Simone Iglesias
Mon, October 3, 2022
(Bloomberg) -- Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is huddling in Sao Paulo on Monday with his top advisers as the leftist former Brazilian president seeks to pivot his campaign to the northeast of the country and the key state of Sao Paulo after a narrower-than-expected first round vote.
A focus of his meetings with campaign advisers is also on how to broaden his coalition of supporters to include more centrist politicians -- the key grouping up for grabs as he and President Jair Bolsonaro start the clock on another month of campaigning before a runoff vote on Oct. 30.
Lula, as he is widely known, took the most votes on Sunday. But at 48% to 43% for Bolsonaro, he failed to get an outright win, and the margin was closer than most pollsters had forecast.
The 76-year-old leader is meeting with campaign advisers Monday afternoon to map out areas in need of improvement and give marching orders. One priority is to secure the support of Senator Simone Tebet, who came third in Sunday’s race and has already signaled she may take his side, according to two senior campaign members. On Sunday, she stopped short of announcing her support for Lula, saying she would give leaders of her coalition 48 hours to make a decision on whom to support.
“I won’t be neglectful,” she said. “I have a side and I will speak up at the right moment.”
A key challenge for Lula is the state of Sao Paulo, home to nearly a quarter of the country’s voters, and where he started his political career as a union leader five decades ago. Bolsonaro, 67, won the state by a 7 percentage-point margin, and the rejection of Lula’s Workers’ Party was stronger than his camp had anticipated.
Former Sao Paulo Governor Geraldo Alckmin -- Lula’s running mate -- will need to work harder in the state, including garnering the support of agribusiness leaders, the advisers said, asking not to be identified discussing campaign strategy. Nationally, Alckmin will be charged with getting the backing of politicians who have broken with Bolsonaro but also aren’t comfortable associating themselves with the Workers’ Party after a series of corruption scandals rocked its previous governments.
Nightmare Scenario
Bolsonaro’s solid performance across Brazil, including his unexpected inroads in some northeastern states that have traditionally been Lula’s bastion, has brought a cold dose of reality to Lula’s campaign. A sense of frustration pervaded his headquarters on Sunday night when it became clear the former president would finish the race with a lead of little more than 5 percentage points. The worst-case scenario, the people said, would have been an 8 percentage-point lead.
Such a narrow lead may be explained by a migration of some of the supporters of presidential candidate Ciro Gomes toward Bolsonaro, according to the people.
Gomes, a former governor of Ceara state, the second largest in the northeast region, sought to become a viable middle-road alternative to Lula on the left and Bolsonaro on the right, but never reached 10% of voting intention in opinion polls.
As Gomes’s campaign struggled, more of its traditionally left-leaning supporters drifted toward Lula. He reacted by stepping up attacks against the former president, including bringing up past corruption allegations against him.
Gomes came fourth on Sunday with only 3% of the vote, his weakest performance in four presidential runs. Lula’s advisers expect the majority of those votes will now come his way, regardless of whether Gomes decides to back the former president.
Lula will also spend more time campaigning in the northeastern region, particularly his home state Pernambuco, where he didn’t achieve the strong outcome he’d expected. Lula took the state with 65% of the vote versus 30% for Bolsonaro, compared with a forecast of 69% to 23% in an Ipec poll released on the eve of the vote.
Tom Phillips in São Paulo
Mon, October 3, 2022
Tears filled Beatriz Simões’s eyes as she digested Jair Bolsonaro’s startlingly strong performance in Sunday’s Brazilian election.
Hours earlier the 34-year-old publicist had been convinced a hope-filled dawn was coming with the election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as Brazil’s next leader.
But as she stood outside São Paulo’s museum of art – where Lula had come to insist his fight for power was alive – Simões wept as she pondered how loved ones had helped Brazil’s far-right incumbent surpass the predictions of pollsters.
“How can it be that my friends, my relatives, people who know me – who know that I am a black woman – still support the kind of thing Bolsonaro supports?” Simões asked as she and three friends grappled with the far right’s seemingly profound grip on society.
“It is terrifying, it’s just bizarre for us, it’s frightening,” said Raquel Barbosa, a 28-year-old community manager whose mother-in-law was one of nearly 700,000 Brazilians killed by a Covid outbreak Bolsonaro called “a little flu”.
Bolsonaristas trumpeted their movement’s stronger-than-forecast showing, which saw their trailblazer secure more than 51m votes despite his international notoriety as an authoritarian-minded zealot.
Lula won the first round with 57m votes, or 48% of the total to Bolsonaro’s 43%. But Bolsonaro’s unexpectedly high share – pollsters had tipped him to claim 36% or 37% – has shattered predictions that re-election is beyond his reach in the 30 October runoff against Lula.
“After what happened yesterday, I rule nothing out – absolutely nothing at all,” said Maria Cristina Fernandes, a political commentator from the newspaper Valor Econômico. “Bolsonaro is not out of the picture.”
Bolsonaro celebrated what he declared “the greatest patriotic victory in the history of Brazil” while his senator son, Flávio, hailed “a victory over the mainstream media, which has been relentlessly anti-Bolsonaro”. The incumbent triumphed in two key south-eastern states, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, home to more than 47 million voters.
Adding to the progressive pain, a wave of Bolsonarista hardliners were elected to congress, with Bolsonaro’s Liberal party claiming 99 of its 513 seats – the largest bloc in more than two decades. The winners include Eduardo Pazuello, the army general-turned-health minister accused of bungling Brazil’s Covid response, and Ricardo Salles, the controversial environment minister under whom Amazon deforestation soared.
A man looks at Brazilian newspapers at a newsstand showing headlines a day after the general elections in Rio de Janeiro. Photograph: Buda Mendes/Getty Images
Damares Alves, the evangelical preacher who was Bolsonaro’s human rights minister, won a senate seat, as did his vice-president, Hamilton Mourão, his former science minister Marcos Pontes, and his former security minister, the judge Sergio Moro.
“Bolsonarismo … has become a political project with a beginning, a middle and an end,” said Fernandes. “The degree of conservatism they have managed to insert into congress is something permanent and will take a very long time to reverse.”
Related: Why did the Brazil election pollsters get Bolsonaro’s vote so wrong?
Fernandes believed the results revealed a troubling disconnect between how Brazil’s chattering classes and journalists viewed Bolsonaro, and how voters themselves felt. “The media and the whole world was outraged by Bolsonaro’s conduct and handling of the pandemic … [But] the people do not share our thoughts,” she said. “There’s a divorce between the press and the intellectual elites and the people.”
Consuelo Dieguez, the author of a book on Brazil’s right called The Serpent’s Egg, attributed Bolsonaro’s performance to deep-rooted and widespread voter rage at the corruption scandals that blighted the 14 years that Lula’s Worker’s party (PT) held power. “Their reasoning is: I don’t want the PT, I don’t want this crook Lula, and I don’t want these lefties coming along championing things like gay marriage and abortion,” she said.
The Bolsonaro vote had also been strengthened by billions of dollars of welfare handouts to the poor. “He has dished out so much money – and even so he didn’t manage to win,” Dieguez said, rejecting the portrayal of Sunday’s election as an unmitigated triumph for Bolsonarismo.
The president’s son and political heir apparent, Eduardo Bolsonaro, was re-elected to congress, but received 1m fewer votes than the last election and lagged behind one of Lula’s proteges, the leftist Guilherme Boulos. Other prominent Bolsonaristas such as Douglas Garcia and Sérgio Camargo floundered.
Related: Brazilian left celebrates election wins for trans and Indigenous candidates
“This wasn’t a victory for Bolsonaro – he did badly,” Dieguez insisted. “This is the first time that a candidate who is president came second in the first round. Lula nearly won – he missed by very little.”
Dieguez still believed Lula would beat Bolsonaro when 156 million Brazilians return to the polls later this month. The third-place candidate, Simone Tebet, is tipped to back Lula in exchange for a cabinet job.
But for now, Bolsonaro’s unforeseen surge has dealt a distressing and unanticipated blow to his foes.
“How is this possible? How can people can still sign off on this … and think Bolsonaro’s a decent option?” Simões demanded as Lula and his supporters headed home voicing a mix of deflation and defiance.
“My tears are tears of exhaustion,” Simões said, “but not surrender.”
Incumbent Jair Bolsonaro and former president Lula will go to a runoff election at the end of the month after a tighter than expected first round result
Latest analysis and reaction
Seán Clarke
How the election works
Brazil’s president is elected directly by the 156 million voters; there is no electoral college and no role for the legislature. A candidate needs more than 50% of the vote to be elected. If this does not happen in the first round, the top two candidates will go into a runoff election at the end of the month.
The leading candidates in 2022 are the incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, a rightwing populist, and the former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, a leftwinger who introduced radical anti-poverty measures during his two terms in office.
There are 11 candidates in all but only two others are likely to draw more than 2% of the vote: Ciro Gomes, a rival leftwinger who served as a minister under Lula, and Simone Tebet, a centrist senator.
In 2018, Bolsonaro won a second-round run-off against Fernando Haddad, the candidate of Lula’s Workers’ party. In that election Haddad had strong support in the north-east, while Bolsonaro’s vote was stronger in the south.
There are also elections for all seats in the lower house of Brazil’s parliament, and for a third of seats in the senate.
Juan Pablo Spinetto and Andrew Rosati
Sun, October 2, 2022
(Bloomberg) -- President Jair Bolsonaro and his leftist rival Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva are in a dead heat in Brazil’s election Sunday with 73% of the vote counted, a stronger-than-expected showing by the incumbent that points to a likely run-off between the two on Oct. 30.
Lula has 46% of the votes compared to 45% for Bolsonaro, a far-right former army captain, the electoral court said as of 8:10 p.m. in Brasilia. Even if Lula has overtaken the president as votes from the northern states that are his bastions come in, it may not be enough to deliver him the 50% he needs for the first-round victory some opinion polls had pointed to.
Carlos Melo, a political scientist at the Insper University in Sao Paulo, said initial results showed the strength of Bolsonaro’s base.
“All that is certain is that the far-right is extremely strong. And Jair Bolsonaro goes into the second round in a position of strength,” he said.
Nearly 160 million Brazilians were registered to pick the next president of Latin America’s largest economy. Voters are also choosing state governors, lower house representatives and senators.
Electoral officials said the vote on Sunday had been largely peaceful. Bolsonaro, 67, has repeatedly cast doubt on the integrity of electronic voting without providing evidence to back his assertions. Lula, 76, is seeking a third term in power after his stint in office from 2003-2010, which was followed by a jail term on corruption charges he disputed.
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Brazil election: ex-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to face Jair Bolsonaro in run-off
Sun, October 2, 2022 a
Brazil’s acrimonious presidential race will go to a second round after the former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva failed to secure the overall majority he needed to avoid a run-off with the far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro.
With more than 99.5% of votes counted the leftist veteran had secured 48.3% of the vote, not enough to avoid the 30 October show down with his right-wing rival. Bolsonaro, who significantly out-performed pollsters’s predictions and will be buoyed by the result, received 43.3%.
Addressing the media at a hotel in downtown São Paulo, Lula, who was president from 2003 until 2010, struck a defiant tone, declaring: “The struggle continues until our final victory.”
Related: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva: the former shoe-shine boy hoping to reclaim Brazil’s presidency
“We are going to win these elections – this for us is simply extra time,” vowed Lula, who was barred from the 2018 election that saw Bolsonaro elected, on corruption charges that were later over-turned.
Speaking on the eve of the election Lula said he was hopeful of a first round win but would redouble his efforts to reclaim power if a second round was needed.
“I feel great hope that this election will be decided tomorrow, but if it isn’t we’ll have to behave like a football team when a match goes to extra time. We’ll rest for 15 minutes and then we’ll get back out onto the pitch to score the goals we didn’t score in normal time,” he told reporters.
Gleisi Hoffmann, the president of Lula’s Workers’ party, told reporters the campaign was neither “sad or downcast” at the result and pointed to Lula’s more than 56 million votes.
“Congratulations, president Lula, for your victory,” she declared.
But the election result was a major blow to progresssive Brazilians who had been rooting for an emphatic victory over Bolsonaro, a former army captain who has repeatedly attacked the country’s democratic institutions and vandalized Brazil’s international reputation.
Bolsonaro is also accused of wreaking havoc on the environment and catastrophically mishandling a Covid epidemic that killed nearly 700,000 Brazilians, by undermining vaccination and containment efforts and peddling quack cures.
Speaking on Sunday night, Bolsonaro promised to devote more time into convincing the poorest sectors of society they will be better off under a far-right government than a leftist one.
The far-right leader said, “I understand there were a lot of votes (cast) because of the condition of the Brazilian people, who feel prices increases, especially basic products. I understand that a lot of people desire change but some changes can be for the worst.”
“We tried to show this other side in the campaign but it seems like it didn’t register with the most important layers of society.”
He once again said Brazil must avoid following neighbouring nations such as Chile and Colombia who recently elected leftist leaders but he pointedly refused to answer questions about possible voter fraud, after spending months casting aspersions on the security of the electronic voting machines.
Bolsonaro has hinted he will not leave office if defeated, raising concerns of a Trump-like insurrection among his supporters if Lula wins.
Prominent Bolsonaristas were elected to Brazil’s congress and as state governors, including Bolsonaro’s former health minister, Eduardo Pazzuelo, who became a congressman for Rio, and his former environment minister Ricardo Salles.
Pazzuelo was Bolsonaro’s Health Minister during the height of the pandemic that led to more than 685,000 deaths in Brazil. A former military general, he promoted quack cures such as hydroxychloroquine.
Salles, meanwhile, was the Environment Minister who presided over a sharp rise in Amazonian deforestation. A Federal Police investigation accused the far-right ideologue of making it difficult for environmental crimes to be investigated. A separate inquiry said he was linked to illegal logging exports. He denied all the charges.
Rio’s Bolsonaro-supporting governor Cláudio Castro was re-elected while one of Bolsonaro’s most controversial former ministers, the evangelical preacher Damares Alves, claimed a place in the senate.
Tarcísio de Freitas, Bolsonaro’s candidate for the governorship of São Paulo, also performed better than pollsters predicted and will face Lula ally Fernando Haddad in a second round.
“The far-right will be thrilled,” said the political scientist Christian Lynch.
Thiago Amparo, an academic and columnist for the Folha de São Paulo newspaper, said the right’s stronger-than-forecast showing showed Bolsonaro and Bolsonarismo were “alive and kicking”.
“There was a feeling among the left that Lula had a chance to win in the first round ... the results show that it was wishful thinking to imagine the election would serve as a way to punish Bolsonaro for his disastrous policies during the pandemic.”
“I feel exhausted,” Amparo added. “But the results show we do not have the time to rest now. It is time to go out onto the streets... otherwise we are going to have a very dark future again.”
“I think Bolsonaro has the momentum,” said Thomas Traumann, a Rio de Janeiro-based political observer, although he believed Lula was still the favourite. “It’s a very disappointing night for the left.”
There was determination from Lula and his allies as the right-wing successes and the need for a second round became clear.
“I think this is a chance that the Brazilian people are giving me,” said Lula before heading to a celebration with his supporters on São Paulo’s Paulista avenue. “The campaign begins tomorrow.”
In Rio de Janeiro’s históric city center, a massive crowd of people, mostly clad in red, drank beer and danced samba as they awaited the final tally to appear on a screen overlooking the square.
But the jubilant mood dampened when results showed Lula still nearly 2 percent shy of the majority he needed to avoid a runoff duel with Bolsonaro.
“I’m disappointed,” said Kharine Gil, a 23-year-old university student. “Because we saw that Bolsonaro is stronger than we thought he was.”
Elaine Azevedo, a 34-year-old security systems worker, looked defeated as she stared up at the towering screen showing the results.
“I feel despair, pure despair,” said Azevedo, who was clad in red from head to toe and sported a hat with Lula’s name on it. “We all thought Lula would win easily.”
But at a neighborhood bar about a block away, Eudacio Queiroz Alves, a 65-year-old retired driver, was celebrating.
“We expected this,” he said. “The people are with Bolsonaro. I’m confident that he will win.”
By Victor Borges and Gram Slattery
BRASILIA/RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - Brazil's presidential election is headed for a run-off vote, electoral authorities said on Sunday, after President Jair Bolsonaro's surprising strength in the first round spoiled rival Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's hopes of winning outright.
With 99.7% of electronic votes counted, Lula was ahead with 48.4% of votes versus 43.3% for Bolsonaro, the national electoral authority reported. As neither got a majority of support, the race will go to a second-round vote on Oct. 30.
Several opinion surveys had shown the leftist Lula, who was president from 2003 to 2010, leading the far-right Bolsonaro by 10-15 percentage points ahead of Sunday's vote. The much tighter result dashed hopes of a quick resolution to a deeply polarized election in the world's fourth-largest democracy.
Bolsonaro had questioned polls that showed him losing to Lula in the first round, saying they did not capture enthusiasm he saw on the campaign trail. He has also attacked the integrity of Brazil's electronic voting system without evidence, and suggested he might not concede if he lost.
Political observers had said a wide margin of victory for Lula could sap Bolsonaro of support to challenge the electoral results. But Sunday's vote, extending a tense and violent election by another four weeks, revitalized his campaign.
"The extreme right is very strong across Brazil," said Carlos Melo, a political scientist at the Insper business school. "Lula's second-round victory is now less likely. Bolsonaro will arrive with a lot of strength for re-election."
Lula put an optimistic spin on the result, saying that it would only postpone his victory and that he looked forward to going head-to-head with Bolsonaro in a debate.
"We can compare the Brazil he has built to the one we built," he told reporters.
Bolsonaro was also calm and confident in his post-election remarks, disparaging polling firms for failing to gauge his support.
"I plan to make the right political alliances to win this election," he told journalists, pointing to significant advances his party made in Congress in Sunday's general election.
His right-wing allies won 19 of the 27 seats that were up from grabs in the Senate, and initial returns suggested a strong showing for his base in the lower house.
FESTIVE MOOD IN RIO
Outside Bolsonaro's family home in Rio de Janeiro's Barra da Tijuca neighborhood the mood was upbeat.
Maria Lourdes de Noronha, 63, said only fraud could prevent a Bolsonaro victory, adding that "we will not accept it" if he loses. "The polls in our country, the media, and journalists, are liars, rascals, shameless," she said.
Although Lula left the presidency 12 years ago with record popularity, he is now disliked by many Brazilians after he was convicted of accepting bribes and jailed during the last election. His conviction was later overturned by the Supreme Court, allowing him to run again for president this year, along with nine other candidates from an array of smaller parties.
A career lawmaker turned self-styled outsider, Bolsonaro rode a backlash against Lula's Workers Party to victory in 2018, uniting strands of Brazil's right, from evangelical Christians to farming interests and pro-gun advocates.
He has dismantled environmental and indigenous protections to the delight of commercial farmers and wildcat miners, while appealing to social conservatives with an anti-gay and anti-abortion agenda.
His popularity has suffered since the coronavirus pandemic, which he called a "little flu" before COVID-19 killed 686,000 Brazilians. Corruption scandals also forced ministers out of his government and focused a harsh spotlight on his lawmaker sons.
Yet Sunday's vote shows his support is far from collapsing.
Lula's proposals for Brazil have been light on details, but he promises to improve the fortunes of Brazil's poor and working classes, as he did as president from 2003-2010, when he lifted millions out of poverty and burnished Brazil's global influence.
While in power, Lula's approval rating soared as he expanded Brazil's social safety net amid a commodity-driven economic boom. But in the years after he left office, the economy collapsed, his hand-picked successor was impeached and many of his associates went to prison as part of a vast graft scandal.
Lula himself spent 19 months in jail for bribery convictions that were thrown out by the Supreme Court last year.
(Reporting by Victor Borges in Brasilia and Gram Slattery in Rio de Janeiro; Additional reporting by Lisandra Paraguassu, Beatriz Garcia, Eduardo Simoes and Steven Grattan in Sao Paulo, Rodrigo Viga Gaier in Rio de Janeiro, Anthony Boadle in Brasilia; Editing by Brad Haynes, Gabriel Stargardter, Raissa Kasolowsky, Grant McCool, Daniel Wallis and Diane Craft)
Brazil Presidential Election Headed To Runoff After Surprisingly Strong Vote For Far-Right Bolsonaro
Travis Waldron
Sun, October 2, 2022
Former Brazil President Lula da Silva and the country's current leader, far-right Jair Bolsonaro, will advance to a runoff election after da Silva fell just short of winning a majority of votes in Sunday's election. (Photo: Eraldo Peres/ AP Photo)
Former Brazil President Lula da Silva and the country's current leader, far-right Jair Bolsonaro, will advance to a runoff election after da Silva fell just short of winning a majority of votes in Sunday's election. (Photo: Eraldo Peres/ AP Photo)
Right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro and leftist former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva appear headed for a second-round runoff contest to settle Brazil’s presidential election, after neither candidate scored an outright victory in Sunday’s vote.
Datafolha, Brazil’s largest pollster, projected that the race would advance to a second round late Sunday night. Multiple Brazilian news outlets, including the Folha de S.Paulo and O Estado de S. Paulo newspapers, also projected that neither candidate would clear the majority threshold.
Da Silva, who led Brazil from 2003 to 2010, had won 48.3% of votes with nearly all of the count finished. Bolsonaro lagged close behind with roughly 43.2%, a tally that outperformed final preelection polls by about 6 points.
Da Silva will still enter the runoff as a slight favorite to defeat Bolsonaro, but the closer-than-expected first round vote will generate concerns about the accuracy of Brazil’s major polling, which had suggested that Bolsonaro was far weaker and that da Silva’s lead would expand in a one-on-one scenario.
It will also likely fuel Bolsonaro’s skepticism of polling that suggested da Silva could win the race outright Sunday with a clear majority of votes. Bolsonaro and his supporters cast doubt on those surveys throughout the race’s final weeks, and will likely see the president’s significant over-performance as a validation of their skepticism.
Bolsonaro allies won gubernatorial, congressional and Senate races Sunday night, another sign of potentially underestimated strength of his right-wing movement. And what looked like it could be a runaway win for da Silva even in the event of a runoff now appears to be a competitive race.
The head-to-head contest four years in the making will have massive implications for Brazil’s democracy, the fourth-largest in the world. Bolsonaro, a former Army captain who has long expressed affinity for the dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, ran for president in 2018 on a blatantly anti-democratic platform, has governed as the authoritarian-minded leader he promised to be, and has spent the last two years waging baseless attacks on the country’s electoral system.
As an ally of former U.S. President Donald Trump, he has made it clear that he does not intend to accept the results of an election defeat, sparking fears that he will attempt to provoke something akin to a Brazilian version of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol if he loses.
Da Silva, his supporters and many Brazilian political experts saw a win in Sunday’s first round as a key way to blunt any electoral challenge Bolsonaro may mount, and cut off his path to a second term in which he could further threaten the country’s democracy. Instead, the campaign will head to a runoff race that will conclude on Oct. 30, a period many observers fear Bolsonaro will use to further spread conspiracies and deepen his attempts to undermine the election.
“The second round will give Bolsonaro an extra month to cause as much turmoil as he can,” said Guilherme Casarões, a Brazilian political expert at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo.
A stronger-than-expected Bolsonaro, however, could also potentially win the runoff race, a result that would grant him a second term that he could use to consolidate many of his efforts to erode basic rights and Brazil’s democratic institutions.
“The odds look substantially bleaker for Brazilian democracy right now than they did 24 hours ago,” Filipe Campante, a Brazilian professor at Johns Hopkins University, tweeted as the results pointed toward a runoff. “Bolsonaro will have a real shot at winning the runoff, and in that case we are in deep trouble.”
Da Silva entered Sunday optimistic that he could pull off a convincing victory this weekend, especially after the release of two new polls that suggested he could garner more than 50% of votes on the eve of the election. He also pledged, however, to celebrate the result even if he fell short, in the hopes of keeping his supporters energized for the runoff race.
“We’re going to party, because we deserve it,” he said Saturday. “To be reborn from the ashes is a reason to celebrate.”
There were good signs for the leftist former president, though: Brazilian presidential elections are almost never decided in the first round, and Da Silva, as the challenger, still won 6 million more votes than Bolsonaro. He is not far from the majority that would carry him to a second round victory. And it’s unclear whether Bolsonaro can make up that gap in a head-to-head matchup, given that far more Brazilians say they won’t vote for him under any circumstance than who say the same about da Silva.
So despite Bolsonaro’s surprising strength, da Silva struck a positive tone in a press conference Sunday night.
“I wanted to win in the first round but that isn’t always possible,“ da Silva said. “I always thought we would win this election. And we are going to win this election.”
“It’s 30 more days to campaign,” da Silva said. “And I love campaigning.”
The leftist is attempting to complete a stunning political turnaround 12 years after he left office as “the most popular politician in the world,” as then-U.S. President Barack Obama branded him. From 2003 to 2010, da Silva oversaw explosive growth of Brazil’s economy that lifted millions out of poverty and made Brazil a powerful player on the global stage.
But he was imprisoned on a corruption conviction in 2018, as part of a wider probe that ensnared hundreds of Brazilian politicians and business leaders. That, along with the collapse of Brazil’s economy under his successor seemingly ended da Silva’s political career and tarnished his legacy.
A year later, The Intercept Brazil revealed substantial judicial impropriety in the case against him. His conviction was annulled, paving the way for a matchup with Bolsonaro that he’d wanted to wage in 2018 but couldn’t because the corruption case led to his banishment from the race.
Bolsonaro, who won an improbable victory in a 2018 election defined by discontent with a political establishment that da Silva had once epitomized and the Workers’ Party he’d founded, has spent his four years in office erodingBrazil’s democratic institutions and targeting the rights of its most marginalized populations. He has curbed protections for Indigenous Brazilians, sought to roll back rights for LGBTQ people, overseen record levels of deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest and unleashed Brazil’s violent police forces to kill even more indiscriminately.
He has routinely attacked journalists and political critics, and has brought Brazil’s military, which had largely abstained from civilian politics since the end of its dictatorship in 1985, roaring back into politics, appointing even more officers to government positions than served in the military government.
Support for Bolsonaro’s scandal-plagued and fitful government cratered during the coronavirus pandemic, which he cast as a conspiracy to bring down his presidency. He opposed lockdowns and sought to undermine faith in vaccines, even as the virus killed more than 680,000 Brazilians, the world’s second-highest official death toll.
Women voters, in particular, turned against Bolsonaro according to preelection polling, thanks largely to his machismo-fueled politics and a lack of focus on the economy even as food, energy and other basic costs rose sharply this summer.
A litany of Brazilian business elites, judges and lawyers ― many of whom had supported Bolsonaro four years ago ― this summer released a letter in defense of the country’s democracy that did not name Bolsonaro specifically but clearly implied that his election conspiracies had put it at risk. Senior officials and lawmakers in both the United States and Europe have also expressed major concerns about the election, warning Bolsonaro to stop threatening it and raising the possibility of sanctions if he tries to remain in power undemocratically.
Bolsonaro performed far better than expected in states like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s two most populous, and also bested preelection projections in other parts of the country’s south and southeast regions. A strong showing from da Silva in the Brazilian northeast, his traditional stronghold, was enough to give him the lead but not the majority he needed to end the election Sunday.
In the days before Sunday’s vote, Bolsonaro continued to ramp up his attacks on Brazil’s election system: He questioned the legitimacy of polls showing him behind da Silva while his party made false claims about election officials’ ability to manipulate votes.
Bolsonaro may still intensify his attacks, but the first-round results also suggest he still has a chance to win a second term legitimately ― something not even Bolsonaro seemed to believe before Sunday’s vote. That all but ensures that Brazil’s democracy is in for a tense month, and the sort of test it hasn’t faced since the end of its dictatorship nearly four decades ago.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
HERO OF THE BOURGEOISIE
Andrew Rosati and Isadora Calumby
Sun, October 2, 2022
(Bloomberg) -- Four years later, Brazilian pollsters once again underestimated support for Jair Bolsonaro.
With just over 99% of votes tallied on Sunday evening, the right-wing president had about 43% of the votes, propelling him to an Oct. 30 runoff against heavy favorite Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who took over 48% of votes.
The day before the election, two of Brazil’s most closely followed pollsters Datafolha and Ipec had Bolsonaro at 36% and 37%, respectively, when removing null and blank votes in the first round. And they indicated there was a real chance of Lula winning outright on Sunday evening.
In 2018, Bolsonaro, 67, rose from the fringe of congress to the nation’s top job on a shoestring budget, flouting the airwaves and traditional campaign methods while dominating the race on social media. Pollsters failed to fully capture his support in their numbers. This time around, it must be said, surveys were more accurate in projecting Lula’s support.
“We prevailed over the lies,” Bolsonaro told reporters Sunday evening in Brasilia, in reference to the polls.
There are multiple reasons an opinion survey could fail to gauge the real support for Bolsonaro. Fervent followers could refuse to talk to pollsters they don’t trust, more moderate supporters might be embarrassed to say they support the often-crass leader, or there may have been last-minute decisions to change a vote from a candidate that was running far behind the front-runners.
Andrei Roman, head of polling firm AtlasIntel, says many survey companies botched their calls on Bolsonaro, in part, because they over estimated the amount of poor voters, who tend to support Lula. Brazil has not conducted a census since 2010, leaving pollsters to come up with estimates for representative samples of things like religion and household income, that best reflect the electorate.
“The samples were always wrong, they were inflating the poor,” Roman said. “Even we underestimated Bolsonaro.” The last Atlas poll projected Bolsonaro to receive just over 41% of the total votes against more than 50% for Lula.
The surveys also undershot his ability to transfer support in local races. Bolsonaro has shown his backing makes a big differences for candidates for senate, governor and congress, Oliver Stuenkel, a professor of international relations at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Sao Paulo, wrote on Twitter.
Some of the biggest botched calls of the evening came in the state of Sao Paulo, the most populous, where Fernando Haddad, Lula’s Workers’ Party candidate for the presidency last election, was the favorite to take the governorship. He finished nearly seven percentage points behind Bolsonaro’s former Infrastructure Minister Tarcisio de Freitas, with the two heading to a run off. Similarly, in the state’s senate race, former astronaut and Bolsonaro’s ex-Science Minister Marcos Pontes clinched an unexpected victory.
In the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, Bolsonaro’s former Vice President Hamilton Mourao surprised and trounced the Worker’s Party candidate in the senate contest. The incumbent’s ex Human Rights Minister Damares Alves also won a senate seat in the capital, Brasilia.
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Mon, October 3, 2022
By Anthony Boadle
BRASILIA (Reuters) - A strong election night for allies of President Jair Bolsonaro have given his party the most seats in both chambers of Congress, highlighting the enduring strength of his conservative movement even if he falls short of re-election.
His right-wing Liberal Party (PL), won 99 seats in the 513-member lower house, up from 77, and right-leaning parties allied with Bolsonaro now control half the chamber.
The bigger surprise in Sunday's voting was in the Senate where Bolsonaro's party won 13 of the 27 seats up for grabs, with two more possible in second-round runoffs, a party spokesman said.
"Against all odds and everyone, we won 2 million more votes this year than in 2018," Bolsonaro posted on social media in Monday's early hours. "We also elected the largest benches in the lower house and the Senate, which was our main priority."
Bolsonaro helped elect allies to the Senate who had trailed in opinion polls, such as former ministers Damares Alves and Paulo Pontes. Alves, an evangelical ally, defeated the Senate candidate from Bolsonaro's own party.
The strong right-wing showing in legislative and gubernatorial races, especially in more affluent southeast Brazil, made Bolsonaro the election's big winner. He also denied his leftist presidential rival Luis Inacio Lula da Silva outright victory and consolidated a political base that can help him govern if he wins the Oct. 30 run-off.
While most political analysts still see former president Lula winning, his victory is no longer a slam dunk.
Lula's Workers Party won 10 more seats in the lower house of Congress, where it remains the second-largest party with 68 representatives. But if elected, Lula will face a harder time getting legislation through a more conservative Congress.
Bolsonaro's allies also made advances in state politics, including races for governor.
His former Infrastructure Minister Tarcisio Freitas, who took part in motorcycle rallies with Bolsonaro, won the most votes for governor of Sao Paulo, Brazil's largest state, and will face Lula ally Fernando Haddad in an Oct. 30 runoff.
Bolsonaro boasted of helping to get eight governors elected outright, with hopes of electing eight more in the second round.
"This is the greatest victory for patriots in the history of Brazil: 60% of the Brazilian territory will be governed by those who defend our values and fight for a freer nation," he tweeted.
Lula put an optimistic spin on the result, saying he was looking forward to another month on the campaign trail and the chance to debate Bolsonaro head-to-head.
(Reporting by Anthony Boadle, Maria Carolina Marcello and Ricardo Brito; Editing by Brad Haynes and Grant McCool)
Bolsonaro’s Movement Has Staying Power in Brazil Regardless of Runoff Election Results
Martha Beck and Daniel Carvalho
Mon, October 3, 2022
(Bloomberg) -- President Jair Bolsonaro’s influence in Brazilian politics will remain strong for the foreseeable future regardless of the result of the country’s Oct. 30 runoff after many of his allies won key congress and local government races.
Right-wing and centrist parties that support the president now account for around 60% of the lower house and Bolsonaro also got several former members of his cabinet elected to the senate. That guarantees him great influence in congress after a stronger-than-expected performance on Brazil’s general election Sunday.
Even if his leftist challenger Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, 76, wins the runoff, the firebrand president and his movement known as Bolsonarismo could make it hard for the next government to approve reforms or appoint members of Brazil’s powerful Supreme Court. Brazilian assets rallied on Monday morning on the assumption that in case of winning, Lula will pivot toward the center and prioritize business-friendly policies.
While Lula is still likely to win the election, the results in congress give Bolsonaro the ability to advance conservative proposals and block Lula’s progressive social agenda in both chambers, according to Flavia Biroli, a political scientist with the University of Brasilia.
“The president’s agenda got more resources and visibility,” she said.
What Bloomberg Economics Says
“Jair Bolsonaro’s stronger-than-expected performance in Sunday’s election may lead the Brazilian president to tone down his rhetoric and his competitor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, to adopt a more pro-market agenda in order to woo moderate voters ahead of the second-round vote. Markets will likely welcome the shifts.”
-- Adriana Dupita, Latin America economist
In the lower house, the Liberal Party that supports Bolsonaro now has the largest number of lawmakers after adding 19 new legislators, according to preliminary data from Superior Electoral Court. Although PL, as the party is known, traditionally supports whoever runs the country, many of its members who got seats on Sunday’s election are ideologically aligned with the president.
Bolsonaro, 67, also benefited from a strong showing in local elections, with his allies winning outright eight of 27 states including Rio de Janeiro, with six others still at play in a second round including Sao Paulo, the richest in the country, where one of his closest advisers lead results. Controlling some of Brazil’s top states will give a boost to the president as he plots his campaign to challenge Lula in the second round.
In total, Bolsonaro got over 51 million votes on Sunday, or 43% of valid votes compared to Lula’s 48%. His three sons remain legislators, with Flavio Bolsonaro being federal senator and Carlos Bolsonaro a council representative in Rio. And even if Eduardo Bolsonaro got less than half of the votes that he received in 2018, he was still re-elected as a lawmaker for Sao Paulo in the lower house.
Trump ‘happy to have helped’ Bolsonaro reach runoff in Brazil
Brett Samuels
Mon, October 3, 2022
Former President Trump on Monday took some credit for Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s performance in Brazil’s elections a day earlier, where the right-wing incumbent outperformed polling expectations to force a runoff.
“So happy to have helped a great person and leader get into the difficult to achieve, with other Conservative candidates and certain difficult rules and regulations, run off for President of Brazil,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform.
“The Voters made a great decision in giving such strong backing to the brilliant and very hard working current President, Jair Bolsonaro. Now, for the sake of Brazil and its future greatness, they have to get Jair over the finish line, against a Radical Left Socialist, on October 30th. Go Bolsonaro!!!” Trump posted.
Trump, in a post shortly after the results came in, congratulated Bolsonaro for “greatly ‘outperforming’ inaccurate early Fake News Media polls.”
Bolsonaro, who was dubbed the “Trump of the Tropics” upon his election four years ago, advanced to a runoff against former leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. With nearly all of the ballots counted, da Silva received roughly 48 percent of the vote to Bolsonaro’s 43 percent. Neither candidate exceeded 50 percent, meaning there will be an Oct. 30 runoff between the two men.
Polls leading up to the race showed Bolsonaro facing a wide deficit and that da Silva could prevail without needing a runoff, leading Trump and his allies to compare it to recent U.S. elections where Trump over-performed polling averages.
Like Trump, Bolsonaro has also cast doubt on Brazil’s election infrastructure and has not said definitively whether he will accept the results of the election.
“There’s always the possibility of something abnormal happening in a fully computerized system,” Bolsonaro said Sunday, according to The New York Times.
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