The Brazilian electoral process is full of paradoxes. One of them is that the biggest loser in the first round was not any of the candidates who did not even reach one percent of the votes, but someone who was not nominated: sergio moro.
The former Curitiba judge did not get to run because his party, Unión Brasil, understood that he would make an electoral slump that would be difficult to overcome in the future. To this was added that the result of the first round was the worst for the magistrate who imprisoned Lula and who later had a fight with Jair Bolsonaro.
The two leaders, whom More confronted in different ways, had reason to feel empowered. Instead, he had no choice but to opt for one of them, and announced his support for the ultra-conservative candidate.
Lula da Silva won the first vote remaining less than two points from 50 percent of the vote. Jair Bolsonaro was second, but only five points below the leader of the PT, that is almost ten points above what the polls predicted and with possibilities, albeit tenuous, of reversing the result. To the first, Sergio Moro imprisoned him to open the way to the electoral triumph of the second, who repaid him the favor with a superministry of Justice and Security. But shortly after they clashed and he ended up leaving the government under a barrage of criticism launched by the leader he now supports.
The former Lava Jato judge is the crucial link between Lula and Bolsonaro, because his action made the former a prisoner and the latter the president. Four years later, he supports the man he had accused of breaking the law and attacking democracy.
Two other relevant jurists took the opposite position. The former president of the Superior Court of Justice of Brazil, Joaquim Barbosa, described Bolsonaro as “an abject, despicable human being, who must be avoided.” He added that the president “is not a serious man, he is not fit to govern, he is not up to the task, he does not have the dignity to hold a position of such relevance,” in addition to explaining what Itamaraty and the world’s diplomats know: the rulers of democratic countries try to avoid him because they consider him unpresentable.
Barbosa was appointed by Lula, but he always acted independently and was the one who promoted the anti-corruption process known as “Mensalao” to its ultimate consequences, imprisoning heavyweights from the PT government and the PT, such as José Dirceu and José Genoino.
The other notable jurist who ruled against what he has just done sergio morois the former Minister of Justice of Fernando Henrique Cardoso and one of those who requested impeachment against Dilma Rousseff, which is why no one would suspect “Lulism” or “leftism” in his position. Miguel Reale Junior demanded to vote for Lula saying that “Brazil cannot stand four more years of Bolsonaro, with threats of a coup, attacks on the Federal Superior Court and a total lack of empathy with those who suffer.”
Neither Barbosa nor Reale spoke well of the PT leader. What they did was speak ill of the current president and ask that the vote remove him from office from which he attacked the Constitution and its institutions. The other apparent paradox is that the polls were right and wrong at the same time. The votes that Bolsonaro obtained were almost ten points more than what the polls predicted. However, Lula obtained almost exactly the percentage indicated by the average of the polls.
What does the success with Lula and the error with Bolsonaro reveal? That there was a significant portion of respondents who hid or lied to the pollsters about the candidate they really intended to vote for. Both paradoxes force the candidates to moderate their speeches, which will generate a new paradoxical situation: the candidates of the full polarizationto win they must conquer the centrist electorate that did not vote for them in the first round.
The one most forced to de-ideologize not only the forms but also their contents, is Bolsonaro. Conservative-leaning citizens who did not vote for him in the first round reject the gestural and verbal violence that characterizes the president. Also his extremism and his putschist impulses.
Bolsonaro will have to evaluate another paradox: if it reached 43%, it was not only because insecurity means that even in the lower class (or especially in the most vulnerable sectors of society) there are levels of fear and stress that make policies high. heavy-handed; were also the economic measures of the minister Paul Guedes that go against the orthodoxy he preaches.
The large-scale subsidies that were granted during and after the pandemic, protectionist measures for certain business sectors and the tax reductions questioned by liberal economists as unsustainable and counterproductive, but which reduced prices in everyday consumer products, explain much of the surprising result that leaves Bolsonaro with a chance of turning the result around in the runoff. Guedes, who grew up within the Chicago School and adhered to the Austrian School, contributed many votes but with measures closer to heterodoxy.
The PT candidate is also obliged to seek the center. Lula already had the support of the most notable centrist and center-right leadership. These leaders understand that Lula’s defects and the corruption of the PT They are no more serious than having a president who denies covid and climate change, capable of overriding the Ministry of Health during a pandemic and playing Nero’s lyre while the Amazon forests burn.
But those center-right leaders were unable to get a significant part of their bases to vote for the candidate they pointed out to them as the most moderate and least dangerous option for democracy.
That is why Lula will have to show not only a coalition that includes the center-right and cleanse his speech of ideologisms. He will also have to give up that double face with which he played when he was in the presidency: internally he was pragmatic and supported the businessmen, while on the regional stage he posed as a leftist and practiced irresponsible cronyism with radicalized populist leaders. Bolsonaro will have to pose as a balanced person and respectful of the adversaries, the institutions and the rules of democracy, while it is no longer enough for Lula to be pragmatic and moderate: now, moreover, he must seem so.
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