Jair Bolsonaro, a leading presidential candidate whose heated rhetoric has electrified some voters and angered others in a deeply polarised Brazil, was stabbed at a campaign event on Thursday and suffered serious abdominal injuries. Police said the suspected attacker was in custody.
Dr. Luiz Henrique Borsato, who performed emergency surgery, said on Thursday night that the right-wing candidate was in serious but in stable condition and would remain in intensive care for at least seven days. The first round of Brazil’s presidential election is October 7.
The doctor said the two-hour procedure stopped serious internal bleeding and repaired most of the damage from the knifing. The candidate will need further surgery within months for a part of his intestines that was temporarily fixed with a colostomy.
Numerous videos on social media showed Mr. Bolsonaro being stabbed with a knife to the lower part of his stomach while campaigning in Juiz de Fora, a city about 200 kilometers north of Rio de Janeiro.
At the moment of the attack, Mr. Bolsonaro was on the shoulders of a supporter, looking out at the crowd and giving a thumbs up with his left hand.
Attacker in custody
Adelio Bispo de Oliveira, the suspected attacker of Jair Bolsonaro.
Police spokesman Flavio Santiago confirmed to The Associated Press that a 40-year-old Adelio Bispo de Oliveira had been arrested in connection with the incident.
De Oliveira was beaten badly by Mr. Bolsonaro’s supporters after the attack. The man was arrested in 2013 for another assault, police said.
Luis Boudens, president of the National Federation of Federal Police, told AP that the assailant appeared to be mentally disturbed.
“Our agents there said the attacker said he was ‘on a mission from God,’” Mr. Boudens reported. “Their impression is that they were not dealing with a mentally stable person. He didn’t expect to be arrested so quickly; agents reacted in seconds.”
“This episode is sad,” President Michel Temer told reporters in Brasilia. “We won’t have a rule of law if we have intolerance.”
Who is Bolsonaro?
Mr. Bolsonaro, a former army captain, is second in the polls to jailed ex-President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who has been barred from running but continues to appeal.
Despite being a congressman since 1991, Mr. Bolsonaro is running as an outsider ready to upend the establishment by cracking down on corruption in politics and reducing crime, in part by giving police a freer hand to shoot and kill while on duty.
While Mr. Bolsonaro has a strong following, he is also a deeply polarising figure. He has been fined, and even faced charges, for derogatory statements toward women, African Americans and gays.
Earlier this week, Mr. Bolsonaro said during a campaign event that he would like to shoot corrupt members of the leftist Workers’ Party, which made Mr. da Silva its candidate. The comment prompted an immediate rebuke from the attorney general, who asked Mr. Bolsonaro to explain that comment.
Underling Brazil’s divisions, people took to Twitter to either to decry the stabbing and ask for prayers for Bolsonaro or to say the candidate had brought it upon himself and even may have staged it.
The top five trending topics in Brazil were related to the stabbing.
Other presidential candidates quickly denounced the stabbing and many of them decided to suspend their campaign events Friday.
“Politics is done through dialogue and by convincing, never with hate,” tweeted Geraldo Alckmin, former governor of Sao Paulo who has focused negative ads on Mr. Bolsonaro.
Fernando Haddad, who is expected to take Mr. da Silva’s place on the Workers’ Party ticket, called the attack “absurd and regrettable.”
Previous instances of violence in poll campaign
The attack comes at a time of increasingly heated rhetoric, and sometimes violence, related to campaigns and candidates.
In March, while Mr. da Silva was on a campaign tour in southern Brazil before his imprisonment, gunshots hit buses in his caravan. No one was hurt, and da Silva, who is in jail on a corruption conviction, was not in the vehicles that were hit.
Also in March, Marielle Franco, a left-leaning black councilwoman in Rio de Janeiro, was shot to death along with her driver after attending an event on empowering black women.
