A viral publication reports on possible statements by the “president of the Netherlands” about the elections in Brazil. The Brazilian presidential elections were held in two rounds and the candidate Lula da Silva ended up defeating Jair Bolsonaro, the incumbent president, with his supporters disputing the electoral process.

In the image of the alleged news, dated November 11, Mark Rutte appears and, below, the headline “The president of the Netherlands confirms that there was fraud in the presidential elections in Brazil.” The logo that can be seen on what appears to be a print Screen it follows from the aforementioned news that it is the Brazilian station Jovem PAN News.

Mark Rutte has been Prime Minister —and not President, as stated in this publication— of the Netherlands since 2010, having been elected last January for the fourth consecutive term. He never made a statement like the one attributed to him here, and on November 9, Rutte acknowledged Lula da Silva’s victory through a post on his official Twitter account where he left a “warm congratulations” to the President-elect. . in that same cheep He also wrote that he sees in Lula “an ally” of the Netherlands in the fight “against climate change, a trading partner and an important member of the G20.”

????: Ik heb Lula da Silva van harte gefeliciteerd met zijn aankomende presidentschap van Brazilië. Holland @LulaOficial welkom als bondgenoot in de strijd tegen klimaatverandering, als partner voor handel in Investeringen, and als belangrijke speler in het G20-netwerk.

—Mark Rutte (@MinPres) November 8, 2022

The exchange is viral and in some of the publications it can be read, in the text of the alleged news, that “the president of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, does not agree with the victory of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva due to the innumerable evidence of the alarming frauds that occurred in the electronic ballot boxes during the Presidential Elections, and is willing to send elite troops in case of military intervention to support”. But it was not possible to find any article like the one in this publication on the website of the Noticias Jóvenes del PAN radio station.

conclusion

The shared publication is based on news that never existed about the Prime Minister’s statements on the legality of the presidential elections in Brazil. The image that appears is a manipulation that takes advantage of the logo of a Brazilian media outlet to pass off the sentence as credible news. Also, Mark Rutte is referred to as “President of the Netherlands” when in fact he is the Prime Minister of the country which is a parliamentary constitutional monarchy (it has a head of government and it has the king who is the head of state) . And he did not make any statement in that sense, he even congratulated Lula on her victory on social networks days after the second round of the elections.

Thus, according to the Observer classification system, this content is:

WRONG

In the Facebook rating system this content is:

FAKE: Main content claims are factually inaccurate. This option generally corresponds to “fake” or “mostly false” ratings on fact-checking sites.

NOTE: This content was curated by The Observer as part of a fact-checking partnership with Facebook.