Late on Sunday it was confirmed the victory of Lula da Silva, candidate of the Workers’ Party and some centrist groups, against the current president Jair Bolsonaro, a soldier linked to the extreme right. Lula’s victory allows for a sigh of relief. Not only because of Bolsonaro’s extreme ideas, but because Brazil does not have a great democratic tradition and suffered a military dictatorship until 1985.
But Lula has won by a narrow margin, 50.9% to 49.1%, well below what the polls predicted. And, more importantly for the future, the left will be a minority in both parliamentary chambers and the right has won in the big states like São Paulo. Lula’s first assignment should therefore be to build bridges towards the half of the electorate that has voted for Bolsonaro, either due to proximity to the current president or due to mistrust in the political trajectory of the PT leader. And the task will not be easy at all because the long electoral campaign has been presided over by a great polarization with serious disqualifications and insults, and even worrying outbreaks of violence. Lula repeated that in Brazil there was a battle of democracy against fascism and barbarism and Bolsonaro’s propaganda described Lula as a true demon seeking to approach religious primitivism on the part of his followers.
The president-elect seems to have understood this because in his first words he has assured that he will govern for the 215 million Brazilians, not only for those who have voted for him and who are fed up with the extreme polarization because in the end “We are a people, a country and a great nation.” But the great unknown is the attitude of the defeated president. Politicians close to Bolsonaro, such as the president of parliament and the newly elected governor of the state of Sao Paulo, have already recognized the results and have called for collaboration between political forces. But Bolsonaro, who during the electoral campaign did not stop sowing doubts about the cleanliness of the elections – some describe him as a “tropical Trump & rdquor; -, has locked himself in the presidential palace and still had not said anything when it had been almost 24 hours since results were known. Do you pretend not to recognize them? Doubts about the path to take? Are you probing the commanders of an army with a certain coup temptation? These are troubling questions because Brazil does not have the long democratic tradition of the United States that made it impossible for Trump to prevent the proclamation of Biden’s victory.
The attitude of both presidents will therefore be decisive for the future of Brazil. And the fact that Lula failed to win in the first round, as many polls said, and that her final margin was less than two points, does not make things easy. Lula has a strong personality. Laborer and trade unionist in a car factory in Sao Paulo, created the Workers’ Party in 1980, in the midst of a military dictatorship, and then it was elected president in 2003 when I try for the third time.
His two terms, until 2010, were successful because lifted millions of Brazilians out of extreme misery and Brazil, a country with great potential, grew taking advantage of an upward cycle of raw materials in world markets. But the mandate of his successor Dilma Rousseff, also of the PT, ended in a great economic and political crisis and Lula himself, with serious accusations of corruption, He spent two years in jail and was unable to participate in the 2018 elections that brought Bolsonaro to the presidency.
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Finally, Lula was exonerated of all charges and has now won the presidential elections for the third time. He has in his favor great popularity among many Brazilians from the less favored classes, but because of his history he is also a divisive figure in part of society. We will see his capacity for dialogue and management of the economy, where his lack of specificity, the refusal to say who would be his minister of economy and the supposed statist tendencies that concern him in the business community.
Lula’s third term should be that of Brazil’s reconciliation with itself. But before Bolsonaro must accept, without ulterior motives, the opinion of the polls.