At the end of an aggressive campaign, in a historical climate of polarization and after a count of the votes, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has finally prevailed over current president Jair Bolsonaro in this second election and will return to the Presidential Palace next 1 from January.
With 96% of the votes counted, the leader of the Workers’ Party got 50.6% against Jair Bolsonaro’s 49.3%, a difference of just over one and a half million votes.
The election took place in a country almost divided into two equal parts. The fields of both candidates anticipated that they would be voted in the midst of a technical draw.
Nail 156 million people were called to vote, even if the more than 30 million who did not make it in the first round have been discounted. Abstention had grown in the country fueled by disappointment, especially among younger voters, over the management of policies.
The last debate, in which both candidates despised each other and insulted every proposal for the future, in a two-hour struggle, can they have kept many more voters away from the polls, according to specialists fear. Especially to young people who perceive from these deviations a strong deterioration of the institutional system.
This Sunday’s elections were important not only at the national level. Nine of the 12 states also defined their government as an ally of the PT and the Bolsonarists.
Lula had finished the first round with a six million vote lead over Bolsonaro. But the main thing is that both added 91% of the total votes. The other forces remained at a minimum. Both support and rejection are data that have focused analysts’ attention.
No less than 50 percent of voters predicted they would never elect Bolsonaro, while a similar figure, 46 percent, said the same of Lula. That is, a huge no vote that went through the other party driven by rejection.
Political scientist Bolívar Lamonier stressed this Sunday a State than the current division of the company 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 nobody says “what with what” and concludes that 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 acronyms made by half a dozen people”.
For other observers the landscape is less dramatic, even if the future president will have to have a special negotiating belt, especially if he is the former metallurgical leader.
Brazil next year will have to solve the tax debts that are accumulating, a serious budget problem that in this country has a secret chapter that is discussed in reserve with the Parliament and which would also be of abysmal dimensions.
The adjustment of public finances is inevitable, analysts say.
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 claimed, that there will be a high level of pragmatism to deal with the red numbers which, if they had foreseen it, could have reduce his electoral support.
The leader of the PT, who ruled in two administrations with liberal economic policies, and managed eight years of fiscal surplus in public accountshas shown himself during the election campaign in the political center and towards the center right in recent times with the help of his main ally, Senator Simone Tebet, an anti-abortion and very conservative landowner respected by the agri-food sectora sector that has hitherto been vertically aligned with Bolsonarism.
St. Paul. Special delivery
Source: Clarin
