Brazil’s Presidential Election Remains a Cliff-hanger

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

This coming Sunday, the largest country in South America will finally know who its next president will be. On Oct. 30, Brazil’s acrimonious presidential race goes into a second round, after a former president failed to secure the overall majority he needed to avoid a runoff with the incumbent.

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, commonly known as Lula, who served as the 35th president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010, faces off against Jair Messias Bolsonaro, the former military officer who has been the 38th president of Brazil since 2019.

On Oct. 2 Lula secured 48.4 per cent of the vote, while Bolsonaro received 43.2. If polls are accurate, the leftist veteran will win the runoff, taking charge of a deeply polarized country in 2023.

NOT A FLUKE

Bolsonaro is no accident of history. It might have been possible to dismiss his surprising election four years ago, when he rose to power on a wave of widespread anti-left sentiment, as a fluke. No longer.

Underlying his vague appeals to “God, fatherland and family” is a bedrock of support, spread across the country and encompassing a wide cross-section of society. Also, several of Bolsonaro’s former cabinet ministers and allies across the country rode his coattails to success in local elections on Oct. 2. They won major victories against candidates backed by Lula in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

But only those who don’t know Brazil’s political culture and history will be surprised. An army captain, Bolsonaro first came to national attention in the mid-1980s as the armed forces were beginning a tactical retreat from political life after two decades of military rule. In 1988, after the restoration of Brazilian democracy, he began his political career.

Bolsonaro, who has been called the “Trump of the Tropics,” is seen by his opponents as a populist demagogue. But how much better is Lula, who has already spent time in jail for corruption?

CORRUPTION SCANDALS

He has, for instance, compared participants of pro-Bolsonaro rallies to Ku Klux Klan sympathizers. While Bolsonaro claims he must protect Brazil from demons, the devil and Communism, and accuses Lula of being a thief, Lula says the country faces the danger of fascism, the Ku Klux Klan, and illiberalism. He even accuses Bolsonaro of committing genocide in the Amazon region.

Until this day, Lula’s involvement in huge corruption scandals has not been properly investigated. After 13 years in power under him and his successor Dilma Rousseff, who was impeached, Brazil found itself in such a bad state that voters turned to Bolsonaro in 2018.

But this is a country that has never been a paragon of democracy. In 1964 the Brazilian military carried out a coup and ruled the country for over two decades. In 1965 political parties were banned and in 1966 a strict bipartisanship was instated, limiting participation in elections to the governmental party, Aliança Renovadora Nacional (National Renewal Alliance), or the opposition party, Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (Brazilian Democratic Movement).

1970S BRAZIL

This was the situation when I visited relatives in Brazil in 1976-1977, when General Ernesto Geisel, a career army officer from an immigrant family of German Lutherans, was head of the military junta. It was not a happy place.

By 1984 a movement had formed to pressure the government to reinstate direct elections. In the same year a constitutional amendment reinstituted the direct vote for president. This amendment allowed the registration of new (and old) political parties, including the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party), the banner under which Lula and Rousseff would later run.

It was not until the 1988 Constitution, enacted at the end of a military dictatorship that had made a farce of democracy in Brazil for over two decades, that all adult Brazilians, regardless of income or literacy, could vote.

This constitution opened the door for the poor, particularly from the northeast, to vote for Lula, himself a northeasterner born to a poor family in Caetés, a rural town in Pernambuco.

After two consecutive terms as president, 2003-2010, an extended break from the executive office and a stint in federal prison for corruption charges that have since been dropped, Lula now seeks to be elected for a third presidential term. We’ll soon know how this turns out.