The two political heavyweights vying to become Brazil’s next president have locked horns during the final television debate before a momentous election with profound implications for the Amazon rainforest, the global climate emergency and the future of one of the world’s largest democracies.
The former leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro faced off in Rio at the studios of Brazil’s biggest broadcaster, with eve of election polls giving Lula a slender but not unassailable lead.
During the tetchy encounter, Lula accused Bolsonaro of catastrophically mishandling a Covid outbreak that has killed nearly 700,000 Brazilians, arming organised crime by loosening gun laws, and trashing the Amazon and Brazil’s international reputation. “Brazil is more isolated than Cuba …. We have become a pariah,” the 77-year-old leftist said, castigating Bolsonaro’s “insane behaviour”.
Bolsonaro, who was visibly nervous and lost his footing on stage several times, repeatedly called Lula a liar and highlighted the corruption scandals that tarnished the 14 years in which the ex-president’s Workers’ party (PT) governed from 2003 to 2016. “Lula, you’re a crook,” Bolsonaro fumed. “Your government was a champion in corruption.”
“He’s a one-note samba,” Lula hit back, citing one of bossa nova legend Tom Jobim’s most famous songs.
In his closing statement, Bolsonaro became confused and announced that, God willing, he would be re-elected to Brazil’s congress, where he served for nearly three decades until reinventing himself as an anti-establishment outsider before being elected president in 2018.
This year’s election – widely seen as the most important since the end of Brazil’s 21-year dictatorship in 1985 – has split Latin America’s most populous country, with around half of voters rejecting Bolsonaro and almost as many spurning Lula.
Lula voters view Bolsonaro as an incompetent authoritarian who has wrecked the environment and Brazil’s place in the world, bungled its Covid response, and divided society with his radical, hate-filled rhetoric. Bolsonaro supporters consider Lula, a moderate two-term president, from 2003 to 2010, a dishonest “communist” threat whose dealings with leftist authoritarians such as Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega make a mockery of his claim to be battling for democracy.
On Friday, Bolsonaro’s key international ally, Donald Trump, waded into the debate, urging Brazilians to reject Lula, “a radical left lunatic who will quickly destroy your country”.
Lula supporters fear that Bolsonaro – a dictatorship-admiring former army captain who has hinted he will challenge a result he considers “abnormal” – could provoke Trump-style turmoil if he loses. Those fears grew last week after one of Bolsonaro’s sons used unproven allegations of electoral foul play to claim his father was the victim of “the greatest electoral fraud ever seen” – almost identical language to Trump’s after he lost the 2020 US election to Joe Biden.
At Friday’s debate, Bolsonaro appeared to commit to respect the result. “He with the most votes wins,” he said.
Whichever side prevails, tens of millions of citizens are likely to be shattered. “I’ll move to Finland the next day,” if Lula wins, said Dhennis Wheberth, a Bolsonaro activist and evangelical pastor – his movement remains overwhelmingly loyal to the president.
Henrique Vieira, a progressive church leader who supports Lula, said re-electing Bolsonaro would give him a blank cheque to persecute leftist rivals and perhaps even to try to close congress.
“I believe Bolsonaro’s re-election could deal a fatal blow to Brazilian democracy … he’s a fascist and an…
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