This Sunday, the two most simultaneously loved and hated men in Brazil will face off to decide the future of Latin America’s biggest democracy. Following a closer than expected first round of voting, far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro and leftist former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who is popularly known as Lula, go into the second round amid great uncertainty. Despite heavy campaign spending and support from evangelical groups, Bolsonaro trails by a small margin.
In what has been a deeply divisive election season—tainted by violent incidents and political tension week in, week out—there is little room for the country’s 156m eligible voters to hear what each candidate has to say before heading to the polls again. Lula supporters want to end economic instability and culture war. Bolsonaro supporters want to avoid a rerun of the corruption scandals that plagued da Silva’s and his successor Dilma Rousseff’s Workers’ Party during their terms in office between 2003 and 2016.
Bolsonaro insists that da Silva, a 76-year-old centre-left politician, will transform Brazil into an autocratic Venezuela or Nicaragua, despite little evidence about why or how this could happen. Da Silva claims it is Bolsonaro who wants to be a dictator, by gagging the courts and giving away his powers over the budget to buy support in Congress.
It’s a fight between which candidate voters hate least, but “also of what people fear the most”, says Carlos Melo, a political science professor at the Insper Institute, a private university in São Paulo. His argument is backed by findings from polling company Quaest, which recently released data that suggests 43 per cent of eligible voters fear the Workers’ Party returning to power—the same number of people who dread four more years of Bolsonaro. Earlier this year, the far-right leader’s prospects looked far gloomier.
“Lula voters include the left and moderates, and they could agree in the past that the economy was better and that democracy was safe,” Melo says. “On the other side, you see a president who is hailed as a hero by many right-wingers precisely for challenging constitutional guardrails, often using fear as his main tool.”
But nostalgia alone doesn’t fully capture what da Silva means for Brazil’s election cycles: since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985, he has run in every single one. Every voter, no matter their age, remembers the words to his campaign jingle “Lula lá”, or “Lula there” in Portuguese.
In 1989, the former trade union leader lost to right-wing Fernando Collor in a runoff. In 1994 and 1998, he lost to the Social Democratic candidate Fernando Henrique Cardoso on the first ballot. With the Workers’ Party swinging to the centre, he finally secured victory in 2002 and again in 2006. His popularity in office was such that he was able to hand-pick his successor in 2010: the little-known chief of staff Rousseff. She was subsequently elected, and then again four years later.
As part of Operation Car Wash, a sprawling corruption probe that heavily implicated the Workers’ Party, Rousseff was impeached in 2016 and da Silva sentenced to nine years in jail in 2017, increased by the Federal Regional Court to 12 years in 2018. His bid to stand for the presidency again that year, from jail, was rejected by the country’s top electoral body. Fernando Haddad, who instead became the Workers’ Party candidate, lost to Bolsonaro in the runoff.
Da Silva was released from jail in 2019 after Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court ruled that the judge who sentenced him was biased; the UN’s human rights committee noted that the judge had approved request for his phone to be tapped. His conviction on corruption charges was annulled. Now he is once again running for president, and once again the frontrunner.
Celso Barros, a columnist for the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper and the author of a recently published book on the history of the Workers’ Party, puts da Silva’s second wind down to several factors. “It is nostalgia for Lula, it is Bolsonaro’s poor handling of the government, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, but it is also part of the population trying to reward Lula for all that he has suffered these years,” he says. “He won the first round and leads the polls for the runoff based on his personal resilience and because too many are fed up with the president, not so much because the left promises a much better future.”
Trying to ease fears among moderates, da Silva has brought in a former conservative rival to be his running-mate—the former São Paulo governor Geraldo Alckmin, who da Silva defeated in the 2006 presidential elections. The moderate candidate Simone Tebet, who came third place in this year’s first round with 4 per cent of the vote, has since come out and endorsed da Silva’s candidacy.
Bolsonaro, who lost the first round to da Silva by six million votes, has not had any endorsements heading into the runoff. But his campaign has succeeded in closing the gap thanks to a rich campaign and an energised base. “It is good against evil,” says lawmaker Otoni de Paula, one of the most radical Bolsonaro supporters. “We will win this battle and we will continue to fight no matter what after Sunday ends.”
Analysts and politicians widely expect Bolsonaro not to concede if he loses the election. With inauguration day not until 1st January 2023, the choice Brazil makes between fear and nostalgia could end in months of uncertainty—and even violence.
