Bolsonaro and Lula get up early to cast their ballots in Brazilian presidential elections

Lula, favorite, bets on returning Brazil to “normality”

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva are already casting their votes in the presidential elections held this Sunday in the South American country with the former president as the clear favorite.

After depositing his ballot in a school in Rio de Janeiro, Bolsonaro has shown himself convinced that he will take the victory in the first round and that the elections will go smoothly.

“I am sure that it will be a clean election and that we will win with 60 percent of the votes,” he assured in comments picked up by ‘Estadao’.

For his part, Lula has made an appearance at the polling station of Firmino Correia de Araújo School, in Sao Bernardo do Campo, in Sao Paulo. After the voting, still in progress, Lula gave a brief press conference before accompanying the counting of votes in a hotel in the central region of the São Paulo capital.

“This country needs to finally recover its right to be happy. We want a country that lives in peace, a country that has hope, a country with a future and a country that can produce and build its future from the participation of its society,” said the candidate of the Workers’ Party (PT).

“We do not want more hatred. We do not want more discord. We want a country that lives in peace. These are the most important elections for me,” he noted before recalling that he could not vote in 2010, 2014 or 2018, the last two because he was in prison for corruption offenses of which he has finally been acquitted. “I am very happy,” he reiterated.

Lula has referred to his rival’s supporters. “The most fanatical bolsonaristas will have to adjust to the majority of society. The majority of society does not want confrontation. They want peace. The majority does not want the sale of arms; they want the distribution of books,” he said.

“Most people want to live in peace. Those who don’t want it, those who break the law, … that’s their problem. It will be easy to restore peace and democracy in this country,” he added. The goal is for Brazil to “return to normalcy”.

The also former Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff has declared her support for Lula after voting in the region of Pampulha, in the city of Belo Horizonte. “My expectation is that democracy will win and that means Lula’s victory in the first round,” said the former president.

Likewise, former President Michel Temer (2016-2018) has exercised his right, who has ruled out that there could be a coup d’état if Bolsonaro does not win. “There is no climate for this. Democracy is solid in the country. Once the ballot boxes are counted, everything will be calm,” Temer has reviewed after voting in Sao Paulo.

More than 150 million Brazilians are summoned to settle one of the most polarized elections in the country’s history, but at the same time one with the clearest results, according to polls that for months have not questioned the victory of former president Lula, who could even win in the first round.

Since the Workers’ Party (PT) candidate recovered his political rights after his convictions were annulled, there has been no poll that has not put him back in the Planalto Palace twelve years later.

Aware of this, the candidate for reelection for the Liberal Party (PL), Jair Bolsonaro, has focused his campaign on questioning the Brazilian electoral system and recalling the past with the Justice of his rival, while facing a steep fall in his popularity, always in question, although even more so after his management of the pandemic.

Brazil will decide its future at a time when it has to deal with record inflation rates, an inequality of previous times, unemployment, and the ravages of the pandemic, while there are fears that Bolsonaro will not recognize the election results, after he has been appealing on numerous occasions to the Army and casting doubt on the Supreme Court.