‘The vote for Bolsonaro consolidates a conservative tendency’, analyzes the politician Gaspard Estrada

First modification: 03/10/2022 – 14:22

Gaspard Estrada: It is a result that few expected, not so much because of the result of former President Lula, which is in line with the electoral history of Brazil and the particular history of the Workers’ Party (PT) candidates in the first round, but I believe that What there was fundamentally was a phenomenon of useful voting for President Jair Bolsonaro, particularly in the three main electoral colleges in the country, that is, Sao Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Rio de Janeiro. It can be seen in the voters who formerly wanted to vote for third-way candidates, that is, from the center, Simone Tebet and Ciro Gomes, and that this migration of votes allowed Jair Bolsonaro to surprise in this first round and, more generally. , consolidate a conservative trend in Brazil, which allowed the current president’s party to obtain the first parliamentary group in Congress, in the Chamber of Deputies, with 99 deputies.

RFI: Former president Lula da Silva gets 6 million more votes than current president Jair Bolsonaro, but the latter gets about 2 million more votes compared to the 2018 election. There is a real progression of the Bolsonarist current…

Without a doubt, Bolsonaro’s electorate is visibly establishing itself in Brazil, it is not something temporary. I take note of the results at the state level and at the level of the legislative elections with this very good performance of the parties with the presidential majority, and at the state level very significant victories as in the case of Rio de Janeiro in which Governor Claudio Castro, Despite all the corruption scandals and security problems, he manages to be reelected in the first round. Lula’s Workers’ Party has improvements, it increases its bench in the Chamber of Deputies, it increases its bench in the Senate, it has two governors elected in the first round, but it is by no means the red tide that was expected and from that point From this point of view, the electoral result of the Brazilian left is much more modest than what the polls predicted.

Between now and October 30, when the second round will take place, the country will undoubtedly be experiencing great polarization; there has been violence like few times in an electoral campaign. President Bolsonaro himself went to vote wearing a bulletproof vest. What can you expect between now and October 30, Gaspard Estrada?

A lot of polarization, a lot of debate, but at a low level, can be feared with acts of violence. I believe that President Bolsonaro is willing to do anything to preserve the presidency. From the moment that the trends have gone better than expected, he mysteriously stopped criticizing the electoral result at the polls, however, we cannot exclude that this will appear again if the current chief executive loses the presidential election . I am expecting four extremely tough weeks for Brazilian democracy, which will be fundamental in defining its future.

You evoked the results obtained by the Workers’ Party in Congress at the governorship level, but there is no doubt that this will be a Congress dominated by a much more radical right, there are six former ministers of Bolsonaro who enter Parliament and even the judge Sergio Moro and prosecutor Dalton Dellagnol, who prosecuted Lula da Silva, also make their entrance to the congress.

Without a doubt, in the hypothesis of a Lula government, the room for maneuver will not be easy for the president to govern Brazil with such a conservative Congress, where the presence of people like Dalton Dallagnol or Sergio Moro are not going to have a constructive role in an eventual Lula government. So, it seems to me that the conditions of governability in Brazil will once again be very complex, even in the hypothesis of a Lula government.

The polls before the first round indicated that a majority of men would cast their vote in favor of President Bolsonaro, in the order of 44% against 37% for Lula, and that it was based on the women’s vote that the victory of Bolsonaro could be defined. former president Lula da Silva. But what has been the result, if known, of those more than 2 million young people who participated in the elections for the first time?

We still do not have the data for the day of the election, the data we have is from the Superior Electoral Court. Pollsters are finishing this type of analysis. But it seems to me that the key to understanding what happened yesterday and, above all, understanding the surprise is to be found, in particular, in the three main electoral colleges in Brazil, Sao Paulo, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro, where President Jair Bolsonaro It went way beyond what was planned. This is where the future of Brazil will be decided

Will there be Bolsonaro after the elections on October 30, will there be Bolsonarism in the political life of Brazil?

Without a doubt, I believe that this is one of the main lessons of this first round, and the question is how this Bolsonaroism will behave if Lula wins the election and there is a transfer of government.