Brazil elections: Lula falls short of a majority against Jair Bolsonaro

Now, the leader of the Workers’ Party must now wait for the second round run-off on October 30.

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (Right), presidential candidate of the Workers’ Party, greets supporters during a campaign rally in Brazil’s Belo Horizonte, on October 9. Most election observers are confident that Lula will emerge a winner. | Photo Credit: AFP / DOUGLAS MAGNO

It was a bit of a disappointment for former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and his Workers’ Party that they could not win the presidency in the first round election itself. According to Brazilian electoral laws, a candidate who gets 50 per cent of the votes in the first round wins and there is no need for a second round run-off. Lula, as he is popularly known, narrowly failed to make the cut-off, winning almost 49 per cent of the votes polled. Most pollsters in Brazil had predicted an outright win for Lula and a comprehensive defeat for the incumbent President, Jair Bolsonaro; most opinion polls gave Bolsonaro only 36-38 per cent of the votes.

In the event, Bolsonaro surprised everyone by getting 43 per cent of the votes. Many of the right-wing candidates running for Governors and the legislature also fared far better than predicted. Bolsonaro’s right-wing Liberal Party won 99 seats in the 513-member Lower House. More than 300 out of the 533 sitting legislators belong to extreme right-wing parties. Claudio Castro, the far-right Governor of Rio de Janeiro won by a landslide. Seven of Bolsonaro’s Cabinet Ministers won their seats in the National Congress. Among those were the Health and Environment Ministers. The Brazilian government was heavily criticised for its handling of the pandemic and the deforestation of the Amazon region.

The country, the largest and most populous in Latin America, is getting ready for a tense run-off to be held on October 30. Most observers of the Brazilian political scene are confident that Lula will cross the final hurdle without much of a problem. It will be a stunning comeback for the 77-year-old politician. Just three years ago, he was in jail, sentenced to serve 22 years on trumped-up corruption charges. Before his sentencing, he was prevented from contesting in the last presidential election, and this allowed Bolsonaro to easily defeat a weaker candidate from the Workers’ Party. Last year, the Supreme Court threw out the case against him, saying that the investigating judge, Sergio Moro, was “biased”. Bolsonaro had appointed Moro as his Justice Minister after becoming President, apparently for the services he rendered.

When Lula completed his second term in 2011, his popularity rating had touched a phenomenal 80 per cent. In his two terms as President starting from 2003, Lula had transformed Brazil. At least 20 million Brazilians were lifted from abject poverty in those years, the economy was revitalised, and the country became an important player on the international stage. Much of the credit for the creation of the BRICS grouping should go to him. It was under his leadership that Brazil successfully bid to stage the Olympics.

Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva (Left) and Daniela do Waguinho wave at supporters during a campaign rally at Belford Roxo in the Baixada Fluminense area on October 11. | Photo Credit: Getty Images / WAGNER MEIER

Under Bolsonaro, inflation is now in double digits. The mishandling of the pandemic also ravaged the economy, and the number of people beneath the poverty line has increased to 33 per cent. Lula has pledged to widen the safety net for the poor, increase the minimum wage, bring down inflation, provide housing and food for the needy, and create new jobs by commissioning big infrastructure projects. He promises, if elected, to raise taxes on the rich in order to finance infrastructure projects.

Lula, speaking after the first round results, said that he was looking forward to the campaign ahead and the chance to debate with Bolsonaro. “We can compare the Brazil he built and the Brazil we built,” he said. The abstention rate in the first round was the highest the country has witnessed in 28 years. Around 21 per cent of the electorate did not cast their votes. An opinion poll taken in the second week of October predicted that the voters who did not cast their votes and are undecided about their choice are overwhelmingly leaning towards Lula in the final round.

The candidates who finished third and fourth, Simone Tebet of the centre-right and Giro Gomes of the centre-left, have urged their supporters to rally behind Lula in the final round. Tebet received nearly five million votes. Lula has gone out of his way to court parties that were previously opposed to the Workers’ Party. Lula’s running mate is Geraldo Alckmin, a centre-right politician who contested against him in the 2007 presidential election. Lula has said that he plans to give the finance portfolio to his Vice President if elected.

Trump connection

However, the question most Brazilians are asking is whether Bolsonaro, known as the “Trump of the Tropics”, will concede defeat. Even after his better-than-expected showing in the first round, Bolsonaro refused to acknowledge the validity of the results, saying that he would wait for the military to double check the results.

“Our system is not 100 per cent ironclad,” he told the media. “There’s always the possibility of something abnormal happening in a fully computerised system.” For the first time, the Brazilian military conducted a parallel counting of the votes under orders from Defence Minister Gen. Paulo Sergio Olivera. The Minister was hand-picked by Bolsonaro, superseding senior army generals. The army has still not officially commented on the results.

In the run-up to the first round, Bolsonaro questioned the legitimacy of the country’s electoral process. From the time opinion polls showed him to be trailing, Bolsonaro threatened to not recognise the results. He demanded a change to Brazil’s much-praised and emulated electronic voting system, claiming that it could be easily hacked or manipulated, and reintroduction of printed ballots. He is apparently taking a page out of former US President Donald Trump’s playbook.

Many of the election deniers from Trump’s Republican Party were present at a conference hosted by Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party last year. Among them was Donald Trump Jr. The former American President’s son claimed that this year’s Brazilian elections could be hacked by the Chinese. Steve Bannon, Trump’s main political adviser and extreme right-wing ideologue, is on record as saying that Bolsonaro can lose only “if the machines steal the elections”. After a Brazilian congressional panel recommended that Bolsonaro be charged “for crimes against humanity” for his gross mishandling of the pandemic, Donald Trump immediately issued a statement saying that Brazil “was lucky to have a man like Bolsonaro working for them”.

US President Joseph Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, on a visit to Brazil last year had advised Bolsonaro to respect the results of the election. Brazil is the continent’s second largest democracy. Trump and his allies in the Republican party have been building contacts with like-minded parties in Latin America and Asia. Trump is known to share a personal rapport with leaders like Bolsonaro, Modi in India, right-wing leaders in Hungary, Poland, Italy, and the UK.

Trump’s electoral success is to a large extent due to the Christian evangelical vote. In Brazil, too, the evangelical vote continues to be solidly behind Bolsonaro. Brazil was once predominantly Catholic, but now evangelical Christians make up more than 31 per cent of the population. Industrialists, big landowners, military and police personnel, and gun aficionados are also staunch Bolsonaro supporters. Bolsonaro has made guns much more freely available to citizens after coming to power. He once said that it is written in the Bible that everyone should own a gun.

Brazil’s Election Commission said that the objections raised by Bolsonaro and his supporters about the election process were baseless and “a waste of focus”. Widespread fraud and rigging were prevalent in Brazil when only paper ballots were being used.

From the very first day after becoming President, Bolsonaro showed his contempt for democratic norms. Within no time, he locked horns with Brazil’s Supreme Court which was investigating serious cases of corruption against Bolsonaro and his immediate family. In the middle of the year, a Supreme Court judge, Alexandre de Moraes, ordered the arrest of a group of businessmen known to be close to the President. In a group chat on WhatsApp, two of the businessmen had advocated a military coup in case Lula was elected to the presidency.

In recent years, the Supreme Court has abrogated more powers to itself. According to Dias Toffoli, a Supreme Court judge, this has been done to protect Brazil’s democracy. “Brazil lives with the same incitement to hatred that took the lives in the US Capitol invasion, and democratic institutions must do everything possible to avoid scenarios like January 6, 2021, which shocked the world”, the judge had said in a statement. This year, the court sentenced a Brazilian Congressman close to the President to nine years in prison for casting aspersions on Supreme Court judges. Bolsonaro, however, pardoned the Congressman the next day.

Bolsonaro has said that if he is re-elected, he will fill the Supreme Court with his hand-picked appointees. He has already appointed a staunch evangelical pastor and lawyer, Andre Mendonca, as a Supreme Court judge. With the new powers the Supreme Court has abrogated to itself, Lula could face problems if he wins the presidency.

Ruling parties and army

Throughout his political career, Bolsonaro has gone out of his way to curry favour with Brazil’s military establishment. After becoming President, he packed his Cabinet and government with serving and retired army officers. Since 2019, ten of the 23 Cabinet positions have been occupied by serving or retired military personnel. His Vice President, Hamilton Mourao, is a retired general. A former army officer himself, Bolsonaro has waxed nostalgic about the brutal military dictatorship that rode roughshod over Brazilian democracy between 1964 and 1985. During Lula’s two earlier terms, the Workers’ Party and the army leadership had a cordial relationship. The relationship deteriorated after Lula’s successor, Dilma Roussef, instituted a Truth Commission to investigate crimes committed during the period of the army dictatorship. Roussef, herself was tortured by the military regime and was imprisoned for two and a half years from 1970 to 1972.

Brazil’s President and candidate for re-election Jair Bolsonaro attends the National Sweet Fair in Pelotas, Brazil, on October 11. He surprised everyone by getting 43 per cent of votes in the first round. | Photo Credit: REUTERS / DIEGO VARA

But, despite Bolsonaro’s best efforts, the army leadership may be reluctant to go all the way in thwarting the will of the people. There is a shared belief among conservative Brazilians that it was the military that prevented the country from becoming communist in the 1960s.

The Brazilian army has an institutional memory and has not forgotten Bolsonaro’s career record. While serving as captain, Bolsonaro led a vocal campaign for higher salaries and better amenities for the middle-ranking officers corps. In fact, army prosecutors had accused Bolsonaro of planning to bomb military offices and camps to protest against low salaries and a cut in the military budget.

Serious differences of opinion had also cropped up in 2021 between Bolsonaro and the army leadership after the sacking of the Defence Minister, a former army man. His replacement by a relatively junior military officer prompted the three service chiefs to hand in their resignations. Influential sections in the army had become openly critical of the President’s handling of the pandemic. Bolsonaro, in all probability, will earn the dubious distinction of being the first President since the end of military rule to not win a re-election. Multiparty democracy was reintroduced in Brazil in 1988.

The Crux

• Lula narrowly failed to make the cut-off, winning almost 49 per cent of the votes polled.
• In the run-up to the first round, Bolsonaro questioned the legitimacy of the country’s electoral process.
• After the first round results, Bolsonaro refused to acknowledge the validity of the results, saying that he would wait for the military to double check the results.
• Bolsonaro has said that if he is re-elected, he will fill the Supreme Court with his hand-picked appointees.