Lula and Bolsonaro are competing in the Brazilian elections on 2 October 2022. The future of the Amazon rainforest and indigenous peoples is also at stake.
"You are the president who led the most corrupt government in the history of Brazil." "You have destroyed Brazil and you continue to destroy it." Gloves came off during the first televised debate between candidates in the Brazilian elections, scheduled for Sunday 2 October. Above all between the two main contenders: the incumbent president Jair Bolsonaro and his challenger Lula (Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva), who was already president from 2003 to 2011. The most recent poll presented by the agency Datafolha shows Lula in the lead with 45 per cent of voting intentions, against Bolsonaro's 34 per cent (and rising). Voting intentions for the other nine presidential candidates remain marginal.
Tensions are running high, as are the stakes, in a country that, from the beginning of 2020, has lost 680,000 people to Covid-19 and more than three million hectares of primary tropical forest (a figure from which 2022 is still missing). A country whose economy is enjoying a strong rebound, partly thanks to rising prices for exported commodities. Citizens, however, are benefiting only to a very marginal degree, squeezed by inflation and divided by deep inequalities. Here, then, is an overview of the candidates in the Brazilian elections.
Left-wing candidate Lula is hoping for a comeback, after two terms as president and 580 days spent in prison. His political career was abruptly interrupted by Operation Car Wash, a vast investigation into money laundering and corruption. Convicted in 2017 and sentenced to nine years for accepting money from the oil company Petrobras — a sentence later increased to thirteen on appeal — he was released in 2019 after all convictions were annulled. Throughout this long and controversial legal saga, he consistently declared himself the victim of political persecution.
"We are ready not only to win the elections on 2 October, but also to rebuild and transform Brazil," Lula declared at a campaign launch event. In concrete terms, his Partido dos trabalhadores (Pt) is focusing on credit for businesses, minimum wage adjustments, and the restoration of programmes such as Minha casa minha vida (to facilitate the purchase of a first home) and Luz para todos (to bring electricity from renewable sources to rural areas). In this way, Lula seeks to position himself in continuity with his previous governments, which were strongly focused on the fight against poverty. The number of people suffering from hunger in Brazil fell by 10 million over twenty years, between 1992 and 2013.
Speaking to journalists, the left-wing candidate also promised to "put an end to illegal gold mining and fight seriously against deforestation", preventing trees from being felled to make way for pastures and soya plantations. He also pledged to restore the proper powers of monitoring authorities such as the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Natural Resources (Ibama), which have been weakened over the past four years.
The incumbent president is also trying to win the trust of the poorest sections of the population, promising cash subsidies to families in need. These families have found themselves in serious difficulty in recent months due to the erosion of their purchasing power; compounding this is the heavy health and social toll of a pandemic that Jair Bolsonaro himself long sought to play down. It has, however, been a golden period for the powerful agribusiness lobbies, openly backed by the government even at the cost of visibly weakening the protections afforded to the Amazon rainforest, the planet's green lung.
Time notes how Bolsonaro in office has shown himself to be highly centralising, repeatedly issuing decrees that bypassed Congress and seeking to silence critics. When the Supreme Court blocked some of his initiatives, he called on his supporters to take to the streets. Sensitive situations, in a country that was governed by a military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. And it is by no means certain that Jair Bolsonaro is prepared to accept the outcome of the electoral round, given that he has repeatedly spoken openly about the risk of fraud in the electronic voting system, albeit without evidence.
Unlike Italy, Brazil is a presidential republic in which the head of government is also head of state. If on 2 October no candidate obtains more than 50 per cent of the vote, citizens will return to the polls on 30 October for a run-off. The winner will remain in office for four years.
The Brazilian elections also include a vote for the National Congress, the country's legislative body, the equivalent of our Parliament. It is divided into two chambers. The Câmara dos Deputados has a number of members proportional to the population and will be completely renewed. The Senate, by contrast, has three seats for each of the federal states: those up for grabs on 2 October are 27 out of 81.
Citizens are also called upon to elect the new governors of the 27 federal states.
Voting takes place electronically. It is compulsory for citizens aged between 18 and 69, while it is optional for young people aged 16 and 17, for those over 70 and for the illiterate.
Even before its outcome is known, the 2022 Brazilian elections have already set a record: that for the highest number of indigenous candidates standing for seats in Parliament. There are as many as 181, 36 per cent more than in the 2018 electoral round. Many of them had never been members of a political party. A sudden wave of political engagement that rings out as a signal, after four years in which the administration led by Bolsonaro repeatedly attacked the rights of native peoples. So much so that the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (Apib) went as far as bringing the matter before the International Criminal Court, accusing him of genocide and ecocide. There is also an indigenous candidate for the vice-presidency: she is Künã Yporã Tremembé, who is running alongside Vera Lúcia Salgado for the Unified Socialist Workers' Party (Partido socialista dos trabalhadores unificado), of Trotskyist inspiration.
"There is a need to have indigenous political representation in the national congress. We cannot allow someone else to speak on our behalf," Vanda Ortega, a thirty-five-year-old of Witoto ethnicity, told LifeGate. An educator and nurse, she lives in the state of Amazonas, in the Parque das tribos in Manaus, the first indigenous community officially recognised in Brazil in an urban context. Everyone there knows her because, from the very outbreak of the pandemic, she went from house to house helping those who needed medicines or masks.
Ortega, too, is having her first political experience and has decided to stand for election on Lula's ticket. So far, only two indigenous people have won a seat in the Brazilian Congress: in 1982 Mário Juruna, of the Xavante people, and in 2018 Joênia Wapichana, elected in the state of Roraima. Moreover, in the 2010 census only 0.5 per cent of the population identified as indigenous: a figure significantly underestimated relative to the actual reality, itself the product of decades of uprooting and erasure of native peoples' identity.
Voters in the state of Amazonas, which is covered for the most part by the Amazon rainforest, also came out in favour of Bolsonaro in 2018 and elected eight men to Congress, four of whom came from the world of agribusiness. "If I am chosen, it will be a great challenge," Ortega promises. "We will go and occupy a space that is not designed for women, especially indigenous women."
