In the October 2022 Brazilian presidential election, turnout was 79.05% in the first round and 79.41% in the second. Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva narrowly won the runoff with 50.9% vs. 49.1% for Bolsonaro. In the first round, the candidate of the Workers Party, Lula, had won 48.4%, his only serious rival, the incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro had ended up with 43.2%, better than expected, which led almost to a photo-finish.
On October 30, 2022 the incumbent Jair Bolsonaro (*1955), a far-right populist, a champion of homophobia, misogyny, pro-gun, pro-life and anti-establishment positions, lost the Brazilian presidential election but did not ran around like his friend Donald Trump in the United States claiming that he had won. Evangelicals, who make up roughly 30% of the Brazilian electorate, largely voted for Bolsonaro despite the fact that Bolsonaro and his family have little respect for the principles in the Holy Bible.
Jair Bolsonaro’s anti-establishment positioning is ridiculous insofar as he entered politics decades ago as Councilor of Rio de Janeiro (1989–1991), subsequently as a member of the Brazilian, federal parliament as a deputy for Rio de Janeiro (1991–2018), before becoming Brazil’s president, the highest political position in the country.
After the presidential election runoff, the heads of the electoral agency, the Senate President, the Attorney General and several Supreme Court justices appeared together on television announcing Lula as the winner. They tried to avoid a mess similar to the one created by Trump in the USA. Some Bolsonaro voters contested the result, but they could not create a mass mouvement. Overall, the election was free and fair.
On November 1, 2022 the former Brazilian military officer and former president Jair Bolsonaro did not acknowledge his defeat in the presidential election but stated that he would “comply with the Constitution”, meaning he was implicitly ready to accept his defeat. Nevertheless, on November 23, he and his party partly disputed the election result, without providing evidence. They claimed that there were problems with some electronic voting machines. But they only claimed it for the runoff election. Why not for the first round? Because, on that same day, October 2, 2022 Jair Bolsonaro and his party were the relative winners of the parliamentary election with the PL (Liberal Party) ending up with with 16.64% and 99 seats in the 513-seat Chamber of Deputies; in the Senate, 27 of the 81 seats were up for grabs and Jair Bolonsaro’s PL was the relative winner with 25.4% of the vote, now controlling 13 out the of 81 seats, and his right-wing allies winning 19 of the 27 seats up for grabs. Alexandre de Moraes, the president of the Supreme Election Committee, rightly said that the protest was only receivable if it included also the first round of the election on October 2. In short, the baseless protest was dismissed.
Jair Bolsonaro did not attend Lula’s inaugration but instead flew or fled to Florida, to meet his friend Donald Trump and to escape possible prosecution in Brazil. In articles as well as in the book O Negócio do Jair (Zahar, September 2022, 315 pages; order the Kindle edition or paperback, written in Portuguese: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de), the journalist Juliana Dal Piva of the Brazilian UOL media group had revealed that Jair Bolsonaro and his close family had bought 107 properties, houses, flats and plots of land over the last 30 years. At least 51 properties were paid cash. The irony is that Jair Bolsonaro, running for president, had won the presidential election in 2018 promising to fight corruption. He has now good reasons to stay away from Brazil because, otherwise, he may end up in jail.
Jair Bolsonaro is a corrupt, incompetent, homophob, mysogynist, populist, gun-loving, climate-change denier who, in his long political career, has changed parties more often than his shirt but claimed to be a fresh face cleaning up the notoriously corrupt Brazilian political landscape. It is true that under Lula and his successor Rousseff, corruption flourished, but across pretty much all parties. The Petrobras scandal was one of the greatest ever, the Mensalão scandal was another one. Because of corruption charges, Lula himself spent roughly one year and a half in prison before he was released in 2019 on a technicality.
Was Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva the best choice for Brazil? No. He is now an old man, who did not fight corruption when it was necessary, who believes that the notorious, populist, left-winger Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France is a great politician, and who said that both Putin and Zelensky were responsible for Russia’s war against Ukraine, to mention just a few “details”. Nevertheless, in comparison with Jair Bolsonaro who ignored the covid-pandemic, who pushed deforestation in the Amazon, who ignored the rights of minorities and vulnerable people, Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva was clearly the better option. It remains to be seen what Lula can achieve now. The protection of the Amazon and indigenious peoples are already back on the agenda with ministers such as Marina Silva and Sônia Guajajara, quite a contrast with the Bolsonaro years which, in 2022, ended with the murders of the indigenous peoples expert Bruno Pereira and the British journalist Dom Phillips in Brazil’s Amazonas state. Other priorities named by Lula are social justice and reconciliation, which looks difficult.
Can there be another push of modernization in Brazil, lifting millions out of poverty, as during Lula’s previous years in office? Luiz Inácio da Silva seems to rely on old recipes: higher government spending; transfer payments—Bolsa Família was Lula’s biggest and most popular welfare program during his first years in office, which lifted many of the 215 million Brazilians out of poverty; an active industrial policy—in 2020, Brazil had the world’s ninth largest industrial sector. But there is no commodity price boom as during his first years in office. The outlook for exports of iron ore, crude oil, mineral oils, soybeans and more does not look great. Fiscal discipline and fighting corruption do not seem to be one of Lula’s priorities (yet), with the exception of fighting corruption within the Bolsonaro clan and his former government. Unemployment at 8.3%, inflation at roughly 6% and interest rates at 13.75% are high. Public debt is around 90% of GDP. A tax reform looks essential. Better education and better job training are needed to improve productivity. Last, but not least: President Lula is in a minority position in both Chambers of the Brazilian Congress.
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Photograph of the Brazilian president-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (*1945). Photo (cropped): Argentinian President Alberto Fernández held a meeting this noon at the InterContinental Hotel in São Paulo with the president-elect of the Federative Republic of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who the day before won the election against Jair Bolsonaro. Date: October 31, 2022. Source: Casa Rosada via Wikipedia.
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Article added on January 3, 2023 at 14:12 Swiss time. Last update on January 4, 2023 at 14:48 Swiss time.
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