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Lula narrowly wins and there will be a second round in Brazil

Lula-habla-a-votantes-tras-primera-vuelta-768x432Former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won the first round of presidential elections in Brazil on Sunday with a four-point advantage over the current president, Jair Bolsonaro. Both will dispute the second round of the electoral race.

The results give the leftist Lula da Silva 48.13% of the vote compared to 43.46% for the far-right Bolsonaro with 98.67% of the vote. The night was bittersweet for the head of state who went from leading the count from the beginning to seeing how his opponent overtook him at the end.

The results leave Lula below what the polls predicted, while Bolsonaro has managed to add more than expected for his re-election.

The count released by the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) allows us to foresee that the leader of the Workers’ Party (PT) will have to face the far-right leader in a second round, scheduled for October 30, to define the Presidency.

In accordance with Brazilian electoral legislation, the two candidates with the most valid votes in the first round, that is, the blanks and the null votes have been discounted, must be measured in a ballot in the event that no candidate obtains more than half of the votes. .

The senator of the center-right Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB), Simone Tebet, gave another surprise by coming in third position (4.21%), after surpassing the center-left and former Lula minister, Ciro Gomes (3.05%). Both will be decisive in the second round and this Sunday they got fewer points than expected, to the benefit of the two main candidates, which shows the extreme polarization that Brazil is experiencing and predicts a very close second round.

“Some turbulent weeks await Brazil before the second round on October 30. No matter who wins the presidency, Bolsonarism will be very much alive in Congress and the Senate. If Lula wins, he is likely to face fierce resistance,” political analyst Oliver Stuenkel wrote on Twitter.

Brazilians also voted to elect the 513 deputies, a third of the senators, the governors, as well as hundreds of state and Federal District deputies.

In the three most populous states, Sao Paulo, Minas Gerais and Rio Janeiro, candidates for governor allied with Bolsonaro won. In these last two states, even in the first round.

Lula: “We are going to win the elections. This is just an extension.”
A few minutes after the final result of the vote was known, the candidate of the Workers’ Party (PT), Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva, celebrated tonight the victory in the first round of the Brazilian elections and affirmed that he has “the certainty” that it can be imposed in the ballot scheduled for October 30.

Lula spoke after 10 p.m. from his bunker set up in a hotel in the center of the city of São Paulo, where he was accompanied by his wife “Janja”, his running mate, Geraldo Alckmin, and former president Dilma Rousseff, and members of his party. .
The candidate to reach the presidency of Brazil for the third time challenged President Jair Bolsonaro to a new debate and highlighted that “all elections were in the second round” throughout history. “We are going to win the elections. This is just an extension,” he noted.

“Excuse me, the journalists, the allied parties, but we are going to have to work harder, we are going to have to convince Brazilian society, and convince the other political forces” ahead of October 30, Lula said.

After the defeat this Sunday in Sao Paulo, the city where he began his political career, the former president said that he hopes to turn the adverse result around. “Sao Paulo will be a confrontation of proposals for society and I am going to make every effort and I am certain that together we are going to win São Paulo and we are going to win Brazil”, he stressed.

Lula also called on his followers to gather on the traditional Avenida Paulista, to celebrate and gain strength for the second stretch of the campaign. “You know that our country is worse, that the economy is worse, that we have to recover that country,” stressed the PJ candidate, who said: “Unfortunately for some, I have thirty more days of campaigning.”

“I like the campaign, I love discussing with Brazilian society and it will be important because for the first time there will be a face-to-face debate with the president of the republic to find out if he is going to continue telling lies or if he is going to tell him the truth to the Brazilian people”, he emphasized when requesting another meeting with Bolsonaro.

In that sense, he pointed out: “It is a second chance because that debate was not worth much, that debate had strange people.”

(With information from the NA news agency)

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