The former president, who was unable to vote in the previous election because he was in prison, has nearly 50% of the vote and will contest Brazil’s leadership with Bolsonaro in the second round
“It’s an important day for me. Four years ago I couldn’t vote because I was the victim of a lie. I want to help my country get back to normal.” Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva (Pernambuco, 1945), took a solemn vote this Sunday in Sao Bernardo do Campo (Sao Paulo), a municipality where the charismatic leader of the Workers’ Party (PT) was forged as a trade union and political leader.
The first round of Brazil’s presidential, parliamentary and state elections this Sunday confirmed Lula’s resurrection. In less than three years, he has moved from captivity and with the inability to run for election to the presidency. To do this, he had to get 50% plus one of the votes, which was predicted by some polls. Finally, it has remained at 48.35%, so it will contest the second round on the 30th against current President Jair Bolsonaro, who has rocked the polls. The polls put him in the vicinity of 35-38% of the ballots and he got 43.26. Both leaders, who embody hostile ways of understanding politics, will face each other in the second-round polls of the most polarized and hard-fought election in decades.
Lula’s trajectory so far fulfills every step of the movie theory of the hero’s journey: rise, coronation, fall from grace and resurrection. Forged as a union leader in the protests against the military dictatorship in the 1970s and early 1980s, he ran in presidential elections for the PT three times, without success. On the cusp of throwing in the towel, his biographers say it was his friend Fidel Castro who convinced him it was worth continuing to fight. did.
And so came the first great electoral triumph of the left in Latin America’s primeval power. Lula won two consecutive elections and ruled the country from 2010. During his presidency, 30 million Brazilians left the poverty line, an improvement that was also felt in all corners of the country. The education system in general reached unprecedented levels of access, unemployment shrank below that of the United States and consumption skyrocketed, supported by a middle class that had access to better jobs and higher wages. The boom in commodities – including the discovery of large reserves of crude oil – barely left Brazil with the brunt of a crisis that had already begun to devastate the world in 2008.
Then came the disappointment. After leaving the presidency with a popularity of 87% and installing Dilma Rousseff as his successor, the first woman to rise to power in Brazil, Lula fell out of favor. The Lava Jato scandal, a massive network of corruption with tentacles across the continent in which construction companies bribed leaders to get government contracts, touched him completely. He was sentenced to prison and politically disqualified for two crimes of corruption and money laundering. He also collected a dozen lawsuits for criminal organization, passive corruption, criminal organization, bribery again… So up to a dozen cases added in 2018. He never stopped proclaiming his innocence.
In 2019, however, the clouds have disappeared. The Supreme Court, in a ruling that shocked all of Latin America and the world, acquitted Lula of the crimes and gave him back his political rights. He did not comment on the case, but quashed the trial in which he was convicted for lack of formality. It specifically stated that the court that judged him had no jurisdiction and, more importantly, that the magistrate, Sergio Moro, was biased in doing so.
Moro, in fact, later served as justice minister at Bolsonaro, whom he broke with in 2019 to launch his own political brand, which is now in the most absolute of thralls (although the magistrate has won a seat in the Senate). Moro destroyed his reputation as a judge after the judicial scandal. A series of messages were exchanged with the prosecutor in which he made clear his lack of impartiality.
And this is how Lula, the shoe shiner, metal worker, unionist, hero of the left – still a villain to many, who doubt that he is free from corruption, since his acquittal did not address the merits of the imputed causes – returned to lead a left-wing candidacy that has fallen less than two points from gaining power. In an effort to get closer to those who distrust him — also to reassure economic elites and the markets — he has moderate and center-right profiles on his plate.
For example, if he wins, his vice president would be Geraldo Alckmin, a veteran center-right political exponent who was one of the main defenders of Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment in 2016 and was severely charged with the corruption of the PT. And as finance minister, he introduces Henrique Meirelles, a conservative economist and former president of the Central Bank.
We’ll have to wait until the last Sunday in October to see if Lula is able to perform the miracle all polls predict. What the polls had failed to discover is the extensive mobilization that the Bolsonarist bases have shown. The next chapter in the history of the Latin American giant has yet to be written.
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Source: La Verdad
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