This Sunday the Brazilians decide whether to go to the left or remain involved in the religious-populist fog of the right.
They live in a fiercely polarized country, at the end of the day they are going to vote against the candidates they most despise, because Brazilian politics has reached that state. no voting on sunday in favor otherwise against.
On the one hand, the left has former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who exhibits as a business card of his career the improvement of life of Brazilians while he was president from 2003 to 2010 with the “family bag”, for example, and agree to take care of them again.
On the other appears President Jair Bolsonaro, who opposes Lula, and calls on religious conservatives, some of them fascist, and affirms that the former president’s return to power would bring with it communism, the legalization of drugs and abortion. .
For months it seemed that Lula was heading for an easy victory. Opinion polls can be very unreliable forecasts of election results, especially in a huge and sprawling nation like Brazil. But analysts and politicians agree that the race has become close.
In his aggressive campaign, full of fake news and misleading messages on Facebook and Twitter, Bolsonaro has gone so far as to criticize Supreme Court judges, including those he appointed, and to accuse them of complicity with his opponent. And he has repeatedly questioned the reliability of the nation’s electronic voting system, which many analysts have warned is a clear sign that he could reject the election results, as the former US president did. Donald Trump, whom he admires.
The Brazilian president, who says he hates socialism, has had little trouble spending large sums on the poor in the run-up to the second round. Even in recent days the Brazilian press has spoken of vote buying in the Northwest, where in the first round Lula took out his electoral hard core.
Bolsonaro, however, expanded Brazil’s largest social assistance program, giving cooking gas vouchers to low-income Brazilians, handing out $500 million to taxi and truck drivers, and announcing a program to forgive up to 90% of state bank debts to about 4 million people.
Since July, an additional 3 million families have joined the flagship welfare program. It cost 12.7 billion during the first ten months of the year, according to data from the Ministry of Citizenship.
“This amount of money has never been thrown at people at the same time, and nobody has ever used the machinery in such a bold way as Bolsonaro is doing,” independent political analyst Thomas Traumann told the AP agency.
Da Silva’s Workers’ Party, which traditionally draws the support of the poor, in addition to warning about the unbridled increase in public debt, underestimated how Bolsonaro would use the ins and outs of power, Traumann stressed.
On the other hand, analysts maintain that Lula has acted at times as if victory was assured, as if his time was simply running out. The first round of elections on October 2 was a wake-up call: Bolsonaro significantly outperformed the polls that he and his allies had long dismissed as underestimating his support. Some indicated Lula ahead by double digits; Bolsonaro finished five points down. More than projected.
Still, the former president has focused on igniting nostalgia for his tenure, when Brazil became “B” in the BRICS group of emerging nations and tens of millions of people rose to the middle class, ate well and traveled. Brazil became the sixth largest economy in the world. The man universally known as Lula has promised a return to those glory days, but without detailing plans for how he will carry them out.
“Lula’s campaign is about the past; that’s her biggest strength and her biggest weakness,” said Brian Winter, vice president for policy at the America’s Society-Council of the Americas. “What makes people want to vote for him is the memory of the boom years of the 2000s. But his unwillingness or inability to articulate new ideas and bring in new faces has left him somewhat helpless as Bolsonaro closes the gap”.
Most polls now show the former president with a narrow lead. On October 22, his party, the PT, published a video in which he says that he will only win if everyone votes. Traumann noted that the tone marked a clear departure from the previous overconfidence.
Years after the exposure of the Workers’ Party’s massive corruption, some voters are holding their noses and backing Bolsonaro, even those who disagree with his culture-warrior crusade or blame him for many of the nearly 70,000 deaths from COVID-19 in Brazil, and the worst deforestation of the Amazon rainforest in fifteen years.
“This is an election of rejection, not an election of choosing who best represents one’s ideals,” said Thiago de Aragão, director of strategy at Arko Advice. “Most of Bolsonaro’s supporters don’t necessarily love Bolsonaro or support him, but they hate Lula more. And vice versa. They are two of the most rejected politicians in the history of Brazil.”
In April, Lula surprised voters and analysts when he named center-right Geraldo Alckmin, a former rival, as his running mate, part of an effort to create a broad pro-democracy front to counter Bolsonaro.
