Leftist former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said late Sunday that “the campaign begins tomorrow” after he fell just shy of clearing the 50% threshold to win the closely watched and globally important Brazilian election outright, setting up an October 30 runoff against far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro.
“Tomorrow we will be on the streets to win the elections. We don’t have a break. We are going to work hard,” Lula said as the results showed a second round would be necessary.
“I love campaigning. And we have 28 more days,” Lula added. “I love doing rallies, getting on a truck. And it will be the first opportunity to have a face-to-face debate with the current president. So that we can make comparisons between the Brazil he built and the Brazil we built.”
Tensions and fears of more political violence in Brazil are likely to remain elevated in the four weeks leading up to another round of voting, with Bolsonaro expected to keep up — and possibly intensify — his attacks on the integrity of the country’s electoral process, rhetoric that has sparked concerns of a possible military coup attempt.
On Sunday, Bolsonaro outperformed pre-election polls signaling that Lula had a chance to ride to an outright victory in the first round. The incumbent leader, who has presided over a disastrous Covid-19 response and massive deforestation in the Amazon, received just over 43% of the vote compared to Lula’s 48%.
“Yesterday I said that every election I want to win in the first round, but it’s not always possible,” said Lula, who received roughly 6 million more votes than Bolsonaro. “But the belief that nothing happens by chance motivates me. Every poll put us in first place, and I always thought we were going to win… This is just an extension.”
Lula fala para a população na Avenida Paulista https://t.co/0uxWksHpwW
— Lula 13 (@LulaOficial) October 3, 2022
If he’s ultimately elected to return to the presidency, Lula and his left-wing Workers’ Party will have to contend with a Brazilian Congress packed with Bolsonaro loyalists and other right-wing figures as the popular leftist attempts to implement his anti-poverty and climate agenda.
As Reuters reported, Bolsonaro allies “won 19 of the 27 seats that were up [for] grabs in the Senate, and initial returns suggested a strong showing for his base in the lower house.”
“I plan to make the right political alliances to win this election,” Bolsonaro told journalists Sunday, noting his party’s wins in congressional races.
Several notorious ex-members of Bolsonaro’s government were elected to Brazil’s Congress on Sunday, including former environment minister Ricardo Salles — who resigned last year as he faced a criminal investigation involving illegal logging in the Amazon rainforest — and former health minister Eduardo Pazuello, an army general with no medical experience who oversaw the early stages of Brazil’s catastrophic pandemic response.
Also elected Sunday was Sergio Moro, Bolsonaro’s scandal-plagued former justice member and an architect of the since-annulled corruption case that landed Lula in prison for more than a year, preventing him from running for the presidency in 2018.
Thiago Amparo, an academic and columnist for Brazil’s Folha de São Paulo newspaper, told The Guardian that Sunday’s results show “it was wishful thinking to imagine the election would serve as a way to punish Bolsonaro for his disastrous policies during the pandemic.”
“I feel exhausted,” Amparo said. “But the results show we do not have the time to rest now. It is time to go out on to the streets… otherwise we are going to have a very dark future again.”
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.