Lula, the big favorite in the ballot, benefits from the rallying of a part of the employers.
Rio de Janeiro
Analysts have called this the “Meirelles effect”. When the former President of the Central Bank and Minister of Finance of Brazil announced last week, ten days before the first round of the presidential election, his support for Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the consequences were immediate: the index of the Sao Paulo Stock Exchange went up and the dollar went down. A sign that the left-wing ex-president – given as a winner in all polls for weeks – is no longer a scarecrow for the financial markets which voted overwhelmingly for Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. It is true that Henrique Meirelles gives the candidate a weighty guarantee: he is the author of the measure which establishes a ceiling on public expenditure, a guarantee of fiscal responsibility at a time when Brazil is a patient who leaves the hospital without being really cured and who risks a strong relapse, to use the expression of an economist.
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Without going as far as public rallying to Lula, big names in capitalism…