“Liar. Former prisoner. Traitor of the country.” In the latest televised debate, last Thursday, President Jair Bolsonaro showed his fury to describe his main rival in this Sunday’s elections, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva .
The former union leader, founder of the Workers’ Party, firmly replied: “This October 2 people will send you home”.
Protected by polls that present him as the favorite, Lula da Silva is thrilled to be back in the yellow-green band.
His election announcements revived the slogan he popularized since his first presidential candidacy in 1989, when he was a combative union leader feared by businessmen and the wealthy: “Not afraid to be happy.”
Three decades later, Lula today relies on a dozen progressive parties of different tendencies and, in confronting Bolsonaro, he had no qualms about embrace former opponentslike the conservative Geraldo Alckmin, his candidate for the vice president.
With this support and the memory of the experience of the eight years of government (2003-2010), now Lula no longer arouses the fears he fed two decades ago.
On the contrary, the private sector looks at it with some satisfaction. Remember, of course, the benefits that private companies have obtained in their management, in a time of strong economic growth.
Now promises to turn the wheel of the economy againgenerate employment with public works and heat consumption with income distribution programs.
end hunger
But Lula’s message, with her hoarse voice and the straightforward and direct language of those who have never gone to university, reaches above all to the poorest sectors.
He assures them that he will “take care of the people” and repeat the feat of ending hunger, when the economic crisis resulting from the pandemic has emptied the closets of 33 million Brazilians.
To once again seduce the popular sectors, his historical base of support, Lula’s campaign has revived another memory: the story of the former president himself, who as a boy, with his family, fled hunger from the north-east. poor of Brazil to seek opportunities in São Paulo, the most industrialized region of the country.
Lula learned to survive on the street as a salesman and shoe shine, until, as a teenager, he trained as a mechanical lathe operator in São Paulo. He was the first in his family who managed to have a profession, a minimum wage and a home.
In the factories Lula joined the trade union movement and came to preside over the most important trade union in the country. But above all he has distinguished himself as a skilled and pragmatic strategist with a devastating verb.
Syndicalism was the springboard of his career towards the Presidency. In the 1980s he founded the Workers’ Party (PT), a force of Trotskyist origin that ended up becoming a center-left formation that allied itself with the conservatives.
The Presidency
After coming to power, the combative trade unionist showed his other side. He dressed in elegant clothes and, with the more moderate version of him, he managed to win the trust of the market and the banks.
He led a thriving economy that benefited from the commodity boom and lifted nearly 28 million people out of poverty, a success recognized even by his opponents.
But his enormous popularity, which reached 87% in January 2011 when his second term ended, was clouded by corruption.
Lula was born twice convicted for a series of scandals involving the diversion of public funds and he spent a year and a half in prison, between April 2018 and November 2019. And he had to give up his intention to run for elections four years ago, which he ultimately won Bolsonaro.
A year later, the Supreme Court overturned those two cases for procedural errors and irregularities and paved the way for them in politics.
Since then he has tried to rehabilitate his name and to defend that the reason for his beliefs was purely political, to allow for Bolsonaro’s electoral victory.
But the truth is, corruption is still there Weakness It is targeted by most of the attacks of his detractors, and is one of the reasons behind Lula’s high rejection rates, which reach 38%.
Exactly 20 years after the victory that led him to the presidency, Lula is confident of ousting Bolsonaro.
Source: Clarin
