The former president, who could not vote in the previous elections because he was in prison, is close to 50% of the vote and will dispute the leadership of Brazil with Bolsonaro in the second round
“It is an important day for me. Four years ago I couldn’t vote because I was the victim of a lie. I want to help my country get back to normal.” Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva (Pernambuco, 1945), went this Sunday to solemnly vote in Sao Bernardo do Campo (Sao Paulo), a municipality where the charismatic leader of the Workers’ Party (PT) was forged as a union and political leader.
The first round of the Brazilian presidential, legislative and state elections confirmed this Sunday the resurrection of Lula. In less than three years he has gone from being imprisoned and with the impossibility of running for office to brushing against the presidency. For this he needed to reach 50% plus one of the votes, which some polls predicted. He has finally stayed at 48.35%, so he will contest the second round on the 30th against the current president Jair Bolsonaro, who has turned the polls upside down. The polls placed him in the environment of 35-38% of the ballots and he has obtained 43.26. Both leaders, who embody antagonistic ways of understanding politics, will face each other at the polls in the second round of the most polarized and hard-fought elections in decades.
Lula’s trajectory so far fulfills every step of the film theory of the hero’s journey: rise, coronation, fall from grace and resurrection. Forged as a union leader in the protests against the military dictatorship in the 1970s and early 1980s, he ran three times in the presidential elections for the PT without success. About to throw in the towel, his biographers say that it was his friend Fidel Castro who convinced him that it was worth continuing to fight. He did it.
And so came the first great electoral triumph of the left in the first power of Latin America. Lula won two consecutive elections and governed the country from 2010. During his presidency, 30 million Brazilians left behind the poverty line, an improvement that was also felt in every corner of the country. The educational system in general reached unknown heights of access, unemployment contracted to rates below those of the United States and consumption skyrocketed, supported by a middle class that had access to better jobs and higher wages. The boom in raw materials – including the discovery of large crude oil reserves – meant that Brazil barely suffered the blows of a crisis that in 2008 was already beginning to devastate the world.
Then came the disappointment. After leaving the presidency with an 87% popularity rating, and installing Dilma Rousseff as his successor, the first woman to reach power in Brazil, Lula fell from grace. The Lava Jato scandal, a gigantic network of corruption with tentacles throughout the continent in which construction companies bribed leaders to obtain public contracts, fully affected him. He was sentenced to prison and politically disqualified for two crimes of corruption and money laundering. He also accumulated a dozen lawsuits for criminal organization, passive corruption, criminal organization, again bribery… So up to a dozen cases that were added in 2018. He never stopped proclaiming his innocence.
Absolution and return to the ring
However, in 2019 the clouds disappeared. The Supreme Court, in a ruling that shook all of Latin America and the entire world, acquitted Lula of the crimes and returned her political rights. He did not get to the bottom of the matter, but annulled the trial in which he had been convicted for lack of formality. Specifically, it decreed that the court that judged him was not competent and, more importantly, that the magistrate, Sergio Moro, was biased during it.
Moro, in fact, was later Minister of Justice with Bolsonaro, with whom he broke in 2019 to launch his own political brand, which is now in the most absolute ostracism (although the magistrate has won a seat in the Senate). Moro destroyed his reputation as a judge after the judicial scandal. He exchanged a series of messages with the prosecutor in which he made clear his lack of impartiality.
And this is how Lula, the shoeshiner, metallurgist, trade unionist, hero of the left – still a villain for many, who doubt that he is clean of corruption, since his acquittal did not enter into the merits of the causes imputed to him -, has returned to lead a left-wing candidacy that has fallen less than two points from obtaining power. In an attempt to get closer to those who distrust him -also to reassure the economic elites and the markets-, he has moderate and center-right profiles on his plate.
For example, if he wins, his vice president would be Geraldo Alckmin, a veteran political exponent of the center-right, who was one of the main defenders of the ‘impeachment’ (impeachment process) of Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and harshly charged against the corruption of the PT. And as Finance Minister he proposes Henrique Meirelles, a conservative economist and former president of the Central Bank.
We will have to wait until the last Sunday of October to see if Lula is capable of working the miracle that all the polls predict. What the polls had not detected is the extensive mobilization that the Bolsonarist bases have shown. The next chapter in the history of the Latin American giant is yet to be written.
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