Those close to President Jair Bolsonaro said the president went to sleep Sunday evening after his defeat with a minimum of 1.8% of the vote against Lula da Silva, and they rejected that the outgoing president go question the results of the elections.

The president arrived mid-morning this Monday at Planalto after 13 hours without talking about it the election result and without seeing anyone. He only met at the Alvorada with his running mate Braga Netto and his eldest son, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro.

Bolsonaro it is a major challenge for the PT leader who needs to liquidate the bitter clashes between the two who were exposed in the countryside because negotiations with Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party and his allied forces are fundamental for resolving very thorny and imminent issues.

These include public spending licenses that have a legal ceiling in Brazil, or the budget reform sent by the government that elected authorities consider inapplicable. The stock market fell 2% this Monday in reaction to the result and lack of details on the president-elect’s economic team.

The election took place without serious inconvenience. This Monday the landscape was complicated even if it was not clear in what magnitude, with a group of official truck drivers which closed the routes in the south of the country denouncing an alleged fraud. There was no immediate government accompaniment to that protest.

The president-elect will assume power on January 1, 2023. Until then there is a passage where the outgoing teams exchange information with the incoming ones, but it is feared that due to those clashes between the two leaders that path not be very easy to navigate.

In his victory speech on Sunday evening in front of the crowd on Paulista Avenue of this city of Sao Paulo, Lula has more vigor to these differences in arguing that his victory of democracy over authoritarianism and supported it quite hard “I need to know if the president we defeated will allow for a transition.” transparent.

The smallness of the victory plays a serious role in the situation. Marco Antonio Teixeira, a political scientist at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, assured that Lula will have to work to “expand the legitimacy” of the government, integrating “non-PT sectors” and obtaining endorsements from the Bolsonarian governors, who maintain the three largest districts in the country.

“You need to expand your support to unify the country,” the specialist told the agency AFP.

About the new government it emerged that the cabinet of 23 current to 34 ministries, a common key here that reflects the agreements with the distribution among the political forces of the winning alliance.

the lulu team

Lula da Silva drove an alliance of ten parties, from a slight center-left to a center-right. One figure who is taken for granted as having a relevant ministry will be Conservative Senator Simone Tebet, who was at the center of the strategy to achieve victory.

But the main concern of this assembly is the figures who could be part of the economic team, central to this phase and who will indicate the true course of the new government. In this sense, there are already important signs, as he told the newspaper State former Treasury Secretary, Carlos Kawall.

For this economist, the alliance created by Lula, which provided for the election of former Conservative governor Geraldo Alckmin as vice president, in addition to the support of historical figures of the PSDB, the center-right party of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, of orthodox economists and other political forces far from the left, already indicates a less radical position on the part of the elected president ”.

For analysts, the faithful balance will henceforth be the slight difference that the former metallurgical trade unionist placed in Palazzo Planalto for the third time. This observation is based on the fact that Lula certainly won thanks to the same support as her, but also for the rejection of the provocative and oppressive figure of President Bolsonaro who was largely his own enemy.

The president has paid the bill mismanagement of the pandemic who had particularly irritating moments in which the head of state mocked choked breath of covid patients. The constant attacks on women, messianic obscurantism and the insistent defense of the military dictatorship also weigh heavily.

Despite this, the president they managed to significantly increase their votes of the first round was only two million from the winner, so much so that a turn in those aggressive and anti-republican behaviors would have allowed him to obtain re-election at a time when the country’s economy presents a comfortable picture, with low inflation around 8 per cent per year, falling unemployment and GDP growth.

Here is one discussion already raised on the budget and the regime that set a ceiling on public spending. The debate is to what extent that limit can be overcome to alleviate the fiscal crisis that will become a problem in the first year of the new government, according to analysts’ forecasts.

In Lula’s camp, several alternatives are proposed, as confirmed by this envoy. Among these, the direct removal of the legal ceiling imposed by an ally of the new president, former finance minister Henrique Meirelles, during the transitional administration after the impeachment that overthrew PT president Dilma Rousseff from power.

those changes will require the approval of opposition lawmakers, in particular those belonging to the PL and its allies. Meirelles is a market favorite to return to that portfolio, but it’s unclear if that will happen. Among the more heterodox alternative figures are cited Fernando Haddad, Alexandre Padilha or Wellington Dias.

In speeches after the victory, Lula stressed the need to strengthen a social structure that solves the crisis of a large sector of the population with hunger problems and the social assistance system that the Bolsonaro government has strengthened but which they are not included in the financial statementsor.

So, discussions on what to do with the budget began on the same Monday, a few hours after the election.

Folha’s analysis

The influential newspaper Folha de Sao Paolo, historical critic of the excesses of Bolsonarism, he asked the newly elected president not to leave the political center.

He said that “Bolsonaro’s authoritarian impetus, truculence, inefficiency and carelessness facilitated Lula’s campaign, who had the luxury of hiding from voters the details of his economic plans for a government that seems difficult.”

He stressed, however, that Lula is the president elected with “the smallest margin of votes since re-democratization” and reminded him that he is also rejected by an influential part of society, “or by the corruption scandals during his administrations, either because of the economic ruin caused by his successor, Dilma Rousseff, or because of the ideological agenda, sometimes embraced with intolerance by the PT ”.

Saint Paul, special envoy

ap