The strong rejection of the management of the pandemic, unleashed inflation or Lula’s successes during the campaign are some of the factors that explain it
Former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva won this Sunday at brazil elections by defeating President Jair Bolsonaro in a close second round, whose mistakes in his four years in government have paved the way for the presidency of his main rival.
five keys of Lula’s victory in Brazil:
1. Anti-Bolsonarism
The strong rejection of Bolsonaro It is one of the main factors that explain the victory of the progressive leader, who will assume his third term on January 1 after having governed the country between 2003 and 2010.
The feeling of aversion to Bolsonaro, the majority among women, has increased in recent months, amid the the population is fed up with the climate of tension fed by the president himself during his mandate.
According to the latest poll prior to the elections, 50% of the voters stated that they would not vote for the leader of the extreme right under any circumstanceswhile that percentage reached 46% in the case of the leader of the Workers’ Party (PT).
2. The erratic management of the pandemic
The rejection of the leader of the Brazilian extreme right increased sharply after his erratic management of the coronavirus pandemic, which It has cost the lives of nearly 700,000 people. since March 2020.
In the midst of the pandemic, Bolsonaro minimized the severity of the viruswhich he described as a “little flu” while thousands of people died daily, and delayed the purchase of the vaccines, considering that their effectiveness was not proven.
Lula rescued during his campaign some of the hardest moments of the pandemic, especially in radio and television propaganda, and He came to attribute half of the deaths to his opponent by covid in Brazil.
3. The slab of inflation
The pandemic hit Latin America’s largest economy hard and increased unemploymentmainly among women.
Despite the slight improvement in unemployment rates in recent months, Bolsonaro was forced to deal with another workhorse after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine: inflation.
Although the index fell slightly in the final stretch of the campaign, partly thanks to some subsidies granted by the Government to fuel and the increase in interest rates, food prices continued to skyrocketwhich was felt above all in the pockets of the poorest.
3. Fear of a democratic breakdown
Since he came to power on January 1, 2019, Bolsonaro has redoubled his attacks on institutionsmainly to the Supreme Court, and came to appear at demonstrations in which some of his followers defended a military intervention.
Bolsonaro, nostalgic for the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil between 1964 and 1965, went one step further and laid the groundwork for a rhetoric of electoral fraud by questioning the reliability of electronic ballot boxes, implemented in Brazil since 1996, despite the fact that since then there are no records of complaints.
“There is a large part of the population that is very concerned with the democratic issue. Lula managed to appropriate his history of respect for democracy and he used that in his campaign,” Carolina Botelho, a political scientist at the Electoral Studies Laboratory of the Rio de Janeiro State University, told EFE.
4. Any past time was better
Throughout his campaign, the leader of the Workers’ Party (PT) recalled again and again his eight years of Governmentin which Brazil experienced a time of economic boom thanks to the boom in raw materials and grew by an average of 4%.
Allusions to his two previous terms in office permeated all Lula’s campaign advertisements, who has emphasized the robust profits made by private companies and the banks in its management, while removing Brazil from the hunger map.
“Lula activated that memory in society. He knew how to rescue it and transform it into campaign material,” Botelho said.