Opinion – Vinicius Torres Freire: Lula out, great victory for the extreme right and the negotiator right

Along the road from the first turn, there are heads stuck on stakes. They are federal deputies highly voted in the Bolsonarista wave of 2018, but beheaded in 2022 after breaking with the leader. At the end of the road is the country of the extreme right and the business right, which has just annexed new voting provinces.

Lula da Silva (PT) won a preliminary and partial victory. But Lula is not a party. As I said in my prison day speech in 2018: “I’m not a human being anymore, I’m an idea mixed with your ideas”. Aside from the Lula “idea”, the victory so far has been for the rights and their ideas.

Consider a bloc formed by PL, a party now rented by Jair Bolsonaro, PP, from the government regents, Republicans, the largest party of the evangelical company, by União Brasil, fusion of DEM with remnants of PSL, and by the small reactionary Patriota.

These parties made 256 federal deputies. In 2018, they elected 114. It is true that, at the end of the legislature, now in 2022, they had 242. In any case, the extreme right and the main negotiator are one vote away from the majority of the Chamber. The number of votes from this right-wing bloc grew by 27.4% from 2018 to 2022.

The left-wing block elected 128 deputies (adding PT, PSB, PSOL, PCdoB, PDT, PV and Rede). In 2018, they had 138 seats. At the end of this legislature, they had 121. The number of votes cast by the leftist bloc dropped by 5.8%. The PT’s vote for the Chamber grew 10.4%, but it does not compensate for the advance of the right.

The champions of Bolsonarism’s ideological hallucination were elected to Congress and can take Rio Grande do Sul. Bolsonarism can take power in São Paulo. The governors of the country’s three largest electoral colleges, São Paulo, Minas and Rio, will support Bolsonaro — the left-wing campaign in the southeastern triangle was a failure of tactics, strategy and results, to say the least. In other states besides the Northeast, which is already Lula, the situation is now unfavorable for the PT.

These political supports are of relative importance, but they should take a few more votes to the right, already well established with the vote of Bolsonaro and his deputies. Note: Lula had 66.7% of the votes for president in the Northeast, but the PT had 12%, a vote similar to that of PL, União Brasil and PP. In the Southeast, Lula had 42.6% (Bolsonaro, 47.6%), but the PT had 11% of the votes (PL had 21.4%).

This is usually the case, the minority left in the legislative election, with about a quarter of the Chamber. But the composition of the rest has changed: the old center is dwarfed, the negotiators are more right-wing, the right-wingers are more extreme and as many as the left.

There were people who said that a second round would force Lula to “explain programs” in order to obtain support. Hmm. Will “programs” win votes in this “shoot, hit and bomb” campaign? What is more certain is that, if elected, Lula will have a more difficult life in Congress.

Yes, we know very little about the actual electoral conversation, messages and networks. So much so that the 2018 and 2022 results demoralized much of the well-thought-out, research-based analysis.

Finally, that the voter was well decided: there were only 4.4% of null and white votes in the presidential election, a record since 1989. The average was 8.8% since 2006. It is a difference of more than 5 million (from the reality 2022 compared to the recent average). Candidates excluded from the second round did poorly. In theory, there is little left to vote for. It may favor Lula, who will have to campaign in a right-wing and hate-ridden country, however.