By the Brazil Solidarity Initiative

Ed. Note: edited for length

On October 2nd, progressive candidate Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva was on top in the first round of Brazil’s Presidential election. Lula won 48.43% of the vote, with over 57 million voters backing him at the ballot box. Despite the impression given in some media reports, this was not a close election. Lula received over 6 million more votes than his nearest rival, the far-right incumbent president Jair Bolsonaro, who came second with 42.20%.  Lula was just 1.5% short of passing the 50% threshold needed to win the presidency in the first round. There will now be a second-round run-off on October 30th.

Lula’s result was one of the best in the history of his Workers Party (PT).  It has fielded a presidential candidate eight times and won the presidency four times since the return of democracy to Brazil in 1985. Lula’s strong support reflected the successes of his previous term in office after being elected as Brazil’s first working class president in 2003.  His social programs helped lift tens of millions from poverty and his government tackled the deep-rooted inequality and discrimination that continues to scar Brazil. As a result, when Lula left office in 2011, he had record-high approval ratings of 83 per cent. He was subsequently arrested and jailed on trumped-up charges orchestrated by powerful elites in Brazil and Washington. Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s successor as President and his former Chief of Staff, was ousted as President in 2016 via a parliamentary coup. 

The unjust jailing of Lula opened the door to the 2018 election of Jair Bolsonaro, a strong supporter of Brazil’s past military dictatorship under which he had served as a military officer. In office, Bolsonaro repeatedly undermined the rights of women, LGBT, Black and Indigenous communities and environmental activists. 

His attacks on democratic freedoms have left many fearing that Bolsonaro may not accept the results if he is defeated in the run-off on October 30th. Bolsonaro is known as the “Trump of the Tropics” and some fear he could seek to imitate Trump’s ‘Stop the Steal’ tactics. Bolsonaro maintains close links with Trump’s former key strategist Steve Bannon who has described Brazil’s 2022 presidential election as the “most important of all time in South America”. 

In the run-up to the first-round vote, Bolsonaro and his cabinet ministers, nearly half of whom are military generals, baselessly sought to bring into question the integrity of the election process. They suggested that the military should have a greater role in overseeing the election and even threatened to reject the results if Bolsonaro loses. Bolsonaro told supporters that “If necessary, we will go to war” over the election results. His son called on the growing number of Brazilian gun-holders to become “Bolsonaro volunteers”.

Source: https://nocoupinbrazil.wordpress.com 10/4/22