BRASILIA (Realist English). On August 16, the presidential election campaign officially started in Brazil. The confrontation between the incumbent President, Jair Bolsonaro, and the country’s former leader, Lula da Silva, will be the most polarized campaign in recent decades.
Da Silva, who was Brazil’s president from 2003 to 2010, has already started wearing a bulletproof vest during public appearances. He was supposed to speak at an engine manufacturing plant on Tuesday morning, but federal police officers asked him to cancel the event for security reasons.
Instead, the leftist politician filed his seventh bid for the presidency at the Volkswagen plant in San Bernardo do Campo, an industrial city outside Sao Paulo, where he became famous as a trade union leader in the 1970s.
Bolsonaro, the populist nationalist backed by Christian conservatives, launched his campaign with a rally in Juiz de Fora, a small southeastern town where an assailant stabbed and nearly killed him during his 2018 campaign.
“I was reborn here… Here, the Creator saved my life so that I could do everything possible for our nation as president,” an emotional Bolsonaro told the cheering supporters.
In most opinion polls, Lula is ahead of Bolsonaro by double digits, and both leaders are well ahead of the other 10 candidates.
Politicians and poll watchers fear that political violence will only intensify ahead of the presidential, congressional and gubernatorial elections in 27 states, which will be held on October 2.
” There is real reason for concern because even though political violence has been a fact of life here for years the situation today has been exacerbated by the way Bolsonaro has promoted violent discourse as a way to resolve political conflicts,” Pablo Nunez, director of the CESeC think tank, said in a conversation with the Guardian.
A poll conducted by IPEC on August 15 showed that in the first round 44% of voters support Lula and only 32% support Bolsonaro. In the second round, 51% of Brazilians are ready to vote for Lula, and 35% for the incumbent President Bolsonaro.
However, in recent weeks, Bolsonaro has managed to narrow Lula’s gap by increasing social spending for poor Brazilians, as well as calling on the state-controlled oil company Petrobras to lower fuel prices, which is a key factor in inflation.
Many Brazilians fear that if Bolsonaro is defeated, he may follow in the footsteps of former US President Donald Trump and try to fight the outcome.
Bolsonaro has previously expressed unfounded doubts about the national electronic voting system. And in 2021, he told tens of thousands of supporters that only God could remove him from power.
