Workers’ Party candidate beat Bolsonaro by a narrow margin of just 1.8% of the vote
Brazil is laughing again, but not out loud. The victory of the leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was with a low percentage of votes (50.88% against 49.12% for Jair Bolsonaro, with 99.58% counted). But that doesn’t mean that more than 58 million citizens of this country, of the 156 million who were able to vote, have discovered that sadness is good too and that happiness will come someday. The streets of the main cities marched for the carnival to celebrate the return to the presidency of the leader of the Workers’ Party (PT), twelve years after leaving the Planalto palace.
At the age of 77, Lula will lead the country for the third time after the mandates held between 2003 and 2010. Brazilians voted out of nostalgia for a past in which they lived better and the country was regarded as a world economic power. Or perhaps they would have preferred to vote against the populism of Bolsonaro, the man who has kept the nation in suspense and democracy in check, as read this Sunday’s lead article in ‘Folha de Sao Paulo’.
It was a points win. Not by technical knockout, which will revive many Brazilians’ fears that the far-right leader, now a former president, will not recognize the results and contest the election. Yesterday, after casting his vote, he repeated that it would be a clean election. Then he felt victorious because, as he said, he had had very good feelings the past few days. And also because he trusted that God would help him continue to lead the country.
Despite how close the vote was, with Lula only taking the lead after 67% of the vote had been counted, Paulista Avenue, packed with Lula’s supporters, recaptured the Brazilian team’s jersey and the flag of the country whose bolsonarism is its symbol. had made in opposition to the PT led by the new president. D-day for Brazilians finally arrived on Sunday, October 30, in the middle of Halloween.
The election campaign became endless and exhausted many citizens. It was feared that the abstention would surpass that of the first round (20.8%) and it was hoped that the vote of the undecided would ultimately decide who would emerge as the winner. Those were intense days, with the two candidates in the news every hour. Days not exempt from violence, political and social. Days of personal accusations, of insults between the main candidates to rule the country for the next four years. Weeks demonstrating the division of the land that had to decide this Sunday for two completely different models, embracing love and hate, contradictions in every way and in almost every aspect of life.
The existing polarization is so immense that it is difficult to identify a common point between the two candidates. It’s not there because one (Bolsonaro) represents the populism of the far right, which if he could, would stay in power forever, and the other (Lula) stands out for his unionist, progressive past and remarkable management when he ran the country. between 2003 and 2010, which earned 87% approval.
The two candidates were just as early birds as last October 2 when the first round of elections was held. Lula formalized his vote at the polling station of the Firmino Correia de Araújo School, in Sao Bernardo do Campo, in Sao Paulo. Bolsonaro filled the election at a school in Rio de Janeiro. He then went to the airport to meet Flamengo, the team with the most fans in Brazil, which won the Copa Libertadores on Saturday (equivalent to the Champions League in Europe), and took the opportunity to take pictures with the cup and then embarked on a helicopter tour of the city with some players. Maybe he never thought this would be the only party he would have.
Lula, for his part, pointed out that it was the most important day of his life because he was a candidate and because he was convinced that the Brazilian people would vote “for a project in which democracy triumphs, because they want Brazil’s model and the model of the life he wants Lula pushed for the idea of rebuilding Brazil, but in a way that involves all Brazilians.
Lula won in the three electoral colleges in Portugal, which is home to 205,000 registered Brazilians, although the actual number is estimated to be over 400,000. Of that total, just over 80,000 were able to vote on Portuguese soil, more than half of them in the capital Lisbon. Right in Lisbon, the largest electoral college outside Brazil, Lula won 64.5% of the vote, compared to Bolsonaro’s 34.5%.
The progressive Workers’ Party candidate received 64.8% of the vote in the electoral college of Porto, in the north of the neighboring country, where Bolsonaro was voted by 35.2% of voters. Similarly, Lula also prevailed in Faro, in the southern zone, although his advantage was significantly less, with 52% of the vote, compared to 48% for the leader of the far right in Brazil.
Source: La Verdad
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