Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was elected president of Brazil again. The PT leader won the second round of the presidential dispute, held this Sunday (30), by defeating the current chief executive, Jair Bolsonaro (PL), the first president to fail to be reelected.
According to data from the calculation carried out by the TSE (Supreme Electoral Court), Lula has 50,83% of the valid votes, against 49,17% of the current president of the republic.
When Lula, 77, takes office in January, he will be the oldest holder of the position in history. It will be his third mandate in the government, which he led for two terms (2003-2010).
After the highly unusual 2018 campaign, when Brazilians elected an obscure federal deputy with a radical right-wing discourse in reaction to the current implosion of the traditional party system, this time the majority of the electorate sought comfort in a well-known figure.
Indeed, Lula spent the election journey selling the idea of a return to the past, when the world economy was different and favorable to Brazil. The various corruption scandals associated with his party, PT ( the workers' party), kept his rejection high, above 40%, but the plebiscitary nature of the election was worse for Bolsonaro, who always registered at least 50% of voters' disgust.
The then PT candidate did not want to commit to clear solutions to central problems, which are also non-existent in Bolsonaro’s radical rhetoric, who spent his entire term in an authoritarian escalation that culminated in attacks against the very electoral system that created him.
Since 2020, there has been open talk about the current president's coup-mongering attitude and what support he could collect, even leading to unusual US demonstrations in favor of Brazilian democracy.
Translated by Cassy Dias