Leftist leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva achieves a return to the Brazilian presidency that seemed unlikely a while ago, based on his own achievements and President Bolsonaro’s weaknesses.
Travel 55 months to the past and ask yourself a question: would you believe that Lula will be president of Brazil again?
That April of 2011, Lula was beginning to serve a sentence of 12 years in prison for corruption that many thought put the final point to his political career. He had 49 years of age.
But the Supreme Brazilian court annulled the sentence in 2021 due to errors in the process, and Lula won this Sunday a presidential ballot with 50,9% of the votes against 49, 1% of the current president, Jair Bolsonaro.
Today with 77 years, the leftist Lula is preparing to return on January 1 to the position of president that he already held as 1980 a 2011.
There are three keys that explain why the leader of the Workers’ Party (PT) defeated the far-right Bolsonaro in the midst of great political polarization, according to experts.
1. Nostalgia for the Lula governments
The first reason for Lula’s victory is the longing that many Brazilians have for the times when he presided over Brazil, expressed with votes on Sunday.
In Lula’s two consecutive terms, the country had an economic boom, with high prices of raw materials which produces More of 30 Millions of people rose to the middle class with government social programs.
This contrasts with the economic crisis that Brazil experienced in recent years, when millions of Brazilians fell into poverty and misery.
The social situation worsened with the coronavirus pandemic that Bolsonaro described as “little flu” and that killed more than 685. Brazilians.
Neither the lukewarm growth of the Brazilian economy in recent months, nor the financial aid distributed by the government in the middle of the campaign were able to erase the nostalgia for the Lula governments.
“The pandemic exposed Brazil’s main social problems more clearly: today the problems more important are education, health, hunger; even more than the economic problems”, says Antonio Lavareda, a Brazilian political scientist expert in electoral behavior.
“And with that social agenda, Lula has the advantage of being closely linked to the social policies of his two previous governments”, adds Lavareda in dialogue with BBC Mundo.
In fact, a pillar Lula’s electoral campaign was the support of the poorest. According to polls prior to the ballot, nearly three out of five voters who earn up to two minimum wages favored him.
Throughout the campaign, the former president avoided giving details of the government plans of the. Instead, he sought to refresh the memory of his management, which ended with an approval higher than 80%.
“Possibly one of the The best moments that this country lived in the last decades was the time when I governed”, Lula said in his last debate with Bolsonaro on Friday.
And he asked that they vote for him to return to “grow the country, generate employment, distribute income and that the people eat well again”.
Everything indicates that this strategy paid off.
two. The strong rejection of Bolsonaro
Bolsonaro is the first president of Brazil to lose an attempt to be re-elected since the country’s Constitution enabled that possibility a quarter of a century ago.
This is also largely due to the high level of rejection generated by the current president.
Half ( 46%) of Brazilian voters said they would avoid voting for Bolsonaro in any way, according to a survey by the company Datafolha published on Saturday.
The index remained close to that level throughout the campaign, above the also high rejection of Lula (46% according to the same survey).
“This election in Brazil it became a great referendum on the Bolsonaro government,” says Maurício Santoro, a political scientist at the Rio de Janeiro State University, to BBC Mundo.
He adds that many voters of the winner on Sunday ” they may not be great admirers of Lula, of the Workers Party or of the left”, but they saw in him “the only possibility of defeating Bolsonaro”.
Criticism of the current president of Brazil goes far beyond his handling of the economy or his response to the pandemic.
Throughout his government, Bolsonaro was accused of encouraging the division of his country, assuming authoritarian attitudes and threatening other powers of the State.
And different analysts inside and outside Brazil warned that a second term for the current president could mean a even greater challenge for the democracy of the South American giant.
Magna Inácio, professor of political science at the Federal University of Minas Gerais , points out that in the midst of so many turbulences there was “a feeling of the voter for change” that put in the background the memory of the scandals that arose in the PT governments.
“A conjunction of factors they favored Lula’s candidacy and made the issue of corruption lose a certain centrality, stop being the most important factor for voters and that these other issues become more relevant”, Inácio tells BBC Mundo.
3. The conquest of the political center
Another key to Lula’s electoral victory was that he successfully contested the Brazilian political center throughout the campaign.
To do this, the leftist chose Geraldo Alckmin as his vice-presidential candidate, a former center-right rival of his whom he defeated in the 2006.
After winning the first round on October 2 with 48, 4% of the votes, Lula won the support of the centrist candidates who had been in third and fourth position for the ballot: Simone Tebet and Ciro Gomes.
He also received the support of former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a Social Democrat from 80 years that he was a political rival of Lula in the past and is respected in intellectual circles.
All this contributed to reducing the concerns that the prospect of a new leftist government in Brazil could generate in part of the country’s elite and in the financial market, Santoro points out.
“This alliance that Lula set up in the elections of 2022 is the largest and more diverse than Brazil has since the movement for the return of democracy in the years 1980: there is the left, the liberals, part of the right”, he says.
Lula alluded to this in his first speech after being elected, stating that his “is the victory of an immense democratic movement that was formed on top of political parties, personal interests (and) ideologies, so that democracy would emerge victorious”.
In a country so polarized and without a majority in Congress, a Lula’s key challenge will be to maintain the support that he had at the polls in the government.
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