The October presidential elections are held in the midst of the greatest division in its history
Between evil and good or between truth and lies. There is no Brazilian who omits these definitions when he is asked about the presidential elections scheduled for October 2 – the first round – and on the 30th of the same month, the second, if necessary. Brazil, that country that just hearing its name any foreigner associates with joy, carnival, samba and soccer, is experiencing the greatest division in its recent history. And he lives it with a dose of passion that many of his citizens had not experienced. They are forced to choose their next president between two well-known candidates. Or Jair Bolsonaro (67 years old), current president, or Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (76), who headed the Government between 2003 and 2010.
The electoral campaign officially began a few days ago, but Brazil has been digesting for several months the controversial statements and accusations of both candidates and the authoritarian actions of the current president for the benefit of his allies or potential voters who could keep him in power.
Just over half of citizens want Bolsonaro to continue for four more years. They consider him a God who fights against the political system, who is not afraid to impose its decisions and who is rescuing the values that represented the country with the most inhabitants of the continent during the military government. Bolsonaro firmly believes that he is protected by the divine, at the same time that he is a defender of the possession of weapons because, as he maintains, “an armed people will never be enslaved.”
Its doctrine rejects gender ideology in schools, says it respects life from its conception, opposes legalizing drugs and rules out becoming an ally of communism. “Today we are going to talk about politics so that tomorrow no one forbids us to believe in God,” he said in the inaugural speech of his campaign, in Minas Gerais, where he was stabbed in 2018. “The city where I was reborn,” he said proudly while his wife, Michelle, invited the large audience present to pray an Our Father.
The opposition to Bolsonaro maintains that the people who support him today are the same ones who harshly criticized the Lula Executive and the Labor Party for the distribution of money to the poor and also for a very suspicious relationship with the National Congress. Indeed, one of the latest actions of his cabinet has been to extend the tax exemption to pastors in the midst of a campaign directed at evangelicals, the religion to which his wife belongs.
If Bolsonaro was stabbed, Lula spent 580 days in prison. He regained political rights in 2021 when the Supreme Court annulled the two sentences against him for corruption and for which he was imprisoned. It is the sixth time that he presents his candidacy. He won in 2002 and 2006, and again leads the polls, with 44% in voting intentions, while Bolsonaro adds 32%, although some sources assure that the current president every day reduces distance from his opponent.
Union leader, defender of the working class and the most vulnerable population, Lula boasts that during his administration he lifted thirty million Brazilians out of poverty. “This country has to be respected in the world again,” he announced in his first campaign speech at a workers’ factory. His words were stronger. «I want to tell you, genocidal president, that we do not want a government that distributes weapons. We want you to distribute books. We do not want an Executive that feeds hatred. We want one that feeds the soul and love. He accused Bolsonaro of being a denier, of not believing in science or medicine. Only in his lie because if there is someone who is possessed by the devil, it is Bolsonaro. “He is a liar such as he has never seen before,” he noted.
control over the courts
The danger of a self-coup by Bolsonaro has gradually diminished. The president came to question the legitimacy of the electoral system and some thought that he could cancel the elections. The American political scientist and professor Steven Levitsky has even commented that “a second Bolsonaro term would be very dangerous for democracy in Brazil. He would allow him greater control over the courts and other institutions ». Levitsky compares him to Donald Trump.
The writer Paulo Coelho went further when on July 25 he posted on his Twitter account: “The president is not stupid. His 24/7 provocations push the country into confrontation: you know you’re going to lose, you’re building your private army, you don’t need the Armed Forces as a whole. Just a few generals and we will still have a Francisco Franco in September, before the elections. I hope to be wrong”. The threat of a self-coup d’état has been haunting the minds of many Brazilians, not just one of the most widely read novelists in the world.
In elections as polarized as almost all the last ones that have been held in South America, a little more than half of Brazilians disapprove of the management of the Bolsonaro government and at the same time consider it the reason for all evil. He accuses him of being a destroyer of everything that goes against him, an anti-democratic, directly responsible for the return of inflation – in June it reached 11.89%, in July it fell to 10.1% – of hunger, of the more than 675,000 deaths from the pandemic and of many other economic and social problems that Brazil is experiencing. It’s certainly not his best carnival, nor is it a samba to dance to.
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