Brazil presidential election – NBC 51 Miami

RIO DE JANEIRO – Eleven candidates are running for the Brazilian presidential election, but only one has a chance of making the second round: former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and current President Jair Bolsonaro.

Both are political giants and eight in ten Brazilians say they will vote for one of them on Sunday, according to a Datafolha poll. This will leave little room for other competitors.

This means that instead of new proposals and detailed programs, the two lead candidates mainly insisted on their expertise and attacks on each other.

The former president leads the polls

“Both candidates are well known, the vote is very crystallized,” said Nara Pavao, a professor of political science at the Federal University of Pernambuco. He added that most voters made their decisions a long time ago.

The election could signal the return of the world’s fourth-largest democracy to a left-wing government after four years of far-right politics, under a president who has been criticized for challenging democratic institutions, his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic — which has killed nearly 700,000 people — and a weak economy. the performance.

Polls show that Lula has a solid lead that could give him a first-round victory without the need for a second round.

But even if it doesn’t, the vote itself represents a political comeback that seemed impossible for Lula, the 76-year-old former metalworker who rose from poverty to the presidency.

Just four years ago, he was imprisoned as part of a widespread corruption investigation targeting the Workers’ Party and turned Brazilian politics on its head.

Lula’s convictions for corruption and money laundering knocked him out of the 2018 election race when polls showed him the frontrunner, allowing Bolsonaro, then a far-right lawmaker, to claim victory.

Neymar posted the video on his official Tiktok account, showing him dancing seated and smiling singing an urban song asking to vote for Bolsonaro.

But a year later, the Supreme Court overturned Lula’s convictions amid accusations that the judge and prosecutors had falsified the case against him, now allowing him to run again.

In many ways, Sunday’s vote was the race that should have been in 2018, and many voters are well aware of that.

Among them is Antonio dos Santos, who voted for Bolsonaro in 2018 but will vote for da Silva this time.

“What bothers me the most is that when the epidemic started, he (Bolsonaro) seemed to be joking,” said dos Santos, a 55-year-old hairdresser who lives in Rio’s Rosinha neighborhood. “Children are dying, women are losing husbands. He wasn’t the guy I thought he was.”

“What I care about is seeing Brazil well, everybody working, everybody eating,” he said.