Brazil presidential elections : Former president Lula da Silva has the votes but not the victory

Brazil’s presidential election has been inconclusive in the first round and has now spilled to a runoff. The first round of voting in which 99.8 per cent of voting machines counted saw Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva — the left-wing challenger to the incumbent far-right Jair Bolsonaro — bagging 48.4 per cent of the valid votes, failing to reach the halfway mark. Bolsonaro, on the other hand, got 43.3 per cent of the votes, according to the Superior Electoral Tribunal. The tone for the highly polarised election was set by the tense and violent campaign and has now been extended by four more weeks. The runoff – the second-round vote – is now set to take place on October 30.

Nearly all leading opinion polls had projected former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva — popularly known as Lula — the frontrunner with a commanding lead and some even outright handed him the victory after the first round. Lula’s eight-year tenure, starting in 2003 and going on till 2011, has largely been multiple shades of grey. On one hand, he is credited with building an extensive social welfare programme, helping lift tens of millions of Brazilians out of poverty. However, Lula’s regime is also tainted by vast corruption scandals that marred his Workers’ Party along with its politicians and entangled some business executives considered close to the administration.

So deep was the Workers’ Party in these scandals that Lula himself was convicted for corruption and money laundering, which led to a 19-month term in prison. Lula and his supporters have widely claimed that the charges were fabricated and framed. However, his imprisonment meant that he could not run against Bolsonaro in the 2018 presidential elections despite numbers indicating his party was in the lead.

Interestingly, Sergio Moro — the former judge who temporarily jailed Lula — won a Senate seat in the first round of voting on Sunday (October 2). Moro was Bolsonaro’s former justice minister and had defied opinion polls to win. Among the other noteworthy winners in team Bolsonaro who made big wins in the first round was former environment minister Ricardo Salles — widely derided by critics as the “anti-environment minister” for opening up the rainforest to commercial activity — who had to quit in June last year in the midst of investigations regarding allegations on whether he had aided the export of illegally-cut timber from the Amazon rainforests.

The other big winner from Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party was General Eduardo Pazuello — the former health minister of Brazil who was ousted for mishandling the Covid-19 pandemic, leaving hundreds of thousands dead in the country. Gen Pazuello was an army officer with no medical training and he was replaced by Marcelo Queiroga – a cardiologist.

There has been a deep-rooted resentment against Bolsonaro. Brazil has been in turmoil domestically and has been facing the heat in the international arena as well because of Bolsonaro’s policies. There has been rampant and accelerated deforestation in the Amazon rainforests aided abetted by his administration, he has scoffed and sneered at the Covid-19 pandemic even when his people were dying in droves, he has embraced unproven drugs over certified Covid-19 vaccines, and has scathingly and harshly attacked his political rivals, judges, journalists, health professionals, and by far anyone who has dissented.

Despite all this, however, Bolsonaro’s support still seems to be strong. For Lula, this means that he needs to veer more towards the Centre and do it soon enough so that he stands at making a mark in the second round four weeks from now.