In the morning hours, forty military vehicles turn into the Square of the Three Powers in the heart of the Brazilian capital.

There you will find the Presidential Palace, Congress and the Supreme Court.

The President of Brazil is standing on the ramp of his official residence.

Ministers, loyal MPs and commanders of the armed forces cavort around him.

Government supporters watch from a distance.

At the beginning of the roughly ten-minute parade, a soldier in combat uniform climbs out of one of the jeeps, climbs the ramp and hands Jair Bolsonaro an invitation to a planned military exercise of the Navy in the neighboring state of Goiás.

Then the column moves on.

Tjerk Brühwiller

Correspondent for Latin America based in São Paulo.

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This Tuesday is an unusual day.

The soldiers never crossed the center of the capital on the way to the exercise.

For the first time since the end of the dictatorship in 1985 - outside of national commemorative holidays - tanks drive through Brasília.

Bolsonaro: Then there are no elections

Bolsonaro provokes once again with the military parade.

Some MPs then see the action as a threatening gesture.

And even the chairman of the lower house, who is close to the president, describes the parade as a “tragic coincidence”.

The location and time of the short-term organized parade are no coincidence.

Next door, in the congress building, while the military marches by outside, people are preparing for a debate that has been wreaking havoc on Brazil for days.

It's about the electronic voting system. Its opponents, including Bolsonaro, want to change the constitution in order to add an expression to the country's electoral system, i.e. a kind of receipt for the electronically cast votes that are also to be thrown in. For more than twenty years, Brazilians have elected their representatives using electronic devices. The system developed by Brazilian military engineers is considered efficient and secure and was introduced precisely to minimize the possibility of fraud. There were no problems worth mentioning in the past elections. Specialists and the Supreme Electoral Court therefore see no reason for a change, which would also be very expensive and hardly to be implemented until the election next year.

On Tuesday, however, a narrow majority voted for a constitutional amendment.

But that's not enough.

A three-fifths majority would be necessary for a reform.

Bolsonaro will hardly be impressed by this.

Before the vote, he had mobilized his supporters to take to the streets.

If a manual recount of the presidential election is not possible next year in order to prevent election fraud, there will be no elections, he threatened.

Bolsonaro believes in a Lula conspiracy

Even as a member of parliament, he had always been one of the critics of the electronic voting system. Even after his own election in 2018, in which he prevailed in the runoff election, Bolsonaro made charges of fraud. He claimed that he had already won the first ballot. In his weekly live broadcast on social networks two weeks ago, he wanted to provide the proof. However, he did not succeed in his two-hour live broadcast, which was also broadcast on the government channel for the first time. The president even said he only had "evidence" of fraud. Fact checkers promptly exposed many of the comments he and an adviser made during the broadcast as untrue.