MADRID, 30 Oct. (EUROPA PRESS) –
This Sunday marks the end of one of the most agitated elections of recent times in Brazil, with former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva leading without discussion of some polls, which underestimated his rival in the first round, the candidate for the re-election, Jair Bolsonaro, who has not managed to recover ground at the speed he expected.
This week’s poll by Ipec and Datafolha gives the Workers’ Party (PT) candidate 50 percent of the vote, while Bolsonaro would have 43 percent of the support. A difference of seven points that seems insurmountable and that the still Brazilian president hopes to reverse after the debate this Friday.
The final televised face-to-face has been the last chance for a Bolsonaro who has seen how a series of bad decisions have been able to definitively destroy his re-election aspirations after weeks in which some polls even spoke of a technical tie.
Bolsonaro’s apparent recovery in earlier polls coincided with one of his worst moments of the entire campaign. The PT has taken advantage of these ravings to intensify its criticism while the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) was struggling to settle the complaints that one and another candidacy has presented for the content of the respective electoral propaganda of its rivals.
Bolsonaro’s ravings such as controversial statements in which he referred to some Venezuelan minors as possible prostitutes, but also by some of his followers, who have burst religious acts due to their alleged affinity with the PT, or more recently one of the most extreme Bolsonaristas, the former deputy Roberto Jefferson, now disowned, after he was shot at by the policemen who went to his house to arrest him.
The optimism that has been hovering over Bolsonaro’s headquarters for much of the second round seems to have evaporated in the final stretch, after this latest poll, which could have been even worse if it had been carried out after the Jefferson case, which has shown as Bolsonarism is capable of shooting at the Police, a guild over which it has always been a protector.
Lula’s campaign has been able to identify the potential of all these missteps and has used social networks, spaces traditionally dominated by the extreme right, to try to extract electoral revenue from them.
Once again the lower income Brazilians continue to be with Lula, as well as the black population, the young, the middle-aged, and women. In this last segment of the population, the PT takes eleven points from Bolsonaro, who has resorted to his wife, the first lady Michelle, to try without success to improve his situation.
As for the rejection they inspire, both candidates maintain the figures from previous polls, 46 percent of voters would not vote for Bolsonaro and 41 percent would not vote for Lula, while there are 7 percent of undecided voters that the Brazilian president would need to convince to tie.
Meanwhile, the PT has been using its radio and television slots in the last week to try to wear Bolsonaro down economically, more so now after it was leaked that the Minister of Economy, Paulo Guedes, had no plans to readjust the salary. minimum and pensions to inflation.
Brazil will decide its future at a time when it has to deal with record inflation rates, inequality from previous times, unemployment, and the ravages of the pandemic. The difference of seven points could have dispelled the fear that Bolsonaro would not recognize the results if they are tighter than expected, but not of episodes of post-election violence.
Brazil experienced one of its most prosperous periods, coinciding with the Lula 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 get some 30 million people out of poverty. His re-election in 2018 seemed clear, according to the polls, but his conviction -later annulled for judicial malpractice- and his subsequent entry into prison ruined the intentions of the PT.
The great beneficiary was Bolsonaro, an old acquaintance of Brazilian politics who had been walking around the country’s institutions for years under the acronym of the party that most and best represented his interests at that time. His promises of order in the streets –with the right to carry arms as a flag–, punish the corruption of the PT and fight the left for its policies against tradition and the conventional family managed to convince Brazilians.
Now, four years later, Lula promises to combat the economic crisis with policies to boost consumption, repeal the spending ceiling law and a progressive tax reform with which to tax large fortunes. Completely nationalizing the electricity company Eletrobras, launching a major public works plan to generate employment and putting an end to the indiscriminate exploitation of the Amazon are some of his other promises.
Bolsonaro, for his part, will continue with his plans to continue privatizing state companies, such as Eletrobras, the Correios postal service 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 continues to be their pending account. Although Lula’s rhetoric is different from that of Bolsonaro — the far-right promotes the presence of illegal extractors of raw materials and is against delimiting indigenous lands — the PT candidate financed his social policies thanks to the exports of the Brazilian agribusiness, to the detriment of the original communities that live in the region.
The second round this Sunday will not only decide who will be the new president and vice president, since the governors of twelve Brazilian states are still to be decided, including important political places such as Sao Paulo.
In the first round, Brazilians also completely chose the composition of the Chamber of Deputies and part of the Senate, with a predominantly conservative legislature where the formation for which Bolsonaro is running, the Liberal Party (PL), was the most voted option.
