Brazil elections. Bolsonaro dominates the first round and advances to the run-off
Rights — di Valentina Neri
Brazil's far-right presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro leads Fernando Haddad by 16 points. Run-off on 28 October.
Brazil elections. Bolsonaro dominates the first round and advances to the run-off
Brazil's far-right presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro leads Fernando Haddad by 16 points. Run-off on 28 October.
8 October, 8am – The latest polls published just hours before the polls opened put him at just under 40 per cent, but Jair Bolsonaro achieved a result that exceeded even those expectations. The far-right presidential candidate secured 46 per cent of the vote, leading his closest rival Fernando Haddad of the PT (Partido dos trabalhadores) by 16 percentage points, with Haddad finishing at 29.2 per cent.
Ciro Gomes came in at 12.5 per cent, Gerardo Alckmin at 4.8 per cent, and João Amoêdo at 2.5 per cent. Everything will therefore be decided in the run-off, scheduled for Sunday 28 October.
Another heavy blow for the PT came from the state of Minas Gerais, where former Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff was not elected to the Senate.
Update 7 October, 11pm – Voting was completed without incident; at around 2pm local time, approximately 964 digital ballot machines had been replaced due to faults, out of a total of 454,000.
7 October, 4pm – Voting operations are proceeding normally; long queues are being reported across the country. Polling stations will close at 5pm local time.
Fernando Haddad, candidato à presidência pelo PT, vota em São Paulo: tinyurl.com/ybnmsbfd #GloboNews
Sunday 7 October saw Brazilian citizens called to the polls to choose their new president, the governors of the 27 federal states and the members of the national Congress. For South America's largest democracy, these 2018 elections are particularly significant.
How the Brazilian electoral system works
Elections in Brazil are held using a two-round system for president and vice-president. If a candidate receives more than 50 per cent of the vote, they are immediately declared the winner; otherwise, citizens will return to the polls for the run-off on 28 October. The president, who serves a four-year term, is both head of state and head of government (unlike in Italy).
Also on 7 October, votes are cast for the governors of individual states and to renew the national Congress, the country's legislative body, divided into two chambers: the Câmara dos Deputados and the Senado Federal. The former has a number of members proportional to the Brazilian population (but no more than 513), who serve four-year terms. For the Senate, each of the federal states (26, plus the federal district that includes the capital Brasília) elects three members. One third of senators is renewed every four years, with the remaining share renewed after a further four years.
Voting is compulsory for all citizens between the ages of 18 and 69. It is optional, however, for 16- and 17-year-olds, those over 70, and illiterate citizens.
Electronic voting has been in use since 2000, meaning that, if all goes smoothly, the results of the Brazilian elections will be known within a few hours of the polls closing. It is worth bearing in mind the time difference, however: São Paulo is five hours behind Italy.
Who are the candidates in the Brazilian elections and who are the favourites
There are thirteen presidential candidates and, according to the polls, the outcome of these Brazilian elections is still wide open.
Jair Bolsonaro
According to the latest poll published on 2 October by Datafolha, 32 per cent of citizens intend to vote for the far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro. Many have described him as the Brazilian Donald Trump, but according to the British newspaper the Guardian, that nickname is far too kind.
Of Italian descent, the former army captain is serving his seventh term in office, yet his extremist positions have never been so popular. His slogan is "Brazil above everything, God above everyone." His misogynistic statements have caused outrage in Brazil and beyond ("Women should earn less because they get pregnant," or "You don't even deserve to be raped by me," directed at a female political opponent), as have his homophobic remarks ("Gay people are the product of drug addiction") and his violent rhetoric ("A police officer who doesn't kill isn't a police officer").
He declares himself a supporter of the military regime that lasted from 1964 to 1985, refusing to describe it as a dictatorship, and dedicated his impeachment vote against Dilma Rousseff to Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, the head of the regime's torturers during the dictatorship. He has expressed contempt for the rights of indigenous peoples, and the word "environment" does not appear anywhere in his electoral programme.
In September he was stabbed at a campaign rally and was forced to suspend his campaign due to the serious injuries sustained. In recent days, thousands of people took to the streets to protest against him, under the slogan "Ele não" (not him).
Fernando Haddad
Bolsonaro's closest challenger is Fernando Haddad, the centre-left Workers' Party candidate. This is the political party of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who previously governed the country from 2003 to 2011 but was excluded from the race due to legal proceedings. Lula was sentenced to twelve years in prison for corruption and, by virtue of the so-called "clean slate law," Brazil's Supreme Electoral Court blocked his candidacy and also prevented him from campaigning.
Until a few months ago, Lula himself was considered the front-runner with 40 per cent of the vote, but Haddad has proved unable to consolidate that support: according to Datafolha, 21 per cent of Brazilians say they intend to vote for him. A university professor, Haddad is the outgoing mayor of São Paulo and served as Minister of Education under both the Lula and Rousseff governments.
The other candidates
In third and fourth place, with 11 and 9 per cent of voting intentions respectively, are Ciro Gomes and Gerardo Alckmin. Ciro Gomes served as Minister of National Integration in the Lula government and is running for the centre-left Democratic Labour Party. Alckmin, meanwhile, leads the centre-right Brazilian Social Democracy Party; a physician, he is the sitting governor of the state of São Paulo.
Also according to the Datafolha survey, Marina Silva, former environment minister under President Lula, is currently set to receive just 4 per cent of the vote. Silva is well known in environmental circles: following her activism alongside Chico Mendes, she has repeatedly campaigned for the protection of the Amazon, and in 1996 was awarded the Goldman environmental prize, also known as the "Nobel Prize for the environment."
Em 32 anos de vida pública, Marina recebeu mais de 50 prêmios internacionais. Vote 18 - Marina Silva Presidente. #Vote18 #VoteMarina18
The other candidates from left-wing groupings are the thirty-six-year-old Guilherme Boulos of the Socialism and Liberty Party (his running mate, Sônia Guajajara, is the first indigenous person in history to run for the position) and trade unionist Vera Lucia Salgado of the United Socialist Workers' Party.
On the right are Joao Goulart of the Patria Livre Party, son of the Brazilian president of the same name who was ousted by the military coup of 1964; military officer Cabo Daciolo of the Patriota (or Patri) party; and lawyer Jose Maria Eymael, founder of the Christian Social Democratic Party, running for the presidency for the fifth time.
In the centre stands Álvaro Dias of Podemos (which has nothing to do with the Spanish party of the same name). Businessman and banker João Amoêdo is standing for the Partido Novo, which he helped to found and which positions itself as an alternative to the establishment, much as the Movimento 5 stelle did in Italy. Outgoing finance minister Henrique Meirelles represents the coalition formed by the Brazilian Democratic Movement and the Social Humanist Party.
Who is the outgoing president and why he is not standing again
Absent from the ballot is Brazil's current president, Michel Temer, who has given his backing to Meirelles, a member of his government. Temer has been in office since 31 August 2016, when Dilma Rousseff was removed by the senate at the end of a nine-month impeachment process. Brazil's first female president had been accused of falsifying public accounts to conceal the country's financial disarray ahead of her re-election in 2014. The affair had come as a bolt from the blue for Brazil's turbulent politics, all the more so because it unfolded at a particularly sensitive moment: it was in the summer of 2016, after all, that the Olympics were held in Rio. Rousseff, who has always maintained her innocence, is standing for the Senate in the state of Minas Gerais.
Her successor Michel Temer has not been immune to scandal either: even had he stood, his chances of a strong result would have been rather slim. He had been formally charged with corruption, but the criminal proceedings had been blocked by a parliamentary vote. His austerity policies proved deeply unpopular and fuelled widespread distrust of the political class across the country.
The hot-button issues of these elections in Brazil
Brazil is approaching this electoral appointment in a highly critical socio-economic situation. According to the Guardian, Bolsonaro owes much of his support, first and foremost, to the ever-growing focus on the issue of security. Last year the country recorded as many as 63,880 murders, that is 30.8 per 100,000 people. This is an absolute record, for Brazil and beyond (in Mexico, for example, the ratio is 20 per 100,000 people). It is a spiral of violence that cannot fail to alarm the population, and one to which Bolsonaro intends to respond by removing certain restrictions on gun ownership and expanding the powers of repression available to police forces.
While the country's political class was being engulfed by the corruption scandal, the economy entered a deep recession. According to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), GDP will return to growth of 2.2 per cent this year and 2.4 per cent next year, but the unemployment rate remains extremely high: according to the World Bank, it has shot up from 6.67 per cent in 2014 to 13.3 per cent in 2017.