‘Lula’s best support is Bolsonaro’

First modification: 09/29/2022 – 19:27

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva arrives at Sunday’s elections with all the cards to become president again, even from the first round. The polls place the former president with such an advantage over a dozen rivals that he caresses 50% of the votes.

According to the latest survey by the Datafolha Institute published last Thursday, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has 47% of the voting intentions compared to 33% for Bolsonaro.

Considering only the valid votes (without blanks or null), Lula gathers 50% of the support, the minimum percentage to obtain a victory in the first round.

His main contender, outgoing president Jair Bolsonaro, wants to relativize the polls, but the former union leader continues to gain support from political leaders, intellectuals and now from the markets.

“Right now Brazil is experiencing a moment of abandonment [a Bolsonaro]. The representatives of the economic market met with Lula, and the repercussion was good for her candidacy”, explains Marcial Alécio Garcia Suarez, professor of Political Science at the Fluminense University of Rio de Janeiro.

“There was an agreement or convergence of perspectives of interests, and that is having repercussions in Brazil today in an abandonment of what is known here as the ‘centrão’, center parties that are neither left nor right but that play the game politician on a daily basis. They always bet on the winning horse. And at this moment the figure of Lula is consolidating more and more as victorious. No one down the stretch wants to be on the losing side. The self-reproducing herd movement is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he says.

Nostalgia for a government with an economic boom and access to education and material well-being for neglected sectors is an argument that goes deep in the electorate, to which must be added a certain weariness for the political polarization that many attribute to Bolsonaro and his divisive personality.

“Lula’s best support is Bolsonaro, because Bolsonaro made such a disastrous government during the pandemic, in the economic issue, cuts in Education and a polarization of Brazilian society… Basically, Lula presents himself as a return to a time when that Brazil was not so politically fractured, economically fragile”, he adds.

Meanwhile, Bolsonaro, supported by evangelists and agricultural sectors, assures that the polls, which show him at a disadvantage even in a possible second turn, are lying. The truth of the polls, on October 2.