Brazil’s front-running far-right presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro is in serious but stable condition in hospital following “successful” surgery after he was stabbed while campaigning on Thursday, his running mate said, according to Reuters.
Flavio Bolsonaro, the candidate’s son, wrote on Twitter that his father had been wounded in the liver, lung and intestine. “He lost a lot of blood, arrived at the hospital ... almost dead. He appears to have stabilized now,” he said.
General Antonio Hamilton Mourao, Bolsonaro’s running mate, told Reuters by telephone that the candidate’s condition was stable but still worrying.
“He underwent surgery, which was successful and he is doing OK,” Mourao said. “But his state remains delicate.”
A hospital spokeswoman in the city of Juiz de Fora in Minas Gerais state, where the attack took place, confirmed to Reuters that Bolsonaro had been undergoing surgery but provided no details on his state nor his wounds.
The attack on Bolsonaro is a dramatic twist in what is already Brazil’s most unpredictable election since the country’s return to democracy three decades ago. Corruption investigations have jailed scores of powerful businessmen and politicians, and alienated infuriated voters.
Violence in Brazil is rampant - the country has more homicides than any other, according to the United Nations - and political violence is common at the local level.
For instance, in the months before 2016 city council elections in Baixada Fluminense, a hardscrabble region the size of Denmark that surrounds Rio de Janeiro, at least 13 politicians or candidates were murdered before ballots were cast.
Earlier this year, Marielle Franco, a Rio city councilwoman who was an outspoken critic of police violence against slum residents, was assassinated.
But violence against national political figures, even in the extremely heated political climate that has engulfed Brazil in recent years, is rare.