| Luiz
Inacio Lula da Silva holds the hand of his wife, Rosangela da Silva,
after winning the presidential run-off election in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on
Oct. 30. (Carol de Souza/AFP via Getty Images) |
RIO DE JANEIRO — Former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva reclaimed the office Sunday on pledges to defend democracy, save the Amazon rainforest
and bring social justice to Latin America’s largest nation, defeating
Brazil’s Trumpian incumbent in a remarkable political comeback some
three years after he walked out of a prison cell.
The victory for Lula,
who served two terms as president from 2003 to 2010, returns a leftist
titan of the Global South to the world stage, where his progressive
voice will stand in sharp contrast to that of right-wing — and now
one-term — President Jair Bolsonaro.
For Latin America, Lula’s return to the Planalto Palace adds the
regional giant to a streak of wins by the left: Lula joins a club of
leaders who have now bested the political right in Colombia, Chile,
Peru, Honduras, Argentina and Mexico.
His win, which followed a slugfest of a
campaign in a deeply divided country awash in fake news and explosive
rhetoric, came amid allegations of official suppression of the vote by Bolsonaro’s allies in the police.
Overall, the race sounded strong echoes of the 2020 showdown in the United States between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
It pitted Bolsonaro, 67, a staunch Trump ally, against Lula, 77, a
stalwart of the traditional left who moved to the center during the
campaign. Lula’s strength lay in female and low-income voters —
particularly the Northeast, heavily populated by people of color — but
also in social progressives and power brokers disturbed by Bolsonaro’s
authoritarian bent.
Lula has pledged a unity government to work on mending
the breaches in Brazilian society of the kind that, in an era of toxic
politics, have taken root in democracies across the globe. The margin —
Lula won by less than two percentage points — was the closest in
Brazilian history. It was the first time an incumbent ran for a second
term and lost.
“We have reached the end of one of the most
important elections in our history,” Lula told supporters in São Paulo.
“An election that put face to face two opposing projects of the country
and that today has only one winner: the Brazilian people.
The
city’s famous Paulista Avenue became a sea of pro-Lula celebrants. “Lula
is a myth. The Brazilian Mandela,” said Jussara Brito, 50, a nurse who
said she saw too many patients die from the coronavirus, which Bolsonaro dismissed as a “little cold.” “Seeing Bolsonaro leave is a relief. He is a murderer,” she said.
In the capital, Brasilia, hundreds of
Bolsonaro supporters gathered in the Esplanada, where a man with a
loudspeaker urged the crowds not to concede and to wait for their
“leader’s statement.” “We are with you, President Bolsonaro,” he said.
“Lula thief, you belong in prison!” the crowd chanted in unison. Late
Sunday, reports emerged of Bolsonaro loyalists blocking roads.
In
Mato Grosso, the company that manages highways in the state said at
least four stretches of a highway were blocked. In Santa Catarina,
Bolsonaro supporters also cut off a stretch of a highway across the
state, according to the UOL outlet.
“Lula will not be our president,” says a woman in a video from the Mato Grosso protest shared by O Globo.
| A supporter of Brazil's President and presidential candidate, Jair Bolsonaro, cries on Oct. 30. (Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters) |
As voting unfolded earlier in the
day, Brazil’s most bitterly fought election since the collapse of the
military dictatorship in 1985 descended into allegations of police attempting to suppress the vote. The
Federal Highway Police, an organization closely allied with Bolsonaro,
allegedly set up roadblocks to delay voters in the country’s
impoverished Northeast and other centers of support for Lula.
Highway
police director Silvinei Vasques had earlier posted a call to vote for
Bolsonaro on Instagram, the newspaper O Globo reported. It was later
deleted. Sen. Randolfe Rodrigues, a Lula supporter, demanded his
immediate arrest. Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, Brazil’s
chief election official, ordered Vasques to stop the operations
immediately or face personal fines of nearly $100,000 per hour.
Later
Sunday, however, Moraes sought to calm concerns of a broader effort
that could taint the vote. He said checkpoints had delayed, but not
prevented, voters from casting their ballots, and he would not extend
voting hours. “There was no prejudice to the right to vote … There is no
need to overstate this issue,” Moraes said. “There were no cases where
voters went home.”
Despite the statement from Moraes, who has
frequently locked horns with Bolsonaro, Lula’s Worker’s Party demanded
an extension of the polls in the 560 places where it said “illegal”
police operations had taken place.
Brazil’s Superior Electoral
Court announced the result just before 8 p.m. Brasilia time. Bolsonaro
did not immediately concede the race, and uncertainty remained over
whether he would. As recently as Friday night, he said, “whoever has the
most votes wins. That is democracy.”
But he and his supporters
also laid the groundwork to contest a loss with months of allegations of
fraud. Bolsonaro summoned foreign diplomats in July to cast doubt on
electronic voting. Some analysts predicted that Bolsonaro, who followed much of the Trump playbook
during his rise to power and while in office, could do the same in
defeat: refuse to concede and declare Lula’s presidency illegitimate.
Another parallel: Bolsonaro’s loss comes as the specter of criminal investigations hangs over him and his family.
Some
of Bolsonaro’s allies encouraged him to concede. Speaking to
journalists late Sunday, Moraes said he had called both candidates to
inform them of the result before the court’s announcement of the winner,
but suggested the conversations had been short and to the point.
Bolsonaro, he said, had responded “with extreme politeness.” He
described the elections as clean and secure, and insisted there was no
“real risk” the results could be contested.
In the United States,
the contest took on the feel of a proxy war between Democrats and
Republicans. In a letter to President Biden, congressional Democrats
warned that Bolsonaro’s “reckless and dangerous rhetoric about electoral
fraud raise[s] serious fears” that he will try to “impede a peaceful
transfer of power if he loses.” Trump, meanwhile, endorsed Bolsonaro,
telling Brazilians in a video shared on the incumbent’s Twitter account
on Saturday that “you have a chance to elect one of the great people in
all of politics and in all of leadership of countries.”
Biden was quick to recognize Lula’s victory Sunday.
With 99.99 percent of the vote counted, Lula was declared the winner with 50.90 percent of the vote. Bolsonaro had 49.10 percent. The transfer of power is set for the first days of January.
| A
supporter of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva displays stickers on his face
while gathering with fellow supporters in Brasilia on Oct. 30. (Diego
Vara/Reuters) |
The candidates sparred over who
would offer more assistance for the poor and who would raise the minimum
wage. But they also became deeply mired in the culture wars now
emblematic of modern democracies plagued by polarization. For Lula, the job of national healer will not be easy.
Many
economists and political analysts view Lula as a pragmatic elder
statesman, but Bolsonaro’s core supporters revile him. Danya Dorado, a
44-year-old housewife, who waved a flag with Bolsonaro’s face in
Brasilia, described herself as “anguished” by the results — which she
did not believe to be true. “I am ready to fight for my country because I
do not want my children and grandchildren to live in a second
Venezuela,” she said.
Election Day in Brazil
became a global experiment on the power of misinformation. False
narratives spread by Bolsonaro and his supporters in public comments and
on social media insisted Lula would close churches and open unisex
bathrooms in schools. Lula dismissed those claims as blatant lies, but
many Bolsonaro supporters at the polls Sunday steadfastly believed them.
“We
can’t just have one bathroom for a kid to use with men of my age,” said
Mario Antonio Castro, an actor who voted for Bolsonaro in Rio de
Janeiro’s Flamengo neighborhood. He said he’d also heard that Lula was
offering “beer and steak” to those who voted for him.
Others saw a
civic duty in voting out Bolsonaro, who in recent days claimed that
Lula’s strong support in the Brazilian Northeast — a region with a
disproportionately large population of people of color — was due to high
“illiteracy rates” there.
“I’m a Black woman and I am a mother
of three kids,” said Vanda Ventura, a 49-year old stylist who voted in
Rio. “The government in Brasilia does not represent me.” Asked if she
thought Black people in Brazil would vote for Bolsonaro, she said: “Not
the Black people I know. … The Black people who want liberty, who want
to go to college, and want to grow and who want food will not vote for
this genocidal man.”
In the capital, national tensions came to a
head at a downtown polling station, where several voters wearing the
telltale colors of their candidates — green and yellow for Bolsonaro,
red for Lula — squared off in slur-shouting screaming matches, signaling the deep polarization in the country.
“Bolsonaro
out!” a young man wearing a red shirt shouted at the polling station at
the University Center of Brasilia. “Maconheiro!” — a derogatory word in
Portuguese that roughly translates as ‘stoner’ — the woman shouted
back.
The same woman engaged another Lula supporter in a similar
shouting match, leading police to intervene. Leonardo Rodrigues de
Jesus, Bolsonaro’s nephew and a former chief of staff for his eldest
son, told a Washington Post reporter that a man shouting at a woman was
“precisely the kind of leftist behavior” the country needed to get rid
of.
Critics say Bolsonaro, a former army officer, has undermined
democracy by stocking the prosecutor’s office and police with loyalists
while appointing current and former generals to his cabinet and other
senior posts. If he had won the race, they feared, he might have sought
to expand the Supreme Court, a body he has said is biased against him.
Lula,
casting himself as the defender of Brazil’s young democracy, garnered
the backing of center-right leaders and former opponents, including
former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso.
Bolsonaro, known for a
blunt manner that included insults aimed at women, people of color and
the LGBTQ community, connected with supporters through fiery social
media posts. As the coronavirus pandemic hit the country hard, he
suggested vaccines could turn people into “reptiles,” falsely claimed a
link between the vaccine and AIDS, and touted unproven treatments
against covid-19. Bolsonaro dismissed the virus as a “little flu” and
told Brazilians to stop “whining” and get back to work. He often berated
the free press.
During the first televised debate in the current
campaign, Brazilian journalist Vera Magalhães asked him about the
country’s coronavirus vaccination rate. “I think you go to sleep
thinking about me,” Bolsonaro responded to her. “You have a crush on
me.”
But Bolsonaro often reserved his harshest comments for the man he saw as his personal nemesis: Lula.
A
former shoeshine boy from a poor northeastern family who lost a finger
at age 19 in a factory accident, Lula became a union leader and
co-founder of the left-wing Worker’s Party. After three failed runs at
the nation’s highest office, he won his first term as president in 2002
and reelection four years later.
His victory initially rattled investors, who feared the rise of a radical leftist.
Lula
would calm those fears by dragging his party toward the center while he
leveraged the global commodities boom of the 2000s to increase social
spending and launch programs that reduced the hunger rate, lifted
millions out of poverty and sent the children of poor Brazilian families
to university for the first time. Former U.S. President Barack Obama
called him “the most popular president on Earth.” He left office in 2011
with a second term in 2011 with an approval rating above 80 percent.
His
administration was marred by political scandal, including a vote-buying
case in Congress that engulfed members of his inner circle. Claims have
emerged that Lula knew about it. He has maintained he did not.
In
2018, Lula turned himself in to serve a 12-year sentence on separate
charges of accepting bribes from one of the country’s major construction
companies. Though Lula maintained his innocence, his arrest kept him
out of the 2018 election that Bolsonaro won. To the outrage of
Bolsonaro, who has called Lula “a nine-fingered thief,” he was released
from prison in 2019 when the Supreme Court ruled he had been denied due
process. The charges against him were annulled two years later.
“They didn’t lock up a man,” he declared on the day he was freed. “They tried to kill an idea. But an idea can’t be destroyed.”
During
the campaign, Lula largely spoke in broad themes. He promised to fight
hunger and poverty and to slow the deforestation of the Amazon
rainforest, which accelerated under Bolsonaro, and suggested an increase
of taxes on the rich. Few observers believe he is likely to propose
massive spending plans or take radical steps to redistribute wealth.
“Lula
understands well that all policies have to be fiscally sustainable and
that large budget deficits will backfire in his attempt to be
progressive in social issues,” said Paulo Calmon, a University of
Brasilia professor.
What Bolsonaro does next will be key. Some
say he might leave the country to avoid the possibility of prosecution
for alleged crimes including a bloated vaccine deal at the health
ministry and mishandling the pandemic. Others expect him to remain in
Brazil, transforming himself into a formidable opposition leader who
will seek to undermine Lula and stoke national divisions as he bides his
time for the next election.
Bolsonaro can count on a loyal base
of outspoken national lawmakers, as well as powerful governors in some
of the country’s largest states. His most powerful weapon remains an
army of digital followers, which he has wielded as a weapon to build or
destroy political careers.
In governing a divided nation, Lula
might benefit from the nature of Brazilian politics. Victors may draw
lawmakers who did not back them during the campaign to fall in line with
pork barrel spending and backroom deals.
But some observers see a wild card this time around.
“The
nature of the right in Brazil has changed,” said Guilherme Casarões, a
political analyst at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Sao Paulo. “All
they cared about before were office positions and resources, so Lula
could run an administration even with the help of the right. But there’s
a new kind of right, a super ideological kind of right, a Bolsonarista
kind of right. And the pro-Bolsonaro movement is not about political
pragmatism. It’s about total loyalty and submission to what Bolsonaro
thinks is right.”
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