Everything has happened to Brazilian presidents. Getúlio Vargas shot himself in 1954 when they wanted to depose him. Tancredo Neves died in 1985 without being able to take office. Of the last five elected heads of state, two, Collor de Mello and Dilma Rousseff, fell by impeachment. Another, Lula da Silva, spent 580 days in prison, seven years after leaving power. And the current president, Jair Bolsonaro, was stabbed in the 2018 campaign. What never happened in this democratic period is that a president who emerged from the polls failed to run for re-election, and even less so, in the first round. Well, that's what the polls are now announcing.
The polls and poll averages of the three main newspapers, O Globo –from Rio de Janeiro–, Folha de São Paulo and O Estado de São Paulo place the former leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva with between 50% and 52% of the votes in the first round, on October 2. If true, he would be on the verge of exceeding half of the votes cast, without waiting for October 30.
Yesterday, in the average of O Estado de São Paulo, Lula was at 51%, after rising one point, and Bolsonaro, at 36%, after falling another point. However, the president has remained stable in recent weeks, after recovering in the summer. His rival has returned to that magical 51%, a level he has already had several times. He may be mobilizing abstentionists, capturing the undecided and sucking the base of his former minister Ciro Gomes, who accuses Lula of "left-wing fascism" for his constant appeal to the useful vote and his offensive to win now.
According to Gomes, the Workers' Party (PT) proposal is limited to overthrowing the far-right Bolsonaro. Apart from the desperation of this candidate, located at 7% compared to 12% in 2018, this election is the duel over who is less detested. And Lula leads the race because she rejects him, according to Datafolha, 39%, compared to 52% of his rival.
Bolsonaro still had to apologize a few days ago for having said that he was not a "gravedigger", when Brazil reached 300,000 deaths from the pandemic. His disastrous management in the face of what he came to define as a "little flu" brutally weighs him down in the second country in the world with the most deaths, almost 700,000. There the chaos of his way of governing was seen, which adds, among other factors, to his defense of coup and undisguised misogyny. These positions may give him a vote, but they mobilize against him. In his favor he has an appreciable decrease in violent deaths and a recent improvement in the economy, but in a country in which, according to the NGOs, hunger has grown again.
In many of those homes now in serious trouble, Lula reaches the dimensions of a lay saint, the promoter of the "zero hunger" program, within his redistribution policies, which included access to university for the poor and racial minorities.
With or without images of the former president in niches, these sectors tend to forgive him everything, as happens in the bastions of the Northeast, where without Lula the PT beat Bolsonaro in 2018. But in the decisive Southeast, the region of São Paulo, weighs plus the whole plot of corruption in which it is proven that the PT was involved, as one more party in the system that it was going to clean up. And about Lula there are not a few who consider him corrupt even if he was exonerated.
But the demon of 2018 whose invocation, while in prison, filled the ballot boxes with votes for Bolsonaro, appears today as the only one who can rid the country of a plague turned president.
Except for a colossal surprise, Lula's victory is so sung that it is already announced for the first round. In a normal situation, such a defeat would lead the defeated president to keep a low profile until handing over power. But with Bolsonaro nothing is usual. There could even be more conflict, since the elections would be resolved by a smaller margin of votes. He has already said that if he doesn't win the first time with more than 60%, something strange happened. And no one will be able to say that he had not warned of his coup drive.
