Faced with a conservative and exploded congress, the elected president will have to use all his capacity for negotiation and conciliation to weave alliances.
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The triumph of ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Sunday October 30, celebrated all over the world as that of democracy on the extreme right and authoritarianism, is historic in many ways. After two consecutive terms between 2003 and 2011 and five hundred and ninety days in prison, Lula returns to power for a third term, from unheard of in Brazil.
It is however a halftone victory. The weak gap of voice with his rival, Jair Bolsonaro – who had still not recognized his defeat on Monday evening -, the victory of bolsonarist candidates in many states and the composition of the congress from October 2 place the former trade unionist Metallo in an uncomfortable position. Depending on the opinion of many observers, it could strongly limit its room for maneuver and make this third term a path strewn with pitfalls.
The elected president will thus first have to deal with the fact that 14 of the 27 governors of the country will be in the opposition, including the states of Sao Paulo, Rio and Minas Gerais, who house more than a third of the population . At the Congress, then, the allied parties in Bolsonaro elected 187 deputies (including 99 for the only liberal party of the outgoing president, who became the first force in the lower chamber), or 36 % of the 513 seats. Opposite, the PT and its allies will have 108 seats (21 %).
For four years, Bolsonarism has consolidated, far beyond the only figure of Bolsonaro, and has become a real political force that Lula will not be able to ignore. “Brazil has become much more conservative,” said Mauricio Santoro, a researcher attached to the State University of Rio de Janeiro. And Lula will have to face a strong well -organized right opposition, with a capacity for mobilization in the street. “
a context very different from those of its first two mandates
A very different situation from that which prevailed during his first two mandates, when Lula was above all faced the Party of Brazilian Social Democracy (PSDB), which respected democratic rules. “We were happy when our opponents were the PSDB, and we didn’t know,” often repeated Lula during the campaign. “We are witnessing the replacement, at the Congress, of traditional executives of the center right and the” centrao “[” big center “, aggregate of opportunistic political parties and without ideology] by influencers of YouTube and Twitter, whose culture is that of Exhibitionism and permanent confrontation, “said Mathias Alencastro, researcher at the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning.
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