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By Jack Nicas and Flavia Milhorance
Jack Nicas, Brazil’s bureau chief, and Flávia Milhorance, a journalist, have been covering the presidential race since it began last year.
Follow our policy of the Brazilian presidential election between Bolsonaro and Lula.
RIO DE JANEIRO — In 2019, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva spent 23 hours a day on a remote mobile with a treadmill at a federal penitentiary.
The former president of Brazil sentenced to 22 years for corruption, a sentence that gave the impression of ending the mythical career of the once lion of the Latin American left.
Now released from prison, da Silva is on the verge of becoming Brazil’s president again, a political resurrection that, at one point, seemed unthinkable.
On Sunday, Brazilians will vote for their next leader, with a maximum choice between President Jair Bolsonaro, 67, the right-wing nationalist incumbent, and M. da Silva, 76, an enthusiastic leftist known simply as “Lula,” whose corruption convictions were overturned last year after Brazil’s Supreme Court ruled that the ruling handed down in its instances was biased.
For more than a year, polls have given Silva a wide lead. Now, an accumulation in his numbers suggests he could win on Sunday with more than 50% of the vote, avoiding a runoff with M. Bolsonaro.
A victory would complete a remarkable adventure for da Silva, whom former President Barack Obama once called “the most popular politician on the planet. “When he left the job in 2011 after two terms, da Silva exceeded 80%. But then it became the centerpiece of an expanding investigation into government bribery that led to nearly three hundred arrests, landed him in prison, and sent him into obscurity.
Now, the former union leader is back in the spotlight, this time about to take the wheel of the Latin American nation, with a population of 217 million, with the mandate to undo S. Bolsonaro.
“How did they manage to destroy Lula? I spent 580 days in prison because they didn’t want me to show up,” da Silva told a crowd of supporters last week. an exhausting campaign. ” And there I stayed calm, preparing as Mandela did for 27 years. “
During the election campaign, da Silva began to compare himself to Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. , political prisoners who expanded their movements after their release. “I am convinced that the same will happen here in Brazil. ” he said at another rally this month.
Silva’s return to the presidency would cement his prestige as the most influential figure in Brazil’s fashionable democracy. A fifth-grade former metallurgist and the son of illiterate farmworkers, he has been a political force for decades, leading transformative change. in Brazilian politics away from conservative principles and towards left-wing ideals and the interests of the working class.
The Left Workers’ Party, which he co-founded in 1980, has won 4 out of 8 presidential elections since the end of Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1988, and has gained ground in the others.
As president from 2003 to 2010, Mr. da Silva’s tenure helped lift 20 million Brazilians out of poverty, revitalized the national oil industry and brought Brazil onto the world stage, adding the World Cup and Summer Olympics.
But it also allowed a vast bribery program to spread the government, with many Workers’ Party allies convicted of accepting bribes. While the courts rejected Mr. da Silva’s convictions for accepting a condominium and corporate renovations of structures competing for government contracts, he did not assert his innocence.
Mr. da Silva has long maintained that the allegations are false.
If Mr. da Silva wins the presidency, it will be partly thanks to an outdated campaign. He traveled the vast country holding in-person rallies. He played it safe, skipping a debate last Saturday, providing some main points in his proposals and declining maximum requests for interviews, adding with the New York Times.
And he built a broad coalition, from communists to businessmen, and chose as his running mate a former center-right governor, Geraldo Alckmin, who had been his opponent in the 2006 presidential election.
Mr. da Silva also benefited from a clash with a deeply unpopular headline. Polls show that a portion of Brazilians say they would never elect M. Bolsonaro, who has disappointed many voters with a torrent of false statements, destructive environmental policies, adoption of unproven drugs. about Covid-19 vaccines and harsh attacks on political rivals, journalists, judges and medical professionals.
During the election campaign, Bolsonaro called Da Silva a thief and communist, while Da Silva describes the president as authoritarian and inhumane.
If elected, da Silva would be the ultimate example to date of the recent shift to the left in Latin America. Since 2018, leftists have mounted an anti-incumbent wave in Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Chile and Peru.
Overall, da Silva’s crusade was built around the promise he made for decades: he will save the lives of Brazil’s poor. The pandemic has hit Brazil’s economy, with double-digit inflation and the number of others facing hunger doubling to 33 million. He pledged to expand the safety net, raise the minimum wage, reduce inflation, feed and space more people, and create jobs through new primary infrastructure projects.
“He is the anti-poverty president, and this is the legacy that must stay if he wins,” said Celso Rocha de Barros, a sociologist who has written an e-book on the Workers’ Party.
However, as the most successful politicians, Mr. da Silva occasionally falls short on the main points and long on promises. It builds its rhetoric around a clash between “them,” the elites, and “us,” the people. -class credentials on your left hand; He lost his pinky finger at age 19 at an auto portion factory. And it carries its message with its Everyman symbol, with many references to beer, cachaça and picanha, the most prominent cut of meat in Brazil.
“They think the poor have no rights,” he told a crowd of supporters last week in one of São Paulo’s poorest neighborhoods. But he would fight for his rights, he said. The right to have a circle of relatives fried fish on the weekends, to buy a small picanha, to that piece of picanha with the fat dipped in flour, and to a glass of beer without blood,” he shouted to cheers.
“He is the candidate of the people, of the poor,” Vivian Casentino, 44, of the Workers’ Party, said at a rally this week in Rio de Janeiro. “It’s like us. He’s a fighter. “
During his first term as president, Mr. da Silva used a commodity boom to pay for his government’s expansion. This time, the Brazilian economy is in a more complicated scenario and is proposing higher taxes to finance more benefits for the poor. Some voters are uncomfortable with his plans after the economic policies of his hand-picked successor helped push Brazil into recession.
If his political taste did not replace his sixth presidential campaign, he tried to modernize his image. He included more references to women, blacks, indigenous teams and the environment in his speeches and proposals, and even promised to advocate for “organic salads. “
In a recent meeting with social media influencers, adding the country’s most popular YouTuber, a witty comedian and a rapper tattooed on his face, Mr. da Silva suggested they respond to corruption leads.
“Globo spent five years calling me a thief,” he said, referring to Brazil’s largest television channel. He said he sought out the channel’s head anchor to open the news one night with an apology. “Apologies are hard,” he added.
Mr. da Silva never fully declared his Workers’ Party’s role in the government corruption maneuver that persisted for much of the thirteen years it was in power. The investigation, called Operation Carh, revealed how corporations paid scores of millions of dollars in bribes to public officials. in exchange for public contracts.
Mr. da Silva said that political enemies had deceived him with the Workers’ Party of Brazilian politics. He also accused the government of the EE. UU. de helping to carry out the investigation.
Carwash’s investigation eventually became embroiled in its own scandal, as it became transparent that it had been used as a political tool. Prosecutors focused on the Workers’ Party’s crimes than other parties, and investigators leaked Mr. Trabajadores’ recorded conversations. Sergio Moro, the federal ruling on oversight of the case, later resulted in collusion with prosecutors, while also acting as sole arbiter in many trials.
In 2019, M. da Silva was released from the penalty after the Supreme Court ruled he could be on the loose while he appealed. Then, last year, the Supreme Court overturned their convictions, ruling that they had been tried and that Mr. Moro was biased.
Mr. da Silva is driven by a cult of personality, built over more than 4 decades in the eyes of the public, and is more popular than the political party he built.
Creomar de Souza, a Brazilian political analyst, said immature democracies may revolve around a single personality rather than a movement or set of ideas. “Some young democracies are struggling to step up,” he said. component of the game. “
At a rally for Silva in Rio this week, Vinicius Rodrigues, 28, a history student, was handing out flyers for a communist party. “We in particular Lula,” he said, but not the Workers’ Party.
Nearby, Luiz Claudio Costa, 55, was promoting “I’m with Lula” headbands for 50 cents. He had voted for Da Silva, but in 2018 he chose Bolsonaro. “I was wrong,” he said. We want Lula back. “
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