Three days before the elections in Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro spends his last cartridges in an effort to convince the electorate and reverse the advantage that all the polls give former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Source: EFE
Much of the ammunition that remains for the captain of the Army reserve has been directed against electoral justice, which he has been trying to discredit for more than a year, when the polls began to detect Lula’s favoritism, who is credited today with an advantage of between four and seven points ahead of Sunday.
This Thursday, in a popular neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, Bolsonaro insisted that Lula embodies “corruption” and “communism”, something that he has insisted on in this campaign, but he did not make direct references to his latest and virulent attack against the electoral system, which this week has been a constant in his pronouncements.
It started last Monday, with a complaint filed with the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), according to which an unspecified number of radio stations did not transmit Bolsonaro’s free propaganda, something to which all candidates have a legal right.
Nevertheless, the complaint was dismissed by the TSE, because the documents on which it was based only contained measurements of internet traffic, in which such propaganda is not mandatory.
SUSPENSION OF ELECTIONS?
The uproar caused by that allegation was such that a group of Bolsonarist lawyers went to the Attorney General’s Office to request the suspension of Sunday’s elections, despite the fact that this extreme is not even contemplated in the Brazilian Constitution and was ruled out even by the president’s own campaign.
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The matter, however, revived the tensions that exist around the possibility that Bolsonaro, as you have already hinted, do not recognize Sunday’s result in the event of a defeat, as Donald Trump, for whom he professes public admiration, did in the 2020 US election.
In fact, according to Bolsonaro, if this irregularity were verified, one would be facing a “handling” of the electorate that would have as “single goal” favor Lula.
Although the leader of the extreme right avoided that matter this Thursday, his followers did not, who in chorus, and with their complacency, immediately demanded “jail” for Alexandre de Moraes, president of the TSE.
LULA CELEBRATES HIS 77 YEARS WAITING FOR THE LAST DEBATE
For the progressive candidate, this Thursday was a contained holiday. Lula turned 77 and celebrated it privately, but without much fuss, since he chose to dedicate the day to preparing for the last debate of the campaign.
this last face to face with Bolsonaro It will be this Friday night on the Globo television channel, the one with the largest audience in the country, and for both campaigns it could be decisive to address a universe of undecideds that the polls calculate around 10%.
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On his social networks, Lula recalled that, in addition to turning 77 on October 27, that same day in 2002, two decades ago, he won the elections that brought him to power for the first time, which he held until 2010, after being re-elected in 2006.
In a brief telematic interview, Lula insisted that, at his age, he could have “stayed at home”, but he said he decided to run for president again because “It is necessary to rebuild Brazil, after the disaster that Bolsonaro has left.”
If Lula did not celebrate, his followers did, who called events in dozens of cities in the country in support of his candidacy and celebrated the 77th birthday of the former trade unionist with the motto “without fear of being happy”, the same one that he has used since 1989 and that has been recovered for what is his sixth presidential campaign.