Brazil’s presidential elections will go to a runoff on Oct. 30 after Workers Party (PT) candidate Inacio Lula da Silva came in first place but did not succeed in winning the 50% of the vote required for a first round victory in the Sunday, Oct. 2 vote. The PT has never won an election in the first round, but this time it had been considered a possibility. Lula did take the lead, winning 48.3%, but incumbent Jair Bolsonaro garnered somewhat more than polls had projected, coming in at 43.2%. Both candidates will now negotiate deals to win over the small vote totals of the minority party candidates for Oct. 30, as well as fight to win voters over to their candidate.
Everything else being equal, Lula is the likely winner, but the closer-than-forecast vote opens the door for operations to foster conflict, destabilization and the contesting of the upcoming election results, destabilizing this member of the BRICS group in the middle of the rapidly-evolving international crisis. The situation in the country is polarized and tense, even volatile, with several media describing the Oct. 30 runoff election as “the most tense in the history of Brazil.”
The policies which would be adopted in a return to power of a President Lula, or even of Bolsonaro, are also still being battled out. In the campaign period, neither buckled to the external pressure to join the unipolar war party campaign against Russia. Lula is strongly associated with the BRICS policy and South American integration, but leading Anglo-American interests have been promoting Lula as the candidate who will “save the Amazon forest,” in hopes of gaining control over his administration by roping him into their Malthusian green agenda. It is instructive that Marina da Silva, the late Prince Philip’s favorite ecologist and once-presidential candidate, endorsed Lula for that reason.
