Presidential in Brazil | Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva back in power after 12 years

(Rio de Janeiro) Twenty years after his first victory as Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated Jair Bolsonaro on Sunday evening in an extremely tight election that marks a turnaround for the country, after four years of extreme politics right.

Frederik-Xavier Duhamel
The Press

The one known simply as Lula obtained 50.9% of the vote, against 49.1% for Bolsonaro, who had still not appeared nearly two hours after the announcement of the final result.

Flavia Monteiro, who arrived in Quebec from Brazil 12 years ago, said she was “happy” with Lula’s victory. The 39-year-old described the president-elect as “more humane” and more sensitive “to the poorest people and all the financial inequalities in the country”.

Angelo Soares, a Montreal scholar also originally from Brazil, said he was “relieved” by this victory. According to him, the re-election of Bolsonaro would have been “the greatest catastrophe” that could happen to the country.

“I am revolted”, however said Ruth da Silva Barbosa to AFP, disappointed after having followed the counting in Brasilia. “The Brazilian people are not going to swallow an election manipulated like that and hand the country over to a bandit. Bolsonaro must act quickly, otherwise we won’t be able to do anything, ”added the 50-year-old teacher.

Either way, it’s a return to the top for the 77-year-old left-wing candidate, 12 years after leaving power with record popularity after his first two terms (2003-2010 ). Lula then fell into disgrace, spending 580 days in prison after corruption convictions that were eventually overturned on formal grounds.

This sentence excluded him from the 2018 elections, which brought to power Bolsonaro, a defender of conservative social values.

Lula’s victory was greeted with fireworks and cheers in major Brazilian cities like Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, where hundreds of thousands of people partied in the streets, journalists from the report said. AFP.

“Lula’s election represents an opportunity for Brazil to reconnect with democratic values, the promotion of science and environmental protection,” commented Professor Mathieu Turgeon, political scientist at the University of Western Ontario.

“The world will be grateful for protecting the richness of the Amazon rainforest,” he added. Bolsonaro’s tenure has been marked by a record acceleration in deforestation, drawing criticism from the international community.

“Brazil and the planet need a living Amazon,” chanted Lula in his victory speech on Sunday evening.

He also pleaded for “an egalitarian Brazil, a Brazil for all, whose priority is given to those who need it most”. “Our most urgent commitment is to eradicate hunger again”, while 33 million Brazilians live with food insecurity, he stressed.

His victory marks the first time since Brazil’s return to democracy in 1985 that the incumbent has not been re-elected while in the running. The highly polarized election in Latin America’s largest economy extended a wave of recent victories by the left in the region, including in Chile, Colombia and Argentina.

The election of the candidate of the Workers’ Party (PT) “will mean a greater presence of the state in the economy, more interventionism, even the creation of new state companies, without a great concern with fiscal discipline », according to the lecturer and expert in comparative business law of the University of Montreal Dan Kraft.

His positions on environmental protection could cause friction with the agri-food industry, according to the researcher, adding that Lula is however “not an enemy of private initiative, quite the contrary”.

The inauguration of Lula is scheduled for the 1^er January. He will have to deal with a Parliament that is clearly leaning to the right and will probably have to form broad alliances to govern.

In the meantime, Bolsonaro and his supporters will “most certainly” seek to deny the electoral result, predicted Professor Turgeon, who nevertheless said he was “optimistic” about the reaction of Brazilian institutions.

It was the country’s tightest election in more than three decades. The previous closest race, in 2014, was decided by a margin of 3.46 million votes. The margin is much narrower than predicted by polls, which had already heavily underestimated Bolsonaro’s result before the first round.

Lula was quickly praised by several foreign leaders. In a congratulatory Twitter post, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he “looks forward to working” with Lula “to advance our shared priorities — like protecting the environment.”

US President Joe Biden hailed his “free and fair” election and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron said his victory “opens a new page in the history of Brazil”.