Brazilians started voting this Sunday in one country fractured almost the same wayled by the two candidates in the ballot, former Social Democratic president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, who is calling for re-election.
According to the latest polls, the difference between the two averages four points in favor of the former head of state, but the polls are of relative impact. There were serious flaws in the estimates in the first round. The fields of both candidates suggest that this election be held indoors a technical draw therefore one of the two can win.
The country has certainly been divided in an unprecedented polarization in the country’s political history since the end of the military dictatorship. About 156 million voters are called to vote, even if the more than 30 million who vote for it they didn’t do it in the first round.
President Bolsonaro announced his readiness to acknowledge the results on Friday evening, even if they are against it. A statement held here due to fears of an accident that Sunday if the president denounces irregularities or insists on his doubts about the transparency of the electronic voting system.
Abstention is growing in the country fueled by disappointment, especially among younger voters, for the management of politics. The last debate, in which both candidates despised each other reciprocally, and shunned with insults any proposal for the future, in a two-hour struggle, there may be alienated many more voters from the polls, specialists fear.
This Sunday’s elections matter not only at the national level. Nine of the 12 states in which the governorship is contested by ballot will also be defined between allies of the PT and Bolsonarists.
In that fair you notice the state of San Pablo, the largest and richest in the country where the officer Tarcisio Gomes de Freitas was in first place over the candidate of the PT, the former minister of Lula, Fernando Haddad, a result that the pollsters did not foresee.
In the other important states in terms of size and influence, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro, they have obtained allies of the head of state.
Lula ended the first round with an advantage of six million votes on Bolsonaro and it is claimed that there would be up to eight million voters navigating between indecision or the ability to change your vote by one or the other candidate this Sunday. The campaign of the two candidates mainly focused on this segment.
The Brazilian press has marked the remarkable concentration of consensus registered by the president and his opponent, polarizing the country. In the first round, the votes for the president and the PT added 91% of total votes: Lula got 57.2 million votes and Bolsonaro 51 million.
With the same intensity, the current dispute has a particular and unprecedented characteristic that can be summarized in the comparison of superlative waste between the two forces. According to pollsters’ data, no less than 50 percent of voters say they wouldn’t do it at all for Bolsonaro, while a similar figure, 46 percent, says the same about Lula.
This figure is central because it indicates that many votes that go to one are not preferential but from the level of rejection of the other.
unprecedented rift
Political scientist Bolívar Lamonier stressed this Sunday that the current division of society it is unprecedented in our history. “Now it can be safely said that this crisis is much more dangerous and could lead to a reasonably long period of conflict.”
It is concluded that the country faces a lost second decade. The author of Tribunes, prophets and priests imagines the following scenario: “organized crime, endemics, a totally disoriented politics”, where no one says “what with what”.
The respected political scientist added in an interview on Statethat the PSDB, the party of former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, has disappeared as a political force “in a country that – he says – has no parties, but only acronyms made by half a dozen people”.
For other observers the picture is less dramatic, even if whoever wins must have a special trading lifeespecially if he is the former metallurgical leader.
Next year, Brazil will have to settle its accumulated tax debts, a serious budget problem that this country has a problem with secret chapter which is under discussion in reserve with Parliament and which would also be abysmal in size.
Whether one or the other governs from January 1st, the the adjustment of public finances is inevitableanalysts say. The press here leaked documents from the Bolsonaro Ministry of Economy that anticipate that, if it wins, it will end the indexation of salary income based on inflation, which among other things in 2022 has dropped to eight percent today.
Lula da Silva’s refusal to inform in advance what her economic team will be and her plan on the matter would also indicate, it is argued, that there will be a high pragmatism to deal with the red numbers that if they had anticipated they could have reduced their electoral support.
The former president, who ruled in two administrations with liberal economic policies and obtained eight years of fiscal surplus on public accounts, showed himself to the political center and towards the center-right during the election campaign.
In this sense, lately, hand in hand with his main ally, Senator Simone Tebet, a conservative anti-abortion landowner highly respected by agribusiness, a sector that has so far been vertically aligned with Bolsonarism.
ST. PAUL. SPECIAL DELIVERY
Source: Clarin
