The election program of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers Party, set to air Tuesday night (September 8), will sharpen its tone against Senator Flávio Bolsonaro. The segment will call the presidential candidate of the right-wing PL party and his family "traitors to the fatherland", according to the Folha de S.Paulo blog Brasília Hoje.
The broadcast will set statements by the Bolsonaro family on the US tariff offensive and on President Donald Trump's government against criticism from Lula and his allies, with references to national sovereignty. Early in the program, a narrator says: "We cannot forget that there is a family that wears our colors and speaks of patriotism, but in the end serves another country".
The segment then cuts between three family statements. Flávio Bolsonaro: "The tariff will reach Brazil". His brother, former congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro: "If there is a scorched-earth scenario, at least I will be avenged". And their father, former president Jair Bolsonaro, who was sentenced last year to 27 years and three months in prison over the coup plot trial: "My salute to the American flag".
A phrase already in rotation
The phrase "traitors to the fatherland" is not new to Lula's campaign. In the September 1 program, he used it about Brazil's rare earths reserves. "There are people out there watching, and there are people here ready to hand it all over on a silver platter. They are the true traitors to the fatherland," the president said, as reported by Poder360.
Sovereignty has been a campaign theme since Trump imposed a tariff shock, which Brazilians call the "tarifaço", on Brazilian products last year, as G1 reports. In his Independence Day address on Sunday, carried on national radio and television, Lula said: "We are not, and we will never be, anybody's colony." Folha describes Flávio Bolsonaro, who leads the opposition field, as the president's main rival in the race.
The program airs four days after the September 7 military parade, which carried the sovereignty theme to Brasília's Esplanada dos Ministérios, and one month before the first round of the presidential election, scheduled for October 4.