressional representatives would not be attending the ceremony on January 1st.

“We do not agree with discourses and actions that stimulate hatred, intolerance and discrimination. And we do not accept that such practices are naturalized as an instrument of political dispute. For all this, the PT representatives will not be present at the inauguration ceremony of the new president in the National Congress,” read the declaration issued by the PT party (Workers Party).

The statement is signed by the PT’s national president, Senator Gleisi Hoffmann, and by the party’s leaders in the Senate and in the House, Senator Lindbergh Farias, and Chamber representative Paulo Pimenta.

The PT, the largest party in Congress, with 56 representatives, said that the boycott is an ‘act of resistance’. Bolsonaro defeated PT presidential candidate, Fernando Haddad, in late October.

The PT argues that although it has ‘always recognized the legitimacy of democratic institutions’ this year’s election was ‘disgraced by the (Rousseff’s) coup of impeachment, by the illegal prohibition of the candidacy of former President (Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva) and by the criminal manipulation of the social networks to spread lies against candidate Fernando Haddad’.

The PSOL, which has ten representatives in the Chamber of Deputies, stated that it would not be attending the inauguration ceremony because ‘there is nothing to celebrate’.

President-elect Bolsonaro responded to the news in his Twitter account, “I learned that PT and PSOL will not attend the presidential inauguration ceremony in rejection of me. (I) Am sorry!”