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Brazilian voters will go to the polls in October to elect a president. Former president Lula da Silva appears as the favorite to win, even from the first round, but far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, a candidate for his own succession, threatens not to recognize the results. Social polarization is on the rise and the economic crisis is worsening.
Brazilian society has been subjected in the past four years to a series of transformations and reform projects, many times unsuccessful. The October elections come after the pandemic crisis and its catastrophic management by President Bolsonaro, to which is added a major economic crisis and Bolsonaro’s insistent attempts to delegitimize the electoral process.
Our guests, Thomas Zicman de Barros, doctor in political theory at Sciences Po, specialist in Brazil; Patrick Bèle, journalist for the French newspaper Le Figaro, head of the Latin America section; Elcio Ramlho, head of RFI’s Brazilian service, and from Rio de Janeiro, Marcos Moreno, correspondent for RFI’s Spanish service, help us understand the challenges of presidential scrutiny.
“More than institutional reforms, we must think about the changes that President Jair Bolsonaro represents for the institutions of liberal democracy. We cannot normalize what the Bolsonaro government has done because what we have seen in Brazil in these four years were constant attacks, threats to liberal democracy, the most important is the return of the military to political life,” says Thomas Zicman de Barros.
The elections are approaching in a context of a strong weakening of the economy and the acceleration of inflation goes from record to record, “The situation of the Brazilian economy is currently very bad and if the government says that it is going to recover, it cannot do so before six months. With an inflation of 10%, the situation is very serious because there is no growth, and the past years were very bad. Brazil is an open economy and has a lot of international influence”, emphasizes Patrick Bèle.
Different Brazilian media outlets warn of the risk of institutional rupture orchestrated by Bolsonaro in case he loses the election. “Bolsonaro has been trying to delegitimize the elections for a long time, since the beginning of the pre-campaign he began to say that he is not going to recognize the results of the elections. So, it is as if he was preparing the population for something that could represent an institutional rupture. But the response given by the Electoral Tribunal and Brazilian society means that the institutions in Brazil are still very strong,” analyzes Elcio Ramalho, head of the Brazilian RFI service.
Jair Bolsonaro has given space to the military like never before. Many of his ministers are or have been generals, in addition to the fact that he vindicates the 1964 military coup, which suspended democratic rights for several decades, and has asked them to play a more active role in the October elections. Our correspondent in Brazil, Marcos Moreno, considers that “what is in question right now is not the result of the elections, but the acceptance of the result of the elections in case Jair Bolsonaro loses. And that is where he enters in a critical way the army, because Bolsonaro has said that he will not accept defeat in these elections, and if this happens, where will the army stand, especially in the army base that is more pro-Bolsonaro? It’s big but what matters is what happens after the results.”
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