The far-right president forces the circular moment after strongly following Lula, disappointing those who hoped to turn the page on his influence.
Tears filled Beatriz Simões’ eyes as she digested Jair Bolsonaro’s strange functionality in Sunday’s Brazilian elections.
A few hours earlier, the 34-year-old publicist had been convinced that a dawn full of hope was approaching with the election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as head of Brazil.
But while outdoors at the São Paulo Museum of Art, where Lula had arrived to claim his fight for force was alive, Simões wept as he reflected on how his relatives had helped Brazil’s outgoing far-right president beat pollsters’ predictions.
“How is it that my friends, my relatives, other people who know me, who know I’m a black woman, help the kind of things Bolsonaro helps?Simões then asked that she and 3 friends were dealing with the likely far right. “Deep control over society.
“It’s scary, it’s just strange to us, it’s scary,” said Raquel Barbosa, a 28-year-old network manager whose mother-in-law is one of nearly 700,000 Brazilians killed because of a covid outbreak that Bolsonaro called a “flu. “
Bolsonarists touted the stronger-than-expected functionality of their movement, which saw its pioneer garner more than 51 million votes despite his notoriety abroad as an authoritarian fanatic.
Lula won the first circular with 57 million votes, or 48% of the total against Bolsonaro’s 43%. his success in the October 30 runoff against Lula.
“After what happened yesterday, I rule out anything, surely nothing,” said Maria Cristina Fernandes, a political commentator for the daily Valor Econômico. “Bolsonaro is excluded. “
Bolsonaro celebrated what he called “the greatest patriotic victory in Brazil’s history,” while his son, Senator Flávio, hailed “a victory over the mainstream media, which has been relentlessly anti-Bolsonaro. “of Janeiro and São Paulo, which have more than 47 million voters.
To make matters worse, a wave of hardline Bolsonaristas elected to Congress, with Bolsonaro’s liberal party claiming 99 of its 513 seats, the largest bloc in more than two decades. The winners are Eduardo Pazuello, the army general turned fitness minister accused of spoiling Brazil’s reaction to Covid, and Ricardo Salles, the arguable environment minister under whose leadership deforestation in the Amazon skyrocketed.
Damares Alves, the evangelical preacher who was Bolsonaro’s human rights minister, won a seat in the Senate, as did his vice president, Hamilton Mourão, his former science minister Marcos Pontes and his former security minister, Judge Sergio Moro.
“Bolsonarism. . . it has a political assignment with a beginning, a middle and an end,” Fernandes said. “The degree of conservatism they controlled to insert into Congress is permanent and will take a long time to reverse. “
Fernandes’ idea that the effects revealed a troubling disconnect between how gossip categories and Brazilian journalists viewed Bolsonaro and how the electorate felt. not percentage of our ideas,” he said. There is a divorce between the press and the intellectual elites and the other people.
Consuelo Diéguez, author of an e-book on the Brazilian right called The Snake’s Egg, attributed Bolsonaro’s functionality to voters’ deep and widespread anger over corruption scandals that have marred the 14-year rule of Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT). I don’t need the PT, I don’t need this scoundrel from Lula, and I don’t need those leftists to come and protect things like gay marriage and abortion,” he said.
Bolsonaro’s vote was also bolstered through billions of dollars in welfare for the poor. “He handed out so much cash, and still, he couldn’t win,” Dieguez said, downplaying the portrayal of Sunday’s election as an absolute triumph for Bolsonarism.
The president’s son and heir presumptive, Eduardo Bolsonaro, was re-elected to Congress but won 1 million fewer votes than in the last election and ousted one of Lula’s protégés, leftist Guilherme Boulos. Other prominent Bolsonarists such as Douglas García and Sérgio Camargo have failed.
“It’s not a victory for Bolsonaro, he did badly,” Dieguez insisted. “This is the first time a presidential candidate has reached a moment in the first round. Lula almost won, he narrowly failed.
Diéguez still believed Lula would beat Bolsonaro when 156 million Brazilians return to the polls later this month. The candidate for third place, Simone Tebet, leans towards Lula in exchange for a place in the closet.
But for now, Bolsonaro’s push has dealt a painful blow to his enemies.
How can other people keep pointing this out. . . and to think that Bolsonaro is a decent option?” asked Simões as Lula and his supporters returned home expressing total deflation and defiance.
“My tears are tears of exhaustion,” Simões said, “but of surrender. “