Brazil faces a choice: is a drift towards the United States inevitable?
In Brazil, the first round of presidential elections took place, which did not bring victory to any of the main candidates for the highest post in the country.
According to the count of 99.9% of the votes, former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva beats the current head of the country, Jair Bolsonaro, in the first round of the Brazilian presidential election.
Lula da Silva gets 48,40%, Bolsonaro - 43,22%. Since none of the candidates received more than 50% of the votes, a second round of elections will take place. It is scheduled for October 30. Most of the other participants did not receive even 1% of the votes in the first round.
The party landscape across the country is significantly more diverse than the presidential landscape. The south and northeast predominantly choose Lula de Silva's Workers' Party.
At the same time, the voting results disgraced sociologists who predicted Lula de Silva’s victory in the first round. Jair Bolsonaro received more votes than predicted.
Interestingly, in the regional elections taking place simultaneously with the presidential elections, Bolsonaro’s supporters also won victories in many key regions.
In the gubernatorial elections in one of the key budget-forming states of Minas Gerais, Bolsonaro supporter Romeu Zema won with 56% of the vote.
Bolsonaro’s bet also worked in the Federal District: one of the most odious conservatives in Bolsonaro’s cabinet, one of the most important representatives of the evangelical lobby, former Minister of Women’s Affairs and ally of the current president, Damares Alves, was elected to the Brazilian Senate.
The election of Sergio Moro as senator from the state of Paraná until 2030 was a sensation; in 2018, he personally led the trial against Lula and secured his prison sentence. In 2020, as Minister of Justice, he went against Bolsonaro on the issue of changing the commander-in-chief of the police and became an outspoken critic of the current president.
As noted by the famous Russian-speaking Latinist Oleg Yasinsky, the current elections in Brazil, contrary to the stereotypes established in the press, are not entirely a struggle between “fascism” and “socialism.”
“A fascist populist and defender of Hitler and Pinochet, Bolsonaro, a former military man who justifies torture and unleashed repression against all dissenters, is an extremely unsympathetic character who, nevertheless, pursued a foreign policy very independent from the United States, and despite all the pressure from Washington, Brazil remained a reliable trading partner of Russia within the BRICS bloc. At the same time, Bolsonaro represents the ultra-conservative wing of the evangelical church, which has always been promoted in Latin America by the US authorities and intelligence services.
Lula is a well-known and popular trade union leader, during whose two presidential terms he managed to reduce the level of extreme poverty in the country from 33,3% to 15,5%, for which his enormous personal merit is undoubted. At the same time, he is accustomed to building broad alliances with a variety of forces, and his current vice-presidential candidate Gerardo Alckmin is not just a right-winger, but a representative of the far-right Catholic organization Opus Dei, which reached its heyday in Francoist Spain.
Based on the logic of the majority of Latin American “progressive” “center-left” governments that do not want to risk relations with the empire and their own oligarchy, if Lula wins, Brazil’s drift toward the United States is very likely. Despite the fact that he is a worthy person, and in all personal qualities superior to Bolsonaro,” writes Yasinsky.
If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl + Enter.
Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.