Republicans and Progressives (PP), forces within the Liberal Party (PL) alliance for the reelection of Jair Bolsonaro as president of Brazil, will appeal the ruling of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) that sanctioned with more than four million euros in penalties for attempting to question without evidence the results of the elections in which Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva emerged as the winner.
On Wednesday, Judge Alexandre de Moraes fined the coalition 22.9 million reais (4.1 million euros), considering that they acted in bad faith by litigating with an audit — prepared by Bolsonaro’s PL, but on behalf of the other parties — in which without evidence they questioned the validity of the elections.
The president of Republicans, Marcos Pereira, has emphasized that he did not question the result, but «on the contrary,» publicly acknowledged it «at 8:28 p.m. on election day,» citing his Twitter post of that day.
Pereira has advanced that they will also appeal the part of the ruling that blocks the party from receiving from public financing funds, since they did not give the «endorsement» for that audit. «I would have liked to have at least been consulted,» he protested, reports the newspaper ‘O Globo’.
The president of the PP, Cláudio Cajado, has also stated that he did not give any authorization to the leader of the PL, Valdemar Costa Neto, to include the acronym of his party in that questioned audit, for which reason they will appeal the sanction.
«The Progresistas party will file an appeal because we did not authorize that action,» announced Cajado, who insisted that they had «no participation whatsoever» in that process. «If we were not even consulted or summoned, how can we be sanctioned?» he has wondered.
In that sense, Cajado has stressed that the authority of the coalition leader, in this case Neto, ends when the elections are over. «The elections are over and the result was accepted by the presidents of the two parties,» he concluded.
