Brazil today entered the countdown to the general elections on October 2 with the official launch of the electoral campaigns, in acts with a strong symbolic content in which the main candidates, President Jair Bolsonaro, and former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva , showed a high voltage of accusations that exhibits the iron polarization of the lawsuit.
According to the latest survey by the consulting firm Ipec, the far-right Bolsonaro, of the Liberal Party, may lose in the first round by 52 to 35% against Lula, of the leftist Workers’ Party (PT), a fact for which the head of state has adopted a profile to try to capture the evangelical electorate, also the poorest in the country, with an agenda of customs and religion, according to the Télam agency.
Bolsonaro opened his campaign in Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, where he was stabbed in 2018, where he said he was “reborn”, while Lula did it in his political and union cradle, in front of a factory in Sao Bernardo do Campo, Greater São Paulo: the common denominator was that both chose the southeast region, the most populous in the country and the key to seeking votes at wholesale levels.
Bolsonaro encouraged a war between “good against evil” and raised the ghost about the risk of closing churches and temples if Lula triumphs.
The call was surrounded by religious content, precisely when deputy Marco Feliciano, an evangelical Bolsonaro pastor, is at the center of the controversy because he said that in the event of Lula’s victory, temples and churches will begin to be closed.
The president seeking re-election participated in a “motociata”, a motorcycle caravan as he used to do during his term, a meeting with religious and the act in Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais.
There Michelle Bolsonaro, his wife, prayed the Lord’s Prayer, after affirming that it is a “universal prayer”, and was cheered even more than the president-candidate. “She is more important than me” for the campaign, said the former Army captain.
“We know about the fight of good against evil. We defend absolute freedom, if someone is offended they go to justice, but we cannot create laws like that of fake news,” said the president, criticizing the project that sanctions those who spread lies and set up operations against third parties based on false data. .
Bolsonaro insisted that his opponents committed a kind of dictatorship during the pandemic, referring to the governors and mayors who decreed quarantines to prevent Covid-19.
“You already felt a little dictatorship during the pandemic, with churches being closed, people not being able to go to work,” the president assured.
Then, he insisted on Twitter: “You have to be careful because those who love red will seek to use the green and yellow of the flag, those who defended closing churches will say they are great Christians, those who support socialist dictatorships will say they are democrats.”
In the place where he was attacked on September 6, 2018 by Adelio Bispo -a psychiatric patient who was declared incompetent and is hospitalized-, and before thousands of people, several of whom had flags and posters with the phrase “Trump 2024”, Bolsonaro associated “left-handedness with corruption.”
He repeated that he is willing to “give his life for freedom,” but he did not fall into the habit of criticizing electoral justice or the transparency of electronic ballot boxes. The act served to launch the jingle “O Capitao do Povo”.
As of this Tuesday, free advertising for matches on radio and TV is mandatory. The leader of the PT, for his part, tried to open his campaign at the door of a factory in the southern area of São Paulo, but the streets were so narrow that the Federal Police determined that there was not enough security in the event of an attack, according to the report. Central Union Force.
So, the first act of the campaign was in front of the Volkswagen plant in Sao Bernardo do Campo, Greater São Paulo, where Lula was moved at 76 years of age to return to the same stage where at the beginning of his union career he led the strikes against the dictatorship to speak from the top of a truck to the workers.
Lula spoke about the economy but was also in charge of responding to the provocations about religion launched by the president.
The former president and opposition presidential candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva today promised to raise the non-taxable income tax minimum, an old union demand, and described Bolsonaro as “a true demon” for trying to politically manipulate the faithful evangelists, who represent the 30% of the electorate.
«He is trying to manipulate the good faith of evangelical men and women who go to church to talk about faith and spirituality and what he does is tell them lies about Lula, about Lula’s wife, about the workers, about the indigenous and Afro-descendants,” said the former president in his speech.
“If there is someone possessed by the devil, that is Bolsonaro,” he said, after describing him as “a creator of lies and a denier” who “did not shed a tear for the orphans left by the pandemic,” with more than 670,000 deaths and a current average since July of 200 daily deaths from Covid-19.
Lula described Bolsonaro as “genocidal” and said that in Brazil “you have to distribute books instead of weapons.”
Excited at the age of 76, Lula today began his seventh electoral campaign. He was a candidate and reached the ballot against Fernando Collor de Mello in 1989, in the first free and direct elections since the end of the dictatorship (1964-1985), then lost to Fernando Henrique Cardoso in 1994 and 1998 and won in 2003 and 2006, after retiring to launch his dolphin Dilma Rousseff.
Lula was registered as a candidate in 2018, but was banned by the electoral justice system when he was arrested and convicted of corruption by former judge Sérgio Moro, something that allowed Bolsonaro to win.
In 2021, the Federal Supreme Court annulled the sentences and cases for bias in Lava Jato, an operation that the PT described as “lawfare.”
“The situation now is worse than in 2002. Now protein is produced in Brazil for the whole world, but housewives here queue to receive bones before the butcher shops close,” said Lula, who gave an overview of the activity. industry and employment in Brazil based on data from the VW plant in Sao Bernardo do Campo, a symbol of São Paulo’s thriving economy.
In the southern area of São Paulo, with criticism of Bolsonaro and Lula, in the same proportion, the presidential candidate Ciro Gomes, former minister and former governor of Ceará of the Democratic Labor Party, presented himself, who has an average of 7% of voting intention in the polls.
With crossed accusations between Bolsonaro and Lula, the presidential campaign began in Brazil