Lula is confident that the support of Gomes and Tebet will give him the victory with more advantage than in first round

Brazil’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said Monday that he is confident that the support gathered for the second round of the elections, including those of Simone Tebet and Ciro Gomes, will serve to defeat the president, Jair Bolsonaro, with an even greater distance than in the first round, when he was ahead of him by more than six million votes.

Thus, for the candidate for the Workers’ Party (PT), he maintains that these supports, added to that of former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso “means facilitating the possibility of winning the elections in the second round with a greater difference.”

Lula trusts that the public support announced by Tebet over the weekend, as well as the possibility that she may even be part of his future cabinet will serve to attract a large part of the 4.9 million votes that the senator of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB) achieved with a candidacy pulling towards the center of the electorate.

This Tuesday Lula plans to continue his campaign in several events in Rio de Janeiro, after the crowd bath he took last weekend in Sao Paulo. These three states along with Minas Gerais are the main electoral fiefdoms where the outcome is not yet clear, although Bolsonaro hopes to assert the triumph in local elections of his allies.

“I am going to dialogue with the people of Rio de Janeiro. I am going to try to win more votes in Rio de Janeiro because my idea is to win the elections for Bolsonaro in Rio de Janeiro,” has emphasized Lula, who in the first round was defeated in this state by a difference of about one million votes.

On the other hand, Lula has taken advantage of his interview for Super Rádio Tupi to take a little more edge off the insults that last week Bolsonaro launched against the inhabitants of the northeastern region, whom he called “illiterate” after the PT’s triumph in the first round

“This guy doesn’t like women, or blacks, or indigenous people, or northeasterners, or unions. He doesn’t like anything but his militiamen. It is not possible that we have a president of the republic who says such stupid things about a people as hard-working as the northeasterners,” Lula said.