More than 30 million people (21%) did not vote in Sunday’s presidential election in Brazil. It’s a huge and unknown mass. That’s what Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva should be aiming for if he hopes to win in the second round, scheduled for October 30. The first left him just two points away from the presidency without requiring a tiebreak. Mathematics favors him, but the unusual boost Jair Bolsonaro received in the election compels him to maintain his vigilance. The president, who is running for re-election, received 43% of the vote, ten points more than the polls had given him. Not much left outside of teetotalers, that’s how polarized the day was. Between Lula and Bolsonaro, they collected almost 92% of valid votes, or 108 million votes.
The strategy of the candidates is still unclear. Lula da Silva of the Labor Party (PT) opted for a campaign in the first round that countered Bolsonaro’s warmongering speech “a vote with love”. It wasn’t enough for him to win the first round, despite the escalation of preferences polls showed last week. Hunting down the teetotalers won’t be easy. “I very much doubt that the voter who didn’t want to vote in the first ballot will choose to vote in the second,” warns Rafael Mantovani, a political scientist at the Federal University of Santa Catarina. “These are people who are not afraid of Lula or Bolsonaro; everything seems silly to them,” says Mantovani.
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Lula then has five million votes from Democrat Movement’s Simone Tebet and another 3.6 million from Ciro Gomes, a former PT government minister. It’s not entirely clear where that constituency will end up. Lula supports that Tebet chose to speak in defense of the environment despite being a candidate with agribusiness interests. “His voice is conservative, but he spent the whole campaign saying that Brazil should be eco-friendly if it wants to sell meat and soybeans to the world,” Mantovani says. “It may be that part of their votes goes to the candidate who has an environmental agenda,” he adds, referring to Lula da Silva.
Gomes’ voice should of course go for the PT, but nothing is certain. Within this group of voters, there is disappointment at the former president, who will not be forgiven for the corruption cases that have soured both his administrations, such as the Lava Jato investigation. The former president spent more than 500 days in prison before a court overturned all his sentences on formal grounds. Lula always considered himself a political victim of the judiciary, which on this reading served to kill him as a politician. The return is revenge for Lula, but not so much for those who supported him in the past and have now lost faith.
Understanding the voting card will also be crucial. Lula is assured of the vote in the Northeast but on Sunday he suffered an epic and unpredictable beating in the state of São Paulo, a country within another of 46 million people, just like Colombia or Argentina. Bolsonaro received 47.8% of the vote there, seven points more than Lula, which corresponds to 1.8 million people. The current president’s campaign for election even shifted to the dispute over the governorship. Bolsonaro appointed an undisclosed candidate in the district, Tarcísio de Freitas, a military man born in another state, Rio de Janeiro, to be his infrastructure minister. De Freitas got 42% of the vote, almost seven points ahead of Fernando Haddad, a political heavyweight who ran for Labor Party president in 2018, precisely against Bolsonaro.
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“The interior of São Paulo is very Bolsonarian, much more so than the state capital,” says Mantovani. There penetrated the ultra discourse of Bolsonaro, promoter of the motto “God, Fatherland and Family”. “If we discussed public safety before, we’re now voting with a war speech for a candidate who says criminals must be killed,” he adds. Lula will have to fish in this increasingly tough constituency as Bolsonaro grows stronger. Just look at the success of the presidential candidates in Congress: they will gain the largest faction above the PT with 96 seats. Lula’s first-round win shouldn’t obscure the fact that Brazil is turning more and more to the right.
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