São Paulo – Former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was confirmed Thursday as the Workers’ Party’s presidential candidate ahead of the October elections.
The vote by the delegates of that left-wing party in a hotel in São Paulo was already expected and was only a symbolic vote, because the campaign of the former president is underway. The 76-year-old politician, who ruled Brazil from 2003 to 2010, did not attend the party convention while campaigning in his hometown of Pernambuco state, in Brazil’s impoverished northeast. Lula leads all polls against the incumbent president, Jair Bolsonaro.
This is the sixth time that Lula has run for president. He was also confirmed as Labor’s candidate at its 2018 convention, but a guilty plea to corruption and money laundering knocked him out of the race and paved the way for Bolsonaro’s victory.
I didn’t need to be president again. “I could have kept the testimony of the best president in history and spent the last years of my life in peace,” Lula said at a rally in Recife. But I saw this country being destroyed. I saw our education led by a man who did not like education. So I decided to go back.”
“We are not facing a joint election, we are facing a fascist surrounded by militiamen on all sides, and we have to defeat it to restore democracy,” the former president (2003-2010) said in an act with the world of culture. Who was accompanied by liberal Geraldo Alckmin, his candidate for vice president.
The former union leader was released from prison in 2019 and had his sentences overturned last year after the Federal Supreme Court ruled that the judge in charge of the case, Sergio Moro, had acted in part. This new ruling allowed Lula to start his presidential campaign this year. Moro, who oversaw Lava Jato’s extensive corruption investigation, was later appointed Bolsonaro’s Minister of Justice.
Lula has hinted in interviews that this year’s contest will be his last campaign for the highest office in the country and that if re-elected he will not seek re-election. He has tried to reach moderate voters at a time when the nation is still deeply polarized, especially after he selected a conservative deputy, Geraldo Alcmin, the former governor of São Paulo.
Bolsonaro, a far-right politician, said the next competition is a battle of good against evil. He also made unsubstantiated claims that Brazil’s electronic voting system is vulnerable to fraud, which many analysts see as a sign that it paves the way for election results to be challenged if they oppose it. The Liberal Party will hold its convention on Sunday to confirm it as their candidate.
Leftist Cerro Gomez formally submitted his candidacy on Wednesday. He is third in the polls, far behind Lula and Bolsonaro.
Lula has 47% of voting intentions for the October 2 election, while Bolsonaro has 28%, according to a Datapolha survey published in June with a margin of error of two percentage points. That would put Lula in contention for a full first-round victory, without the need for a second round, although analysts said they expect the competition to get tougher in the coming months.
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