The results of Sunday’s elections, with the victory of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva with 48.43% of the votes and 43.20% of President Jair Bolsonaro, it defines a country practically split in half and extremely polarized.
This scenario opens up a clear enigma about what could happen in the runoff scheduled for October 30th. The campaigns already started will face the two main contenders head to head whose main opportunity will be win over center-right voters.
A space in which they have to insert that enigmatic about 20 percent who abstained, which they will try to attract to the polls as in a request for help and the small strip this time but still decisive of the undecided who quickly change their preferences.
Produced the results on Sunday an extraordinary surprise the volume of votes obtained by the president requesting his re-election. A result that has generated a palpable amazement in the PT camp, convinced that it would have achieved a historic and crushing victory.
“Bolsonarism is bigger than Bolsonaro. It is a political phenomenon that will require many of us to defeat it, “summed up a PT campaign coordinator, quoted Monday by Balloon. Another coordinator added the second round will be “much harder” expected.
Lula and his main collaborators celebrated the victory on Sunday evening in Sao Paulo, but concern and frustration were evident in the serious face of the candidate.
The Congress
Bolsonaro returned home with unexpected successes in addition to his electoral wealth, surpassing the PT as the largest force in the Senate. In the deputies, the Bolsonarists won at least 23 seats reaching 99, also forming there the largest committee elected to the House in the past 24 years.
Even the PT it went from 56 to 76 representatives. The composition in that Chamber is of fundamental importance in Brazil. Besides being the place where political trials begin, this is where start most projects promoted by governments, the parliamentarians clarify here.
A striking fact is that much questioned government ministers such as the head of Health, criticized for poor management of the pandemic or the environment, also beaten by the controversy over the abandonment of the Amazon, has places in the lower chamber.
Similarly, former judge Sergio Moro, who imprisoned Lula for the Lava Jato scandal and ended up discredited after learning of the illegal handling of the trial and his alliance with Bolsonaro who appointed him minister, he still managed to reach the Senatedespite the polls giving him no escape.
The PT also lost in the important Rio de Janeiro at the hands of the candidate for the government and the PT candidate in the other big district, Sao Paulo, Fernando Hadad, where there will also be a second round, surprisingly far below the right Tarcisio de Freitas of the Republican Party, respectively 42.3% against 25.7%.
Lula’s strategy
Lula, although she can show her victory, faces a complicated and unpredictable scenario. The former president, who has ruled here twice, leads a coalition of ten parties, ranging from a very weak left to a very marked center right.
The strategy of his advisers who are already campaigning will henceforth be, as the PT leader himself stated in a press conference before the elections in Sao Paulo, advance with the parties that have not joined this alliance. These are centrally two formations or figures.
The main one is the center-right senator Simone Tebet, of the Democratic Movement of Brazil, an anti-abortion lawyer who did a great job in debates and It came in third place with 4.16% of the votes and nearly 5 million votes.
Moved to fourth position the center-left Ciro Gomesformer minister of governments Lula, of the Democratic Labor Party, a strong social democratic formation in which members of the PT will also participate.
Bolsonarism likewise points to the center-right of the legislator, and to other more indefinite groups of undecided and abstention. The president said Sunday evening that there is room for forming alliancesworse did not provide details.
The PSDB, the Brazilian Social Democratic Party, the center-right force of former evolutionist president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who also it is important for the strategy of the PT, it has already given its endorsement.
Cardoso stated some time ago that in a possible ballot he would have voted for Lula da Silva. But even before this Sunday he had made an appeal to support Lula without naming him, marking the historical differences that he has maintained with Bolsonaro.
The closeness between these two leaders indicates, analysts say, an alliance that could too absorb the PT into the PSDB, with the historical positions of the latter organization.
“The PSDB is over, but it is reborn in the PT”, the notable Roberto Mangabeira Unger, who knows what he is talking about, abruptly anticipates, because he was a minister of both Lula and Rousseff.
In this sense, it is also interesting what analysts and academics Silvana Krause and Bruno Schaefer pointed out to Folha de Sao Paulo when they observed that the electorate was already refusing “Favor the option for adventure, but for a more pragmatic vote”.
Not everyone sees it that way. In a harsh editorial the newspaper state he said on Monday that Brazil “will have the torment of another four weeks of an electoral campaign that has not only been so far the most devoid of proposals and ideas in recent national history, but it also enters an even more painful phase, when it comes down to two candidates. they are, each in his own way, the exact antithesis of what the country needs“.
The newspaper repudiates the president because “Used the state apparatus to persecute opponents politicians and for the benefit of family and friends, among other failures. not to mention its total lack of decorum in the exercise of the presidency.
And he also condemns the leader of the PT because «he did not consider it necessary to present a government program nor commit to any concrete proposals for the next four years. the voters asked a blank checksomething that Lula and the PT, as is well known, have never deserved ”.
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Source: Clarin
