Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Jair Bolsonaro have had their last and decisive face to face before the elections on Sunday. The debate, organized this Friday night by the Globo television network, has lasted for just over two hours. It was one of Bolsonaro’s last chances to lure in the few remaining undecideds and get closer to Lula, the poll favorite in a hard-fought duel. Two days before the vote, the tone has been quite harsh.
William Bonner, the presenter of the Globo nightly newscast, had a discreet role, with a format that favored questions among the candidates themselves, who attacked each other relentlessly. Among the rules, it was established that no physical contact would be allowed, unlike the first debate of the second round, on the 16th. In that meeting, Bolsonaro touched Lula’s shoulder at one point, who shook off the gesture. “I don’t want to be close to you,” Lula told him at one point in their face-to-face this Friday. These are some keys of the meeting.
The minimum wage under debate
Bolsonaro opened the debate with the promise that he intends to raise the minimum wage to 1,400 reais (about $264), after the Brazilian press reported that the Ministry of Finance had plans to freeze the minimum wage. “The truth is that the minimum wage is less than when he arrived,” Lula assured, attacking a weak flank of the far-right. “I gave a 74% real increase to the minimum wage,” he assured on several occasions. On several occasions they mentioned their respective flagship state aid programs, Bolsa Família and Auxilio Brasil, without elaborating on their proposals.
“The biggest liar in the history of Brazil”
The debate was full of disqualifications, with the accusation of “liar” as the favorite throwing weapon of both candidates. The harsh tone relapsed over and over again into pointing out falsehoods each time one of the two ran out of arguments to answer a question from his adversary. “Stop lying,” was Bolsonaro’s refrain, to which Lula replied that “the people know who the liar is.” On several occasions, the candidate for the Workers’ Party, more ardent than in previous appointments, mentioned the number of 6,948 lies of the current president during his term, without clarifying where he got it from, until he qualified him as “the biggest liar of the History of Brasil”.
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A global “pariah”
Bolsonaro tried to repeat his strategy of attacking Lula for the corruption scandals, and the period he spent in jail, assuring that he was never acquitted but “decondemned” (exonerated). Lula led the conversation on several occasions to foreign policy, a field in which he insisted on accusing his rival of having isolated Brazil. “It has no relationship with any country in the world,” he lambasted him, while he once again pointed out that he privileged dealings with the governments of Venezuela, Cuba and Argentina, a democratic country – and a neighbor – to which he equated the regimes of Caracas and La Havana. “We made foreign policy more effective”, “Brazil was a great international protagonist”, claimed Lula, referring to his government.
Crossroads of accusations about Robert Jefferson
Some of the most acrimonious moments revolved around former congressman Roberto Jefferson, a Bolsonaro ally and a great fan of weapons, who barricaded himself in his house on Sunday and fired at the agents who were going to arrest him. Lula called him a “gunslinger” of Bolsonaro. The president tried to distance himself by remembering him as an “informer” in one of the PT’s corruption scandals. “You sent the federal police to negotiate. If he were a black man from a favela, you would have had him killed,” Lula blurted out.
Sergio Moro and Marina Silva, former ministers reconciled
Bolsonare decided to repeat the strategy of the previous debate and bring former judge Sergio Moro, elected senator on October 2, as his companion. Moro, responsible for the corruption case that sent Lula to prison, became Bolsonaro’s Minister of Justice and Security, but later he was very critical of the president until they sealed a recent reconciliation. Another notorious reconciliation emerged when they discussed deforestation, which has reached its highest figures in 15 years with Bolsonaro. Lula invoked the “respectability” of Marina Silva, his Environment Minister, who has turned to supporting the former president after giving up years of disagreements.
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