This Sunday, Brazilians will go to the polls in the first round of the presidential and legislative elections, in which current President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is trying to renew his term for the third time, in a heated confrontation against the far-right candidate Flavio Bolsonaro, whom the administration of US President Donald Trump is betting on to expand the circle of expansion of right-wing regimes loyal to Washington in Latin America. Trump has publicly supported right-wing candidates who won elections in Chile, Colombia and Peru in recent months.
In the speech he delivered last week before the United Nations General Assembly, the Brazilian President warned against foreign interference in the affairs of states, and said that “Brazil cannot be accommodated by any backyard,” in a clear reference to the efforts made by the Trump administration publicly to help his rival win.
All polls published so far indicate that Lula has a slight lead over Bolsonaro in the first round, which requires going to a second round whose fate depends on the alliances that each party can establish with other parties and forces.
In the first round, Lula (80 years old) has a slight lead over Senator Bolsonaro (45 years old), the son of former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.
Jair Bolsonaro nominated his son Flavio as a presidential candidate after he was sentenced to 27 years in prison. Flavio, who was not widely known until recently, presents himself as a "moderate" version of his father. He promised to pursue a strict policy in combating crime, pledging to build huge prisons subject to maximum security.
Many registered voters have not yet decided on their choices, following a campaign dominated by scandals that shook both camps. Joel da Silva (42 years old), a doorman in Rio de Janeiro who had previously voted for both Lula and Jair Bolsonaro in previous elections, told Agence France-Presse: “I have not made up my mind yet, because corruption is so blatant, it is difficult.” It is likely that about 160 million voters will have to decide the competition between the most likely candidates in a second round on October 25.
Lula, one of the most prominent symbols of the left in the world, returned to power remarkably in 2023, after spending a period in prison following his conviction for corruption, before the sentences were later overturned for procedural reasons related to jurisdiction.
In his statements and the speeches he delivered at his election festivals, Lula appears confident of victory, and is betting on continuing the political and economic program he put in place for his current term, which is based on a generous package of aid for poor and modest families, and strengthening the health insurance system, most of whose services were cut off by former President Jair Bolsonaro, in addition to an ambitious plan to support the industrial and infrastructure sector, and giving the federal security services broad powers to maintain security, which constitutes a major concern for Brazilians, and the focus of his rival’s program. Which calls for the armed forces to be freed to confront violence in cities.
Lula summarizes his electoral program with the following slogan: a greater role for the state in supporting social policies and investing in key public facilities to reduce disparities among the population. The program is based on 4 main axes: These are sovereignty, the democratic system, the participation of local communities, and the reduction of social disparities.
On the security level, Lula proposes a program that completely contradicts Bolsonaro’s program, which is based on tightening repressive measures and penalties and facilitating the possession of weapons for the civilian population and the conditions for their use. He proposes focusing on intelligence information, enhancing cooperation between the security services and the judiciary, drying up sources of funding for criminal organizations, and ensuring civil rights.
Lula's program includes a plan to put all security agencies under one cloak, allocating $10 billion to finance equipping the police with modern technological equipment, and using cameras on the security forces' uniforms to monitor the abuses that have spread widely in recent years and caused hundreds of deaths.
Among the new measures included in the Lula program is an increase in taxes on major wealth and Brazilian companies abroad, to finance investment in infrastructure and increase the productive capacity of the industrial sector, which has witnessed a decline in the recent period. The program focuses on enhancing the production of medicines locally to reduce dependence on abroad, and not to repeat the crisis that Brazil suffered during the “Covid” pandemic, which caused a very large number of victims due to the lack of timely availability of vaccines and therapeutic medicines.
Environmental policy also constitutes one of the basic pillars of Lula's program, especially since his first term fell short of the expectations and hopes placed upon him to combat forest degradation and unjust cutting in the Amazon forest, which is considered the "lungs of the world" and alone produces 10 percent of the Earth's oxygen. The measures included in the program aim to stop the deterioration of Brazilian forests once and for all within the year 2030. The program also includes a package of projects to achieve full national sovereignty over energy resources and ways to extract them, and self-sufficiency in sensitive minerals.
However, the interest of the Lula camp in the final stage of the electoral campaign remains focused on the possibilities of American interference in the electoral process, which the intelligence services had raised to the maximum degree, in addition to fears that Washington would impose new economic sanctions on Brazil if the competition in the second round was, as expected, between Lula and Bolsonaro. Lula had relatively succeeded in calming the atmosphere that was at its most tense between Brazil and the United States after the intense pressure exerted by Donald Trump to prevent the Brazilian president from being referred to trial, and he held two meetings with the American president that contributed to resolving some of the hot issues between the two parties.
