Brazil chooses president with Jair Bolsonaro as the clear favorite

[Blexfraptor]

The Brazilians will decide this Sunday whether they will be governed by the far-right Jair Bolsonaro, who leads the polls, or by the leftist Fernando Haddad, who tried to form a 'democratic front' to prevent the victory of an apologist of the dictatorship. military (1964-85).

Bolsonaro, a 63-year-old former army captain, won the first round with 46 percent of the vote, compared to 29 percent for Haddad from the Workers' Party (PT).

The ballot polls predict a victory for Bolsonaro, with results between 56 and 59 percent against some 41 to 44 percent of Haddad.

The voters of Bolsonaro paid more attention to their promise to fight a galloping criminality by making more flexible the bearing of arms and their denunciations against corruption than to their misogynistic, homophobic and racist outbursts or their lack of important initiatives in their 27 years as deputy.

The winner will have to govern next to a Congress with parties weakened by the scandals and dominated by the conservative lobbies of the agribusiness, the evangelical churches and the defenders of the bearing of arms.

The PT will continue to be the first force in the Chamber, despite having lost several deputies after being one of the parties most affected by the bribery investigations in Petrobras.

That scandal led to the imprisonment of its historic leader, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010), who has been serving a 12-year prison sentence since April.
Fernando Haddad, 55, was appointed candidate in September, replacing Lula. Its takeoff was based on the millions of Brazilians who benefited from Lula's social inclusion policies.

But it did not achieve, after the first round, more than the "critical support" of the main center-left leaders, who reproach the PT for its political-financial maneuvers during its eight years in power.

Who will be elected on January 1, 2019 replaced the conservative Michel Temer, the most unpo[CENSORED]r president since the return of democracy, which took office in 2016 after the dismissal of Dilma Rousseff, PT, accused of mani[CENSORED]ting public accounts.

Democracy in danger?
Haddad promised to fight until the last breath to prevent "fascism from settling in Brazil"; and Lula asked from prison to relegate the divergences between "democrats". "We can not let despair lead Brazil towards a fascist adventure," warned the ex-president in prison.

Bolsonaro, who still carries a colostomy bag due to a stab wound in his abdomen in September, campaigned essentially on social networks, without participating in any debate, alleging a medical prescription.

His convalescence did not soften his violent tirades at all. "Either they leave or they go to jail. Those marginal marginals will be banished from our homeland, "he shouted on Sunday in an intervention by telephone transmitted at a rally in São Paulo.
That harangue "raging" led Alberto Goldman, former governor of São Paulo and member of the center-right leadership PSDB (the party of former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso), to announce that he would vote for Haddad.

Goldman believes that democratic institutions will resist a Bolsonaro government. "But I'm not willing to pay to check it," he said.
Márcio Coimbra, coordinator of postgraduate programs at the Faculty of International Relations of the Mackenzie Presbyterian University in Brazil, discovers that Jair Bolsonaro can take measures "that affect democracy".

Brazil, the academic argues, has "a strong Public Prosecutor's Office, a strong Supreme Court of Justice and an open Congress." "It is possible that it carries out reforms of the Constitution in order to adapt it to its agenda, but that it will not affect democracy," he says.

Two golden ages
Bolsonaro and Haddad intend to relive heroic times, although different.
The PT's campaign motto, 'The happy people again', evokes the "golden age" of Lula's governments, with a buoyant economy driven by high prices for agricultural products.

The lost paradise of Bolsonaro is another: "We want a country similar to the one we had 40 or 50 years ago," he said in a radio interview.
 

The period of reference, from 1968 to 1978, was the hardest of the military dictatorship, with persecutions and torture of opponents. But it was also at the beginning of the Brazilian "economic miracle", an industrialization project.

In foreign policy, Bolsonaro showed willingness to approach the American Donald Trump, including an increase in pressure on the socialist regime of Venezuela, in full economic and social marasmus.

Haddad wants to strengthen South-South relations.

In the event of victory, the economic guru of Bolsonaro, Paulo Guedes, will try to launch a privatization program to reduce debt, bureaucracy and reactivate the economy, which comes from two years of recession and two more of weak growth.

But in the face of resistance in his own field, Bolsonaro had to clarify that he would only privatize peripheral activities of Petrobras or Eletrobras and ruled out the participation of foreign groups in the generation of energy.