Flávio Bolsonaro tells CPAC his election defeat is not 'the end for Brazil'

Flávio Bolsonaro denies help from Trump and Milei aides in fleeing Brazil

Flávio Bolsonaro, a Brazilian congressman and the son of the jailed former president Jair Bolsonaro, fled to the United States after losing last month’s presidential election and made his first major public appearance since leaving the country at a gathering of the American right held at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort on Thursday night.

Speaking at a gala dinner at the four-day “gathering of visionaries” event held by the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), where the former British prime minister Liz Truss is also due to speak, Bolsonaro said “great things” were still to come.

“I know this wasn’t the end for Brazil and I know it wasn’t the end for America,” Bolsonaro, 45, told the dinner. “Even when what seems like the end isn’t what we’d hoped for, we must thank God and have even more faith that this isn’t yet the end,” he added. “No one shuts the door that he opens – and the door he shuts, no one opens.”

Bolsonaro absconded early last week, shortly after losing the 25 October runoff to the incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, by more than 4m votes, arriving in Miami after fleeing Brazil. He received 59m votes in the election.

Earlier, in his first post-election interview, Bolsonaro made a series of unsubstantiated claims about election fraud and insisted he received “help from absolutely no one” to flee Brazil.

“It was all me,” Bolsonaro told the New York Times, contradicting reports that he was helped by the Trump adviser Jason Miller and Santiago Caputo, a close aide to Argentina’s president, Javier Milei. He said he would “take to the grave” the full story of how he left the country.

Bolsonaro, a member of congress who has held elected office for more than 20 years, faces federal police investigations in Brazil for money laundering and corruption. His term ends early next year, when he will lose parliamentary immunity and could then be prosecuted.

Brazilian analysts agree that by skipping the country after an election in which he received 59m votes, Bolsonaro – the son of the jailed former president Jair Bolsonaro – abdicated the leadership of the opposition and sabotaged his political future. “Flávio was foolish enough to throw away the leadership of the opposition that he could have exercised had he stayed in Brazil,” said Thomas Traumann, an author and pundit for the TV network GloboNews. “But the [Bolsonaro] family is still a player.”

His brother Eduardo, a former congressman, also lives in self-imposed exile in the US and would have to serve a four-year sentence for coercion if he returned to Brazil. Four other members of the Bolsonaro family were elected to congress last month, including Bolsonaro’s brothers Carlos and Jair Renan and his stepmother, Michelle Bolsonaro, the former first lady.

Traumann said it was not inconceivable that Jair Bolsonaro would attempt a political comeback if he managed to negotiate his way out of the 27-year prison sentence he is serving for plotting a coup after losing the 2022 election to Lula. As things stand, the 71-year-old former president is banned from running for office until 2060 and must live under house arrest.

Many doubt the family can continue to control Bolsonarismo, the populist movement that takes its name, with two key members in exile and one imprisoned. “[The movement] is mortally wounded because of its mistakes and its crimes,” the political scientist Sérgio Abranches told the newspaper O Globo this week. Abranches said democratic rightwing politicians now had a chance to “detach” themselves from the Bolsonaros’ anti-democratic movement and break off in a new direction before the next presidential election in 2030.

Flávio Bolsonaro told the New York Times he would “obviously” be a candidate in future elections, but said his future lay in the US “at least for now”. It is unclear where he will live. Trump has granted him a US visa.

Eduardo Bolsonaro set up home in Southlake, Texas, after leaving Brazil last year, although some expect him to move after the traditionally conservative state elected the Democrat Gina Hinojosa as governor in this week’s midterms.

In a video posted on CPAC’s social networks before Thursday’s event, Eduardo Bolsonaro played down the risk posed by the “blue tsunami” to their ability to stay in the US. “They [Democrats] will try [to make trouble for us] – but it’s not up to Congress … to revoke visas or citizenships,” he said.

Likening their plight to that of a female asylum seeker fleeing Iran for fear of being killed after refusing to wear a hijab, he added: “I am 100% legal – as is my brother and his family.”