Brazil: Lula disappoints, Bolsonaro resists outcome of first round of presidential election

Only five points separate the two qualified candidates for the second round, which will be held on October 30. The disappointment is strong on the left.

by and

The crowd is silent. On the Cinelândia, the iconic place of the center of Rio de Janeiro, surrounded by skyscrapers and prestigious Art Deco buildings, the eyes are low and heavy. However, there were several hundred, militants adorned with red, to have come here to celebrate the return of the left left in Brazil. The beers were ready, frozen as it should be, the smiles and the songs of victory too. But the voters decided otherwise.

At the end of the first round of the presidential election, Sunday October 2, the ex-president of the left Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva finished in the lead with 48.43 % of the votes against 43.2 % to the chief of the Outgoing extreme state state, which carries out a much higher score than that provided by the survey institutes. Barely 5 points, or only 6 million votes (out of a total of 123 million votes) separate two men, who will meet for an uncertain second round on October 30.

For the left, it all started well. The day before the ballot, the last polls gave another 15 points to Lula and good chances to win in the first round. The most popular president in the history of Brazil, the latter thought only a bite of his successor, discredited by his catastrophic management of the economy, the COVID-19 and the environment. At the head of a vast coalition bringing together nine political parties, the leader of the Workers’ Party (PT) could leave confident.

On the morning of October 2, Lula went alongside her new wife, Rosângela, voting with a smile to Sao Bernardo Do Campo, a workers’ suburb of Sao Paulo who saw him born as a union leader. “It’s a day more than important for me!” Says the former metallurgist worker, recalling that four years ago, imprisoned for corruption, he could not appear to the presidential election. Lula then seized his receipt and carries him on her lips. A kiss of democracy, as the announcement of an inevitable victory.

far from the effusion of the 2018 victory

At 450 kilometers in the east, in Rio de Janeiro, it is a whole different image that Jair Bolsonaro gives. L’Air Bougon, under a gray and rainy sky, the outgoing president presents himself around 9 am at his polling station in the Vila Militar, Carioca Constelled district of army barracks. No member of his family accompanies him: the head of state is surrounded only from his bodyguards with smoked glasses and a handful of allies. Among them, the deputy Daniel Silveira, former police officer with shaved skull and the body of wrestler, sentenced to eight years in prison for his attacks on democracy, which Bolsonaro ended up picking up …

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/Media reports.