The macabre death toll from the coronavirus skyrocketed in Brazil in 2020 when journalists asked the President of the Republic for his assessment of the gloomy escalation. “I’m not an undertaker,” answered Jair Messias Bolsonaro, with a gesture of what are you saying to me. Now it is known that at that time this former paratrooper captain was indeed a gravedigger, of himself. With his irresponsible management of the pandemic, he dug his own grave until he became the first Brazilian president to be defeated at the polls, albeit by the shortest distance ever, by a rival, Lula da Silva, with an extraordinary pull among the most humble, but heavily burdened by corruption scandals.
More than a presidential election, what Brazil has experienced this month has been a championship of hate, which would be won by the least hated of the two highly rejected candidates. Although both Bolsonaro and Lula had their respective pockets of citizens who had always felt disgust for them for ideological, biographical or whatever reasons, the two crucial elements were that extravagant and very harmful management of the pandemic by far-right and, in the case of the leftist, the Lavajato scandal, which led him to be imprisoned for 580 days until the annulment of the process and reached numerous positions in his party. Bolsonaro also had the advantage of presenting himself from power, a lever he conscientiously used by handing out money in recent months.
Like Donald Trump and like Boris Johnson, although his fall was not at the polls, Bolsonaro is one more Covid denier who ends up in the famous “trash bin of history” to which the Bolshevik Trotsky sent his Menshevik rivals during the Russian Revolution. If the vaccination had not been delayed, a delay that according to Lula cost Brazil 300,000 of its almost 700,000 deaths, it is likely that Bolsonaro would have won this Sunday. If instead of downplaying the virus as a little flu, he had led his country with humanity, he would have had a great opportunity to consolidate himself, beyond all his barbarities of homophobia, misogyny and vindication of the military regime. A better result in the southeast, the most populous region with the most middle class, would have allowed him to neutralize Lula’s rampage in his bastion in the Northeast, where as “filho do povo” (son of the people) the humblest give him a stratospheric result.
The axiom that the elections are lost by the Government was confirmed in a Brazil in which since the dictatorship all the presidents who had stood for re-election, that is, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Lula and Dilma Roussef, had achieved it. But even so, a winner was needed and that role could hardly be fulfilled by Fernando Haddad, the former mayor of São Paulo who got 16% when he stood for re-election in 2016. Lula put him as the candidate of his Workers’ Party against Bolsonaro in 2018, when he was not allowed to appear because he was in prison.
According to his biographer, yesterday’s winner considered other options, but he gives the impression that by choosing Haddad he was preparing the way for his return as the only possible alternative, to achieve electoral acquittal and full political rehabilitation. And so it has happened. He is going to have a third term, something unprecedented in Brazil. While he has said he would only show up once, in the last debate of the campaign he did talk about what he would do in future debates, it being unclear whether it was a slip or a revelation.
In any case, Lula is 77 years old. She now has to face what in Brazil has already been baptized as “the third round”, the transfer of power by a Bolsonaro, in whose ranks total silence reigned at the end of the vote. And then, counting on the fact that no matter how much the former captain resists, he will have to leave the palaces of Planalto and Alvorada, where the president of Brazil works and lives, Lula will have to deal with a right-wing Congress, with the risk of impeachment, dismissal, that has already been pointed out by one of his oldest friends, Frei Betto, the Dominican who in 1980 stood guard at his house to warn the media that the dictatorship had arrested the now president-elect and then leader of a metallurgical union of the suburb of São Paulo.
Since 1989 there have been two impechmeant in Brazil. But to avoid this risk of dismissal, which must also be justified within certain assumptions that have already been assessed, Lula has in his favor a great capacity as a fixer, a builder of pacts and to establish personal complicity. Those skills are essential for his great political challenge, that of rebuilding a country divided in half, with a triggered tension. The extreme example was provided on Saturday by the images of a Bolsonarist deputy, Carla Zambelli, chasing a black man at gunpoint.
On Friday night, in the statements after the last television debate, the great and amazing news jumped out. The president of Brazil, 37 years after the end of the dictatorship, announced that if he lost the elections, he would accept it. The news is that such a statement is news, the result of months disqualifying and sowing doubts about voting in electronic ballot boxes. Until a few days before, Bolsonaro conditioned the acceptance of defeat to the result of the audit of the scrutiny that he got the military to do. He has always been unpredictable, so he will see what he does. As Lula began his election night celebration, there were two conflicting processes. The silence of Bolsonarism and the thunderous clamor of the international community congratulating Lula, to try to block a possible “Trumpist” move
