The surveys take place year after year and practically repeat the same results. The current president of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro has collapsed and is at the bottom, well above those in the third way, but even further from Lula. Sergio Moro has not changed the panorama of the pile of candidates for the third way: he is one more to add to that group of pre-candidates, that the more names he adds, the less chance he has of coming out from below.
The constant factor has been Lula’s favoritism. Always above forty percent, reaching close to fifty, with forty points of support in the spontaneous poll, he is projected not only as a likely winner, but also for being able to do so in the first round.
Lula’s candidacy is no longer just an electoral phenomenon, although he has much more support than in all the other times he was a candidate. He had lost twice to Fernando Henrique Cardoso in the first round and the times he won it was always in the second round.
Today the phenomenon of Lula in Brazil is much more than the favorite candidacy for the presidency of Brazil. It is more than the only way to finally fulfill the Out with Bolsonaro. It is more than the only possibility to recover hope in the country, the only alternative for the restoration of its democracy.
More than all that, after the reality of Brazil as a country and as a nation was destroyed with the breakdown of democracy. There, a majority democratic decision of the people for Dilma’s second term was broken. The national will to continue with the PT governments broke down.
The country no longer has mechanisms to recompose that national will that is expressed in the democratic decisions of the people. It split between the projects that attacked national and democratic interests, of which the Lava Jato was the most expressive. This deepened the breakdown of the national will, cracked amid projects of reappropriation of the State by private interests and impotent struggles of popular resistance.
Lula was the only one who could embody the recomposition of this national will. But he was arrested, prosecuted, convicted, prevented from becoming the president that Brazil urgently needed.
After the most tragic five years in the history of Brazil, the horizon is once again opening for the country to become a democracy, to be a nation again, to once again have a national will. The way in which Lula’s projection was consolidated in political life and in popular hope – of which the polls are only one expression – was by rebuilding a national will around Lula. Because of what he represented in the past, because of his career throughout his life, but also in these last turbulent years. For the dignity with which he faced prison and managed to prove his truth with his own skin.
And because of the way it is projected today, as the rescue of hope and national will. Lula’s demonstrations, his travels around the world, the way in which he met with the people, the ever-widening support for his candidacy, his leadership as the only national figure capable of pulling the country out of the catastrophe that the right wing He launched it, the program that little by little is being designed to overcome the worst crisis that the country has experienced, all this is giving shape to a true national will around Lula.
That he is not the candidate of the PT or of the left. Lula is the candidate of democracy, the national candidate, the candidate of hope, the candidate of Brazil. Being with Lula is not simply joining a candidacy. When someone declares that they are going to vote for Lula, they are not simply expressing their vote, but rather joining this gigantic movement to rebuild a national will around Lula. It means: I am also inside, I could not be outside, I see no alternative, I join Lula as a way to recover hope in Brazil.
Lula expresses the only possibility of rebuilding a national will. Its destiny is inextricably linked to the destiny of Brazil, its democracy and its future. Adhering to Lula is not an act of political favor, which asks for compensation in regional or other elections. It is an act of adherence to the only national project in Brazil today. It is the adherence to a candidacy that is not from a party or an alliance of parties. But that is a Brazilian candidacy.
So that Brazilians can return to love their country, so that they can once again feel proud of being Brazilians, so that they can once again be masters of their destiny. Lula is the expression of a reconstruction project of a national will that gathers around him.