From Sao Paulo
Accurate and detailed radiography of the Lula’s victory contains several confirmations and some surprises. The official page of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) facilitates the analysis after an October that ends as tense as it is violent. Ratified the leader of the PT in the presidency by that supreme voting authority, immediately recognized by presidents as Joe Biden who called him, Emmanuel Macron which showed his satisfaction and his own Alberto Fernandez who traveled to Brazil, to trace the fine data of this crucial election, is necessary to know certain motivations for the outcome on Sunday. In contrast to this display of first-level political contacts, of formal and informal meetings, the head of state, Jair Bolsonaro, never broke the silence.
The most fanatical supporters of President Bolsonaro who took him to the Planalto in 2018 may have been able to distance him from his re-election goal with criminal behavior and in at least two cases with visible weapons, in the days before the second round. Facts whose impact on the vote is difficult to measure, but which had a great public repercussion.
One was the episode former congressman Roberto Jefferson. The man who shot at the police from his mansion in Rio de Janeiro. He was serving a house sentence and returned to prison. He had visited Bolsonaro four times in the Planalto despite the fact that the head of state did not want to recognize that affinity. The other act was carried out by legislator Carla Zambelli, from the same party as the president. She ran into a man with a gun in hand and went into a bar with the excuse that she had been attacked. It was found that her victim is a sports journalist and works at the Weber Shandwick communication agency, dedicated to the cultural area. He also contributes to The Playoffs news site.
The Northeast and Minas Gerais
The two situations further deteriorated Bolsonaro’s image a few days before the ballot. A second shift that ended with a tight difference of 1.80 percent. 50.90 for Lula and 49.10 for the president, which the government must hand over to him on January 1st. The winner prevailed in thirteen statesof which nine belong to the Northeast region, where his greatest political wealth resides. In addition, he won in a very tight way in the strategic Minas Gerais (50.20 to 49.80) and in three of the seven states with the highest number of voters in the northern Brazil: Amazonas, Tocantins and Pará.
Lula made a big difference on his home turf, where he almost uniformly beat up Bolsonaro. The nine states of the Northeast, including Pernambuco where she was born, gave her confidence with percentages that ranged between 76.86 percent in Piauí and 58.68 percent in Alagoas. In addition, its only winning candidate for governor, Jerônimo Rodrigues, triumphed widely in Bahia. The remaining three who made it to the second round lost. Fernando Haddad in San Pablo and those who with few chances aspired to the governorships of Santa Catarina and Sergipe.
His rival, the beleaguered president whose voice was still unheard after the election, won all fourteen remaining states. Even with his victory in São Paulo, the most populous in the country – where his candidate for governor from the Republican force, Tarcisio Gomes de Freitas, won – he was not enough to continue in government for another four years. He also prevailed in Rio de Janeiro and Espírito Santo in the southeast, but where he made the biggest difference was in the three southern states: Paraná, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul (RS).
Bolsonaro’s happiness was not complete in the region. In industrialized RS, his gubernatorial candidate Onyx Lorenzoni suffered one of the worst defeats. Eduardo Leite from Tucano turned around the result of October 2 with the support of the PT electorate. The loser had held the position of chief minister of the Bolsonaro Civil House.
Where the military president also won with wide differences was in the Central West region, a fundamental pole of agribusiness. In the Federal District of Brasilia, Goias, Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul, the re-election project obtained very high percentages, between 59 and 65 percent.
Congress, a complicated scenario
Lula will have to fully deploy his recognized capacity as a political armorer in Congress. His own caucus in both chambers is meager (68 deputies and 9 senators from the PT). Even with his allies in the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB), Guilherme Boulos’s PSOL and other lesser forces, he would not succeed in putting into operation the parliamentary devices required to pass vital laws. One of them, the tax reform.
Of the 308 federal deputies that are required to pass a law in Congress, the next president and his allies reach 122 today. They lack no less than 186. To achieve a quorum in the Lower House, he needs 257 legislators, so he should arrive to gather 135 deputies more than those who have their bench. To call a plebiscite he needs less. There are 171 deputies and discounting his 122, he would have to add 49 more to his own and his allies.
The same will happen to him in the Senate. Of the nine that hold a seat in the Upper House for the PT – to which three of his allies must be added – he has almost a quarter of the amount he needs to sit. There are 41 and 29 are missing. Conditioned by this scenario in Congress, Lula has to expand his own strength in a scenario that is almost always hostile to his party.
In that sounding board of Brazilian democracy, his partner and former president Dilma Rousseff was dismissed in 2016. Bolsonaro began to build his way to the Planalto also in that room. When he voted to remove from office that woman who accompanied Lula on Sunday night in the box, he vindicated the memory of her own torturer, Carlos Brilhante Ustra.
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