On October 2nd, almost two million Brazilians voted in the first round of the 2022 presidential elections. Tension increased in Brazil as the country increasingly split in half during the voting between the two candidates, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Jair Bolsonaro. With the far-right Bolsonaro and left-wing Lula pitted against each other in a final run-off, the elections were the most polarized election campaign the country had seen in a while.
Lula had been the president from 2003 to 2010, in a time where Brazil’s economy was booming. He was the first working class president and left the office with an 83% approval rating. For many people, life became better during this time, and this is what Lula is basing his campaign around. His argument is about the past, saying that because life was good when he was president, it can be like that again because he knows what he is doing. His campaign is saying he wants to reconstruct Bolsonaro’s time in office, doing things like increasing environmental protection, and appealing more to working-class people as well as people in rural regions.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won the first round by a smaller margin than expected
But many people are angry with him because of what came out after his presidency. After 2013 the economy went into a recession and inflation increased with prices for necessities such as food and fuel rising. During this time an operation began called Operation Car Wash that exposed the corruption of government parties tied in with the Pteropus corporation in which Lula was a part of. He was then sentenced to prison for 12 years because of his involvement in these corruption scandals and money laundering, but he managed to get out after only 18 months and the Supreme Court later annulled the convictions.
Far-right previous army captain Bolsonaro became president in 2019 and had been in office up to this time. His motto is “God, family, country” and resonated mostly with evangelical Christians. His campaign paints him as Brazil’s champion of goodness against Lula; casting “Lula as a radical socialist and himself as Brazil’s savior” (“How Close is the Race”). He came into presidency when Brazil was in a deep recession and embodied the Brazilian people’s frustration and gained popularity by saying he would make Brazil great again.
Jair Bolsonaro won 43% of the vote – a much closer gap than pre-election polls predicted
But during his presidency, he also did many things to make people angry and upset. He didn’t take Covid seriously and Brazil ended up with the second highest death rate toll in the world. He also caused massive deforestation in the Amazon rainforest up to over 25,000 square km, or 6.3 million acres. He also undermined political institutions as a way to take away obstacles to his rule.
And so the past few months have been tense with this political showdown for the presidential election. Both candidates get equal amounts of love and hate from the people. Both candidates have good and bad things going for them, and as summarized in an article from Al Jazeera, people are having to choose between not very good options and are going for what is the least worst choice, saying that people are saying they have to choose between “a crazy guy and a robber.” A major factor for people voting is the economy. Right now, half of the population of Brazil are food insecure, even though the country is one of the biggest food producers in the world. Bolsonaro’s argument is that inflation had gone down during his presidency and that he had had Congress approve emergency aid funds. Meanwhile, Lula’s argument is that it was better when he was the president and that he had made it better in the past.
The first election results came out with Lula winning 48% of the vote and Bolsonaro 43% and so led to a run-off election. Lula had pulled ahead in the first round, and so was expected to receive backlash in the second. In the end Bolsonaro lost the 30 October run-off election to Lula by 50.9% to 49.1%, which was the slimmest winning margin since the end of Brazil’s right-wing dictatorship in 1985 (“Brazil Military Finds No Evidence”). This was met mostly with a sense of relief by Lula supporters and followed by a two day media silence of Bolsonaro, who was facing his first major political loss.
Brazil’s outgoing President Jair Bolsonaro maintained nearly two days of public silence following his defeat in the 2022 presidential elections [Adriano Machado/Reuters]
Bolsonaro has since claimed that the electoral vote was a fraud, and this has led to his supporters following this misinformation and protesting in the streets that the election was rigged. Many appealed to the military, seeing as Bolsonaro had been an army captain, but after an investigation, the army sent in a 63-paged report that proved that Bolsanoro’s claim was baseless, and so eventually Bolsonaro accepted the results. Brazil is one of the few countries that solely uses electronic voting methods and has not had problems with it in 30 years and “that Brazil’s voting machines are a source of national pride” (Nicas).
It will be interesting to see what the future holds for Brazil. Will Lula be able to “return to the past” and fulfill his promise of how things were better when he was there? Will he be able to successfully get the country’s economy to a better place and follow up on his claims to help the environment? Will he fall back into the ways of the corrupt scandals? And how will Bolsonaro react to this in the coming decisions? All this we will have to wait to see.
Sources:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/11/10/after-brazil-election-loss-whats-next-for-bolsonaro
https://www.economist.com/interactive/brazil-2022
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/10/world/americas/brazil-election-fraud.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-63115691
Image credit:
All images can be found in sources.