In Caetés, his hometown, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was close to the plenary session, since his almost 13,000 votes account for 91% of the votes. This data does not represent any anecdote, as it happened in the 80s when the socialist Felipe González massacred the popular Manuel Fraga, who, however, prevailed resoundingly in his Lugo birthplace of Vilalba. Instead, the result of Caetés, Pernambuco, reflects the extreme version of the geographical and sociological phenomenon that gave Lula victory over Jair Messias Bolsonaro on Sunday. Of the five regions of Brazil, he only beat him in one, the Northeast, Permambuco. But he gave it such a beating, of 12.5 million votes, that it allowed him to compensate for the losses in the other zones and win by 2.1 million.
The always loquacious and inopportune Bolsonaro attacked Lulista’s bastion after the first round, without thinking, it seems, that the second was missing. “Lula won in nine of the ten states with the highest illiteracy rate. Do you know which ones they are? It is our Northeast. It’s not just a higher or more severe illiteracy rate in these states. Other economic data is now also lower in the region, ”he declared in a rage.
The drama of the Northeast comes from far away. In the first volume of his rather official biography of Lula, the journalist Fernando Morais points out that when she was born, in 1945, life expectancy in the region was 35 years. The president-elect himself prematurely lost four of his eleven siblings.
With an area of ??8.5 million square kilometers, 17 times that of Spain, Brazil is divided into 27 states, which are grouped in turn into five regions: South, Southeast, Center-West, North and Northeast. In the latter, in the largest state, Bahia, with its 11.2 million voters and the highest proportion of black people, the candidate of the Workers’ Party (PT), Lula, obtained 72% of the vote. and surpassed his far-right rival by 3.7 million votes. In Pernambuco de Caetés, the former president and future president had 67%, with a margin of 1.8 million votes.
The most overwhelming victory of Lulismo in its bastion was that of Piuaí, with 77% and one million more votes than Bolsonaro. And in the region as a whole, it reached 69%, with those determinants 12.5 million votes ahead.
The total data from the Northeast are essential, not only because territorially they served Lula to widely compensate for the defeats of just over 10 million in the other regions. They have great value for what they express sociologically, as it is an area of ??high poverty and considerable racial diversity.
The pre-election polls, which this time again found the winner correct and only slightly underestimated Bolsonaro, already anticipated Lula’s dominance among the humblest, blacks and mestizos, as well as among Catholics and women.
When Lula was seven years old, her mother, Mrs. Lindu, decided that they emigrate from the state of Pernambuco to São Paulo, which forms the southern region with Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro and Espírito Santo. It is the most populous in Brazil, in which 50 million people voted for one of the two candidates on Sunday, compared to 32.5 in the Northeast. However, Lula got practically the same number of votes in both territories.
In the Southeast, it was where the calculations of Bolsonarism were blown up, because to win it had broader victories than those it had in Rio, the stronghold of the Bolsonaro family, and São Paulo, the state with the highest census and elusive for the PT. , who lost the gubernatorial election again on Sunday. In Minas, the state that usually reflects the result of the country as a whole, Lula won by the minimum, by four tenths.
In the Southeast as a whole, Bolsonaro’s victory was 4.2 million votes. The same margin that he practically achieved in the South, the Porto Alegre area, one of the most prosperous in Brazil. And in a less inhabited region, he obtained it with 62% of the votes, compared to 54% in the Southeast of São Paulo.
In the other two regions, the Center-West, which includes Brasilia, and the North, where Manaus is, Bolsonaro also won, by 1.8 million and some 200,000 votes, respectively.
The presidential election this Sunday was one of records. There has never been such a small difference between the candidates, 1.8 points, which is almost half the previous minimum, that of 2014, when Dilma Roussef beat Aécio Neves. Lula broke the vote record, with his 60 million. Never has a president who was running for a second term been overthrown and, as Folha de São Paulo pointed out yesterday, it had never happened that a defeated party did not speak out once the official result was announced.
Facing Bolsonaro’s silence, while Lula began his celebration, congratulations from world leaders followed one another. These quick messages can be read as a warning to the outgoing president that the international community will not accept his emulation of Donald Trump, resisting leaving power. His closed mouth leaves any scenario open. With his trajectory, it would be rare for him not to try something, unless he assumes that it is impossible to resist.
