(Los Angeles) No taboo subjects, warns the White House, including the next presidential election in Brazil: US President Joe Biden will have his first bilateral meeting with his counterpart Jair Bolsonaro on Thursday, and it promises to be delicate.
Posted at 2:28 p.m.
Updated at 4:18 p.m.
“I expect the president to address the subject of open, free, fair, transparent, and democratic elections,” top White House diplomatic adviser Jake Sullivan previously said aboard Air Force One. .
First head-to-head
It will be the first tete-a-tete between the 79-year-old Democrat and the 67-year-old far-right head of state, and it will take place on the sidelines of the Summit of the Americas currently being held in Los Angeles.
Washington is concerned about the virulent attacks by Jair Bolsonaro, who is seeking a new mandate, against the electoral system in Brazil, as if he was already preparing the challenge of an unfavorable result.
“There is no subject that is excluded whatever the bilateral meeting of the American president”, said Jake Sullivan, responding to reports in the press according to which Jair Bolsonaro would have made a list of subjects not to be discussed during the encounter.
The subject of elections is obviously particularly sensitive for Joe Biden: his own electoral victory in 2020 is the subject of relentless and baseless contestation by his opponent, former President Donald Trump.
“Doubtful”
As if to throw more oil on the fire, Jair Bolsonaro has just expressed his own doubts about the last American presidential election.
“I’m not going to go into detail about another sovereign nation. [Donald] Trump was fine. And we saw a number of things that we think were questionable,” he said, referring to voters who would have voted multiple times in the United States.
“We don’t want this to happen in Brazil,” said the far-right leader, trailed in all the polls by Lula, a veteran of the Brazilian left and himself a former president.
For Benjamin Gedan, director of Latin American studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Jair Bolsonaro’s attacks on the electoral system are “really disturbing”.
But for all that, he believes that a bilateral meeting “is not problematic in itself […]. The leaders of the two largest countries on the continent need to talk to each other. »
The researcher in particular rejects any comparison with a meeting, still hypothetical, between Joe Biden and the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed ben Salman, arguing in particular that the Brazilian president was him “democratically elected”.
Amazon
Another potentially delicate subject for the meeting in Los Angeles: the environment, since Jair Bolsonaro is openly climatosceptic.
Jake Sullivan assured that “the climate [serait] an important topic of conversation. »
“We believe this can be a vehicle for progress in the relationship between the United States and Brazil, particularly around concrete actions to protect the Amazon rainforest,” he said.
After decades of deforestation to make way for livestock and agriculture, the planet’s “green lung” could be close, according to some experts, to a climatic point of no return, beyond which the release of CO2 and methane would be inevitable.
Beyond this critical threshold, part of the Amazon would turn into savannah.