For the first time in the New Republic, a candidate for presidential reelection comes at a disadvantage in the first round. With 36% of valid votes in Datafolha, Jair Bolsonaro (PL) risks being defeated as early as this Sunday (2), if Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT), with 50%, wins the majority of the ballots.
In history's shorter range, however, this picture is not surprising. Despite the evident improvement observed in the economy, 44% of the people rate the federal administration as either bad or terrible.
Bad and terrible are appropriate qualifiers of the president's performance, whether in managerial tasks or in his relationship with democratic institutions.
At this point, there is another historical novelty, not at all inspiring: under the 1988 Charter, no head of state had ever dared to sponsor attacks against independent Powers and the electoral system itself. Bolsonaro has spent the last three years and nine months on this offensive.
Chosen as a target for populist artillery, the electronic ballot box has kept its reliability intact. The festival of ignorance proffered about it did not succeed in raising a meager proof of fraud. The maneuver in Congress to revert to the printed vote failed.
What happened to the voting machine also happened to the institutional apparatus designed to resist authoritarianism. Challenged in an unprecedented way, it demonstrated its impregnability and returned the disorder speculator to its rightful place.
The Federal Supreme Court did not bow to the volley that erupted from the Palácio do Planalto ( Government's headquarters). It imposed the rules of the game, punished perpetrators of the coup, and preserved the constitutional balance even when the Speaker of the Chamber and the Attorney General of the Republic shied away from their supervisory duty.
The Electoral Court acted in the same way. The sabotage attempt carried out by the military, invited in good faith to give an opinion on the soundness of the voting and counting system, was energetically barred, leaving clear the deviation of purpose and the administrative improbity of any interference by the Armed Forces in the process.
The exuberant proof of the resistance and rootedness of Brazilian democracy is the unshakable maintenance of the civic ritual that is repeated this Sunday (2). Over 156 million citizens are able to freely choose their candidates for the Legislative and Executive at the state and federal levels.
As the sun rises every morning in the east, the choices of popular sovereignty will be efficiently determined and respected, and the elected candidates will take office and exercise their mandates within the limits of the law. Long live Brazilian democracy.
Translated by Cassy Dias