The favorite Lula plays it in a hostile São Paulo

Brazil is in itself a surprise, born in Tordesillas (Valladolid), in whose treaty Portugal managed to move the line dividing the planet with Spain towards the west.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
03 October 2022 Monday 17:30
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The favorite Lula plays it in a hostile São Paulo

Brazil is in itself a surprise, born in Tordesillas (Valladolid), in whose treaty Portugal managed to move the line dividing the planet with Spain towards the west. In that space, Cabral discovered by chance, or by chance, what today is almost a continental country, the largest in Latin America. Its diversity and inequality are colossal with a great glue, that language that a Galician understands much better than the Portuguese of Lisbon. In Rio was the only American capital of a European country, when the Portuguese Court fled from Napoleon. Independence was led 200 years ago by the Portuguese royal house.

It is the state of the president who shot himself before being killed, real or figuratively, and who died in the operating room, without taking office. It is also the country in which, before the last coup d'état, in 1964, the United States saw the military conspirators as so weak that it prepared an entire armed apparatus, even thinking of a civil war against communist influence. The coup succeeded easily. Washington just had to applaud.

"64 is a good number," proclaimed in 2018 the protagonist of the latest surprise, President Jair Bolsonaro, a nostalgic former captain of the dictatorship. The polls said that he didn't even make it to the second round after losing to leftist Lula da Silva by 15 points. In the end there were five.

With this difference, Lula maintains his position as favorite, but diminished, since his far-right rival is still alive, since the leftist, with his 48%, was 4.5 million votes short of getting at least half plus one of the votes. . In Brazil everything is huge. Each turnout point represents 1.5 million voters. On Sunday it was at the low line of recent years, with 79%. At the beginning of the century it reached 83%.

As the Lula-Bolsonaro tandem added 92%, the mobilization of abstentionists, in a country with mandatory voting but few punishments for not exercising it, can be as relevant as the support of other candidates. Even so, the support of the centrist Simone Tebet with 4% of her and the leftist Ciro Gomes, with 3%, are highly coveted.

A Brazilian surprise could be that on October 30 fewer people voted than on Sunday, although pressure and polarization make it seem more difficult than Tordesillas.

On election night, the strategists were already discussing the plan for the determining factors in the next four weeks. The columnist for the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo, Vera Rosa, in addition to qualifying the outcome as “unpredictable”, yesterday explained the debate in the presidential staff. The less radical advocate a more temperate profile, against the hard line that wants to maintain the "cabinet of hate" that directs the "digital militias". It is commanded by Carlos Bolsonaro. He was already decisive four years ago, with his campaign, especially on WhatsApp, based on fake news, memes and slogans. The part that has risen to the surface indicates that in this election he is also very active, with the Lula corruption scandals as the main raw material.

Although the former president has been judicially exonerated, in politics these cases weigh more than was believed in Brazil. It was seen in the general result and in that of Paraná, where the Lavajato macro summary was instructed. Former prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol was the most voted deputy candidate and former judge Sergio Moro won the seat in the Senate, while his wife was deputy for São Paulo.

In this state, the most populous, with its 27 million votes on Sunday, is the key, according to Lula himself, who lost by seven points, while winning the second with the most inhabitants, Minas Gerais, and sweeping the northeast. . Analysts emphasize that São Paulo has always been complicated for the PT and that it usually loses by a greater margin in the second round. Even so, Lula is the favorite because he is ahead. But the scenario is, at least, the one that his party feared the most, the one in which Bolsonaro does not accept an eventual defeat.