Brazil’s former left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is poised for a startling political comeback, with polls suggesting he is poised to defeat his far-right rival Jair Bolsonaro in Sunday’s elections.
The eve of election polls suggested Lula would come within a hair’s breadth of securing the overall majority of votes that would guarantee him a first-round victory against Brazil’s radical incumbent, whose disastrous response to Covid, its attack on the Amazon and its vulgar threats anti-democracy have alienated more than half the population.
“I will win these elections so I can give people the right to be happy again. People must, deserve and have the right to be happy again,” 76-year-old Lula told journalists on Saturday during a visit to São Paulo – one of the three most important battlefields of the Minas Gerais elections, along with the states of Rio de Janeiro and Brazil .
José Roberto de Toledo, a political columnist for news website UOL, said Lula would undoubtedly come out on top if 156 million citizens voted in what is billed as Brazil’s most important election in decades.
Pollsters give the left-wing veteran a 14-point lead over Bolsonaro, the hard-line nationalist who retains the support of about a third of voters, including many evangelical Christians and members of Brazil’s largely white social elite.
But Toledo feared Lula could be just short of the 50 percent needed to avoid a fierce runoff against Bolsonaro on Oct. 30, opening the door to a month of uncertainty and political violence.
“I think it’s more likely that there will be a second round,” Toledo said, warning of “terrible” consequences if that happened given the spate of attacks and killings that had been overshadowed in the run-up to the election.
“If there is a second round, it will be much worse than before. That would mean four weeks of blood,” Toledo warned, adding, “I hope I’m wrong.”
Should Lula prevail, it would be a once unthinkable political resurrection for a former factory worker and union leader who became Brazil’s first working-class president in 2002.
Lula resigned in 2010 after two terms with approval ratings approaching 90%. But in the decade that followed, the Workers’ Party (PT), which he helped found, became embroiled in a tangle of corruption scandals and accused of plunging Brazil into a brutal recession.
Lula’s seemingly incurable downfall was cemented in 2018 when he was jailed on corruption charges and barred from running in that year’s election, which Bolsonaro later won. Lula’s 580-day captivity appeared to be the melancholy end of a fairytale life in which he rose from rural poverty to become one of the world’s most popular leaders.
But Lula was released in late 2019 and his conviction overturned on the grounds that he had been wrongly tried by Sérgio Moro, a right-wing judge who later took a job in Bolsonaro’s cabinet.
Lula, who first ran for the presidency in 1989, announced his sixth presidential bid in May and vowed to beat Bolsonaro by staging “the greatest peaceful revolution the world has ever seen.”
A Lula victory would be the latest in a string of triumphs for a resurgent Latin American left, with ex-guerrilla Gustavo Petro claiming power in Colombia in June and former student leader Gabriel Boric being elected Chilean president last December. Since 2018, leftists have taken power across the region, from Argentina to Peru and Mexico.
Lula supporters are excited by their leader’s rebirth and his promise to wage war on poverty and hunger in a country where 33 million people are struggling for food. During his two terms in office, Lula gained international recognition for using a commodity boom to fund welfare programs that helped tens of millions lift themselves out of poverty.
“After he left power, everything went haywire,” said Iracy Batista, a 58-year-old housewife who was among thousands of supporters at a recent Lula rally in Rio.
“Lula is one of those people, just like us … Bolsonaro just knows how to swear at people,” agreed her friend Clélia Maria da Silva.
Environmentalists and Indigenous activists are hoping Lula, who has pledged to fight deforestation and stamp out illegal gold mining, will stop the assault on the Amazon that has unfolded under Bolsonaro. “With Bolsonaro we die, with Lula we live,” said indigenous rights group Opi, which was co-founded by recently murdered activist Bruno Pereira.
That optimism is tempered by nervousness about how Bolsonaro, a former soldier notorious for admiring dictators like Chilean General Augusto Pinochet, will react if he loses. Some fear the Trump-admiring populist may be trying to foment similar turmoil as the January 6 uprising in the US. Bolsonaro has repeatedly questioned Brazil’s electronic voting system and has refused to confirm whether he will accept defeat.
Steven Levitsky, a Harvard University Latin America specialist and author of How Democracies Die, said he was concerned about the possibility of violence or upheaval in the coming days and weeks. “One factor that has prevented us in the US from sliding into an even deeper crisis is that the armed forces would clearly not step in for Trump. I don’t think the military will intervene in Brazil either, but it’s less safe,” he said.
When asked if he was planning a coup during a televised debate on Thursday, Bolsonaro declined to answer. He has portrayed the election as a battle between the upright Christian right and the evil and corrupt heretical left, claiming without evidence that Lula will close churches if elected.
Benedita da Silva, a PT congresswoman and Lula ally, said such divisive rhetoric and an explosion of fake news meant it was crucial that the election be decided now. “We can’t afford to delay this any longer… Are we going to have another month of agony and all this madness it provokes?” she asked. “The democracy of this country is at stake… it is our duty to win on October 2nd.”
For all the fears about the elections, Levitsky said, there is also reason for optimism about the resilience of Brazil’s fledgling democracy, which was restored in 1985 after 21 years of military rule.
“People are adding Brazil to the list of cases of democratic relapse in recent years, like the Philippines and Indonesia, El Salvador, India and Hungary. But it’s not,” he said.
“Brazilians have elected an autocrat – perhaps the most outrageously autocratic of all the autocrat-minded presidents elected in recent years. But so far, Brazilian democracy has held… Four years after Bolsonaro’s election, Brazilian democracy is not dead. That’s good news.”