This Sunday marks the end of one of the most hectic elections of recent times in Brazil, with former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva leading the polls without discussion, which underestimated his rival, the candidate for reelection, Jair Bolsonaro, who has failed to recover ground at the speed he expected.
This week’s poll by Ipec and Datafolha gives the candidate of the Workers’ Party (PT) 50 percent of the votes, while Bolsonaro would be left with 43 percent of the support. A difference of seven points that seems insurmountable and that the still Brazilian president hopes to reverse after this Friday’s debate.
The final face-to-face televised debate was the last chance for Bolsonaro, who has seen how a series of bad decisions could have definitively ruined his reelection aspirations after weeks in which some polls even spoke of a technical tie.
Bolsonaro’s apparent recovery in previous polls coincided with one of his worst moments in the entire campaign. The PT has taken advantage of these rants to intensify its criticism while the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) was busy settling the complaints that one and the other candidacy have filed for the content of the respective electoral propaganda of their rivals.
Bolsonaro’s outbursts, such as some controversial statements in which he referred to Venezuelan minors as possible prostitutes, but also by some of his followers, who have been busting religious events for their alleged affinity with the PT, or more recently by one of the most extreme Bolsonaristas, the former congressman Roberto Jefferson, now disowned, after he was shot by the police who went to his house to arrest him.
The optimism that has been hovering over Bolsonaro’s headquarters during much of the second round seems to have vanished in the final stretch, after this last poll, which could have been even worse if it had been conducted after the Jefferson case, which has shown how Bolsonarismo is capable of shooting at the Police, a guild over which he always set himself up as a protector.
LULA, THE FAVORITE OF ALMOST EVERYONE Lula’s campaign has been able to identify the potential of all these setbacks and has made use of social networks, spaces traditionally dominated by the ultra-right, to try to take electoral advantage of them.
Once again, lower income Brazilians continue to support Lula, as well as the black population, the young, the middle-aged and women. In this last segment of the population, the PT candidate is eleven points ahead of Bolsonaro, who has turned to his wife, First Lady Michelle, in an unsuccessful attempt to improve his situation.
As for the rejection they inspire, both candidates maintain the figures of previous polls, 46 percent of voters would not vote for Bolsonaro and 41 percent would not vote for Lula, while there is a 7 percent of undecided voters whom the Brazilian president would need to convince to tie.
Meanwhile, the PT has been using in this last week its spaces on radio and television to try to wear Bolsonaro down economically, more so now after it was leaked that the Minister of Economy, Paulo Guedes, did not plan to readjust the minimum wage and pensions to inflation.
Brazil will decide its future at a time when it has to deal with record inflation rates, inequality of earlier times, unemployment, and the ravages of the pandemic. The seven-point difference may have allayed fears of Bolsonaro not recognizing the results if they are tighter than expected, but not of post-election violence.
BOLSONARO VS LULA Brazil experienced one of its most prosperous periods coinciding with Lula’s government between 2003 and 2010. With hardly any economic reforms, the great demand for raw materials from abroad allowed the former president to implement a series of social aid policies with which he managed to lift some 30 million people out of poverty. His reelection in 2018 seemed clear, according to the polls, but his conviction – subsequently annulled for judicial malpractice – and his subsequent imprisonment put paid to the PT’s intentions.
The big beneficiary was Bolsonaro, an old acquaintance of Brazilian politics who had been strolling for years through the country’s institutions under the acronym of the party that most and best represented his interests at the time. His promises of order in the streets – with the right to bear arms as a banner -, punishing the corruption of the PT and fighting the left for its anti-traditional and anti-conventional family policies managed to convince Brazilians.
Now, four years later, Lula promises to fight the economic crisis with policies to boost consumption, repeal the spending ceiling law and a progressive tax reform to tax the big fortunes. Other promises include the complete nationalization of the Eletrobras electricity company, the implementation of a major public works plan to generate employment and an end to the indiscriminate exploitation of the Amazon.
Bolsonaro, for his part, will continue with his plans to further privatize state-owned companies, such as Eletrobras, the postal service Correios and the always questionable Petrobras – due to corruption during the PT years – with which he hopes to make possible one of his campaign promises, to have the cheapest fuel in the world.
Although both have promised to increase investment in social policies to reduce inequality, the Amazon remains the pending account of both. Although Lula’s rhetoric is different from Bolsonaro’s – the far-right candidate encourages the presence of illegal extractors of raw materials and is against the demarcation of indigenous lands – the PT candidate paid for his social policies thanks to the exports of Brazilian agribusiness, to the detriment of the native communities living in the region.
This Sunday’s second round will not only determine who will be the new president and vice-president, since the governors of twelve Brazilian states, among them important political centers such as Sao Paulo, are still to be decided.
In the first round, Brazilians also chose the composition of the Chamber of Deputies and part of the Senate, with a predominantly conservative legislature where Bolsonaro’s party, the Liberal Party (PL), was the most voted option.
