Brazil | The polling stations closed their doors, the presidential race between Lula and Bolsonaro is still open

Rio de Janeiro / Washington

of Brazil the situation in the presidential elections was completely open, when the first round of voting was at midnight Finnish time.

Incumbent president Jair Bolsonaro led the comeback-seeking former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva roughly by 48-43 percent, after the votes had been counted from more than 17 percent of the polling places.

According to opinion polls, Lula was a clear early favorite. Most research institutes predicted him 10-15 percentage points in both the first and second rounds. According to some polls, it was about whether Lula could win outright in the first round.

A second round, if needed, will be held on Sunday, October 30.

At the same time, Brazilians also voted in the congressional elections, the results of which will greatly affect how easily the future president can govern the country of 214 million inhabitants.

“We do not I don’t want more hatred, more discord,” Lula declared, according to news agencies, on the day of the election.

This clearly pointed to the deep division in Brazil, where the opposing sides have demonized each other more uglier than ever.

Read more: The hero of the poor can return from prison to power in the elections – the sitting president of Brazil is already priming lies and fraud and inciting his supporters to arms

A large number of experts believe that if Bolsonaro loses, he intends to deny his defeat, which could incite his supporters to the streets in a violent way.

This is probably all the more likely, the tighter the potential loss would be.

Lula, 76, led Brazil from 2003 to 2010. His return would be an incredible feat considering how battered his Labor party is in the wake of corruption scandals.

Lula himself got 12 year sentence among other things money laundering and spent time in prison 580 days. The Supreme Court invalidate Lula’s sentence last year, although not by declaring the charges to be baseless, but by appealing to a formality: the court that issued the sentence had exceeded its authority.

Lula would probably have won the last presidential election behind barsbut the court denied his candidacy.

Lulan the persistent popularity despite the stigma of corruption is explained by the gilded memories of time. During his last reign, an estimated twenty million Brazilians rose from poverty.

Lula’s government’s social programs played a key role in this, providing direct cash grants to low-income families in return for keeping their children in school.

The generous grants were made possible by the boom in raw materials at the time, which Brazil benefited from when its exports went abroad. We would no longer be able to afford something like that, no matter who was president.

Lula has been criticized for not using the good economic situation to implement structural reforms, such as revamping the widely criticized education and health care systems.

For his rants the well-known Bolsonaro has often been compared to the previous president of the United States to Donald Trump, whom he openly admires. Still, Lula’s and Trump’s messages also have a clear unifying factor.

“Lula’s campaign is in practice Make Brazil Great Again: Vote for me, and you will get meat on the table and a good job, just like last time. It’s very nostalgic,” describes the political researcher Mauricio Santoro from the State University of Rio de Janeiro.

During this election, Lula has been reluctant to talk about the economy. He has contented himself with referring to the politics and achievements of his previous term.

“That’s a bad answer because the outlook for Brazil and the global economy as a whole is quite different.”

Lula has appeared more moderate than before, almost as a middle-of-the-road traveler.

His vice presidential candidate is a pro-business centrist Geraldo Alckmin, former longtime governor of the state of São Paulo. They are former adversaries. In 2006, Lula defeated Alckmin in the second round of the presidential election.

Researcher Santoro points out that Lula can’t do very left-wing politics because Brazilian society has become more conservative in terms of values ​​in 10-15 years.

Election results was received on Sunday almost immediately after the polls closed, as Brazil has an electronic voting system.

Bolsonaro has sown suspicion towards the voting machines by monthly trading, claiming that the system could be easily tampered with. He has not presented any evidence on the matter, and no problems have appeared with the devices during twenty years of use.

Bolsonaro’s claims have been widely interpreted to mean that he is preparing to deny his defeat.

Read more: Bolsonaro used Brazil’s 200th anniversary to sow suspicion – the President may be preparing to deny his defeat in the elections

“Bolsonaro is sincere and honest – not corrupt,” said the electrical technician Leonardo Gonçalves30, who lives in the port city of Macaé, enriched by the oil industry.

Gonçalves’ father, who works at the Population Information Agency Jose Carlos Moreira55, was involved in voting Lula to power twenty years ago, but today he supports Bolsonaro.

“I was disappointed. Lula promised the people everything but did not deliver on his promises,” said Moreira, who lives in Rio de Janeiro.

When Bolsonaro came to power four years ago, actor and cultural producer Marta Norbregan a horrified partner suggested moving to Paris – perhaps to make art on the walls of the subway tunnels.

It wasn’t a real plan, let alone realism financially. But Bolsonaro’s season has turned out to be even worse than feared, according to Norbrega.

“Economy, culture, education and healthcare are all in a worse mess than before.”

That’s why Norbrega assured that he seriously considered moving to Argentina or Uruguay, if there are four more years of Bolsonaro ahead.

“Half of his voters are evil. The other half are stupid”, Norbrega stated, horrified by the directness of his words.

Norbrega is an experienced actor and cultural producer, but in recent years he has scraped together a living as a textbook editor. He blames Bolsonaro, who abolished the Ministry of Culture and prevented the distribution of corona grants to the cultural sector several times.

Norbrega is sure that the president wanted to prevent the views of value liberals from being presented to the public.

He sees the previous reign of the Labor Party as a golden age for culture. At that time, he toured the country in a small theater that had a couple of hundred performances a year sponsored by, among other things, state companies.