Analysis: Brazil’s Bolsonaro scored more with centrist voters than Lula da Silva

Both the elections for governor in the Southeast, mainly in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Minas Gerais, and the Senate elections, equally majoritarian, show that former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s advantage in the region was smaller than estimated and that President Jair Bolsonaro’s alliance policy in those states was stronger than imagined.

Both served as leverage for the elections of their respective parties’ proportional candidates.

Still, the Liberal Party (PL, right) went from 76 to 99 deputies, while the Workers’ Party (PT, left) jumped from 56 to 68 representatives in the House.

However, Lula da Silva had more than a five million vote advantage over Bolsonaro.

The electoral results, especially in the Southeast, show that Lula da Silva did not broaden his alliances as much as he needed to, despite choosing the former Toucan governor Geraldo Alckmin as his vice-president.

There were several episodes in which this was evident, as in the refusal to talk to former president Michel Temer, which could be the missing movement to avoid the consolidation of Simone Tebet’s candidacy and the MDB to support him in the election formally.

The fact that PT and its allies repeatedly talked about a broad front did not mean that it existed.

What did exist was a leftist front, which thought it was strong enough to take the election by storm in the first round.

To use historical parameters that can illustrate this distinction, we can cite the democratic front formed by the PSD, the PTB, and the clandestine PCB, in 1955 to elect President Juscelino Kubitschek, which even then was not enough to obtain an absolute majority of the valid votes, since it received 36% of the votes, against 30% for Juarez Távora.

In other words, the left supported the conservative candidate. A broad front was formed against General Castelo Branco when the 1965 elections were suspended.

Carlos Lacerda (UDN), who had been the great architect of the Udenist coup; Juscelino, who supported the removal of the government; and João Goulart (PTB), the deposed president, in exile, with the support of the communist leader Luís Carlos Prestes (PCB), in hiding, formed a broad opposition front.

Lacerda and Juscelino were annulled, and the military changed the game’s rules, ending any possibility of re-democratization with the prohibition of the Broad Front and the adoption of Institutional Act no. 5.

Forming a broad front is much more complicated than articulating a left front based on a national-developmental agenda.

It means accepting the centrality of the liberal political agenda in politics, making economic concessions, and reducing the depth of social proposals.

Lula da Silva didn’t manifest any intention of making these concessions in the first round of elections.

He continuously evaluated that emptying the so-called third way through the helpful vote would solve this issue in his favor. That is not what happened.

BERMUDA TRIANGLE

There were attempts to ally Governor Rodrigo Garcia (PSDB) and Lula da Silva in the elections in São Paulo.

Still, these articulations to form a broad front in São Paulo were never taken seriously because the issue would have been solved with the presence of Alckmin on da Silva’s ticket.

It was believed that the favoritism of the former mayor of São Paulo, Fernando Haddad, would be confirmed in the polls, but this was not the case.

Bolsonaro’s candidate, Tarcísio de Freitas, a native of Rio de Janeiro who was parachuted into the São Paulo elections, won the first round by a wide margin.

A portion of Garcia’s voters, defeated in anticipation, made the switch to Bolsonaro’s candidate already in the first round.

Now, it is much more challenging to attract the others to an alliance with Haddad because Tarcísio leads with a vast advantage in the runoff.

In Rio de Janeiro, it was not much different. President of the Legislative Assembly, Congressman André Ceciliano (PT), a candidate for the Senate, was the guarantor of the administration of Claudio Castro.

The latter took over after the impeachment of Wilson Witzel, without ever having run for a major election.

This alliance was broken when da Silva supported the candidacy of federal deputy Marcelo Freixo, following the logic of the left front.

If the alliance was maintained, Castro’s neutrality would be possible, as he detached his campaign from Bolsonaro, making Lula da Silva’s life easier.

But such an alliance is unimaginable for the Rio de Janeiro left and the PT.

In other words, the broad front is not viable in practice. Lula da Silva is looking for Castro, but it is spilled milk.

In Minas Gerais, governor Romeu Zema (Novo) took a neutral position in the elections because Lula da Silva held a vast advantage in the state.

The conditions for an alliance between the two were given by the position of the overwhelming majority of voters.

Still, da Silva preferred to support the former mayor of Belo Horizonte, Alexandre Kalil, in the expectation that it would take him to the second round and transfer his votes, but not on the required scale.

Zema won in the first round and announced he would give Bolsonaro a boost in Minas, a critical swing state.

With the positions well defined in the South and Midwest states in favor of Bolsonaro, and the North and Northeast, with Lula da Silva, the dispute of the majority of voters in the Southeastern states, the so-called Bermuda Triangle, will decide the elections.

Bolsonaro won in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Espírito Santo; Lula da Silva in Minas Gerais.

With information from Correio Braziliense