Lula da Silva had a lead of about five percentage points over President Bolsonaro in the first round of Brazil’s elections, a narrower gap than polls had predicted. Especially in the state of São Paulo, the country’s economic hub, Bolsonarism was more popular than polls had predicted. Bolsonaro and Lula will meet in a second round on October 30. Lula’s numbers had increased slightly in the days leading up to this vote, prompting his supporters to point to a first-round win. From the first moments of counting the votes, it was clear that these expectations were overly optimistic. The race for the presidency will be tight, and if Lula wins, he will face tremendous opposition in the Senate and Congress, where several of Bolsonaro’s allies have won. Brazil is deeply divided.
The results represent a great disappointment for the opposition, but at the same time it must be remembered that the advantage Lula has gained over Bolsonaro is unprecedented. No president in Brazil has lost re-election, largely due to the great advantage of being the chief executive. Dilma Rousseff, whose first term in office in 2013 was characterized by weak economic growth and large-scale protests, also managed to get re-elected in 2014. Bolsonaro’s difficulty in catching up with Lula is a sign of deep societal dissatisfaction with the current situation and coincides with the prevailing sentiment in Latin America: in the last fourteen free and fair elections in the region, the president or official candidate has lost. Given the challenging macroeconomic environment and the ongoing impact of the pandemic, many voters in Latin America are angry and frustrated, and largely hostile to those in power.
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Three more reasons explain why Lula goes into Round 2 on October 30 with a slight lead. First, Bolsonaro’s low approval ratings have remained largely stable despite spending unprecedented amounts of money in recent months. For the most part, the poorest voters, the main beneficiaries of the Axilio Brasil program — a last-minute splurge from Bolsonaro — have not changed their voting preferences, in part because Bolsonaro did little to garner their support in the first three years of his tenure. Furthermore, given the Lula government’s long history of defending programs for the poorest, Bolsonaro’s warnings that the PT would not continue its sudden pro-poor policies are unlikely to change their minds, which explains why they decided to support Lula supported by a large margin.
Second, despite occasional attempts to tone down his misogynist rhetoric, Bolsonaro has failed in recent months to improve his image among women, who overwhelmingly reject him. Women’s doubts about Bolsonaro go beyond his sexist statements: his decisions, for example, to facilitate access to guns, are deeply unpopular with women; who, along with children, are the most vulnerable groups in society to armed violence. Even a complete change in Bolsonaro’s rhetoric on women would be unlikely to significantly reduce his voter rejection rates at this point.
Finally, Brazil is so polarized that the number of voters willing to reconsider their vote is limited. Although the level of polarization in the country has not reached the levels seen in the United States, mutual demonization of candidates is so widespread in Brazil that Bolsonaro is unlikely to win the votes of those who support Lula in the first round to have. Rather, both candidates will focus on voters who have backed candidates like Ciro Gomes and Simone Tebet. Lula Tebet may even be offering a service to support the left’s candidacy. In addition, Lula is being pressured to appoint a moderate and financially accountable Minister of Economy as a strategy to attract the centrists. In fact, while you’re getting pretty close to moderate voters — with the election of his vice president and the active involvement of groups that opposed the Labor Party (PT) four years ago, like agribusiness, evangelicals and the police — you’ll still have it work harder to get closer to the center. If he wins, the left wing of the PT will have little influence.
The biggest questions for the coming weeks are: Will Bolsonaro continue his strategy of undermining public confidence in the electoral system? How will Bolsonaro’s most radical supporters, who expected their candidate to win in the first round, react if Lula wins on October 30? Will the political violence, which has already claimed victims after discussions between Bolsonaristas and PT supporters, increase further in an extremely polarized end phase? Polls suggest that around 25% of Bolsonaro voters don’t want their president to back down if he loses. At the same time, political violence has increased significantly in recent weeks. Any attempt to attack any of the candidates could create political instability. The threat of a Brazilian “6th January” remains acute even after the second round.
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