brazil elections lula bolsonaro ballot who wins

Brazil is on the eve of presidential elections. And it is the total confrontation between Lula and Bolsonaro. During the televised debate preceding the vote on Sunday, October 30, big words flew between the two challengers. The stakes are high: the presidency of one of the most important countries in the world.

“You have made Brazil a more isolated country than Cuba,” the left-wing leader told his right-wing rival. Bolsonaro responded by linking Lula’s governments to Latin American dictatorships and recalled work funded by PT governments in other countries. The president then played on religious terms and addressing the opponent said to him: “Do I have to exorcise you so that you stop lying?”.

Photo Ansa / Epa Antonio Lacerda

Brazil’s Supreme Court is also intervening in the final hours of the election campaign. The magistrates will ask the government to reactivate an international fund of one billion dollars aimed at protecting the forests of the Amazon, while Brazil faces galloping deforestation. After Bolsonaro took over as president in 2019, the fund stalled. Brazil’s incumbent president has weakened environmental protections in the Amazon, arguing that commercial agriculture and mining are needed in the region to reduce poverty. Since then, deforestation has increased, driven by illegal logging and gold mining.

Brazil in the balance until the last

But can Bolsonaro really win the ballot and be re-elected president of Brazil? It’s not impossible because Lula, the favorite, didn’t win in the first round. The elections on Sunday October 2 had decreed the need for a second round between the two main candidates. On the one hand, the outgoing head of state, on the other Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, former president between 2003 and 2011. In the first round, Lula (Pt, left) obtained 57,254,672 votes, or 48, 43%, while Jair Bolsonaro (Pl, right) obtained 51,070,672, or 43.20%.

Photo Ansa / Epa Antonio Antonio Lacerda

Lula in front

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 76, icon of the left in all of South America, therefore did not confirm the predictions of victory. But the ballot is nothing more than an “extension”, he himself commented after the first round, spurring the disappointed. Back in São Paulo de San Bernardo do Campo, his electoral stronghold where he had voted, Lula had waited for the answer at the Novotel Jaraguà, with his wife Janja, the deputy designated for his future government, Geraldo Alckmin, and the former president Dilma Roussef. .

By the end of the evening, he had reached the Paulista Avenue, reserved for the crowd of the turning point, and reduced instead to the theater for a symbolic embrace with a few tens of thousands of supporters. It may be that on the evening of October 30, things are different. And Lula is resoundingly returning to power in Brazil after a full rehabilitation following a short term imprisonment in recent years for corruption.

Photo Ansa / Epa André Coelho