RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — After an inconclusive first round of
presidential elections,
Brazilians woke up Monday to another month of
uncertainty in a deeply polarized political environment and with renewed fears
of unrest.
اضافة اعلان
Seeking to make a
spectacular comeback, ex-president and frontrunner Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva
failed to garner the 50 percent of votes plus one needed to avoid an October 30
runoff against far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro.
Lula got 48.4
percent of the vote in Sunday’s first round, followed by Bolsonaro with a much
closer-than-expected 43.2 percent that seemed to signal a high level of
enthusiasm for his conservative brand of “God, country, and family” politics.
Lula had gone into
Sunday’s first round with 50 percent of polled voter intention, and
Bolsonaro with 36 percent.
The divisive
president’s surprise performance likely spells a difficult time ahead, analysts
said.
“I think it will
be a very stressful campaign,” Leonardo Paz, Brazil consultant for the
International Crisis Group, told AFP.
“Bolsonaro and
Lula will come ... for each other, and I think Bolsonaro will double down on
... saying that the system was against him.”
Bolsonaro has
repeatedly sought to cast doubt on Brazil’s electronic voting system and has
questioned the validity of opinion polls that have consistently placed him a
distant second.
Now, with
real-life results seeming to bear out his claims, “more people ... may believe
in what Bolsonaro is saying,” said Paz.
‘Emboldened’
The incumbent president has
repeatedly hinted that he would not accept a Lula victory, raising fears of a
Brazilian version of the riots last year at the US Capitol after former
president
Donald Trump refused to accept his election loss.
Bolsonaro “will be very emboldened,” by Sunday’s
electoral performance, said Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue
think tank.
“It will give him some momentum because he’s beaten
the expectations. ... He will play on that the experts were wrong: ‘I’ve got
the momentum and I’ll defy expectations again in the second round’.”
Late Sunday, Bolsonaro proclaimed to journalists:
“We defeated the opinion polls’ lie.”
Passions will be high on both sides for the next
four weeks.
Lula’s failure to pull off a first-round victory
leaves Bolsonaro with “an extra month to cause turmoil in the streets,”
political scientist Guilherme Casaroes of the Getulio Vargas Foundation’s Sao
Paulo School of Business Administration told AFP.
“Any kind of doubt that he casts upon the electoral
system will work in his favor, ... demobilizing voters not to go vote for
Lula.”
This would mean hammering on Lula’s flaws, including
his controversial conviction for corruption — since overturned in court, but
not necessarily in the court of public opinion — and the 18 months he spent in
jail.
Any violence, however, was likely to be in the form of
isolated incidents and not organized, just like it has been so far, analysts
said.
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