Lula: “We have to convince people that it is not enough to vote for the president” in Brazil

Although there is still a long way to go before the official start of the electoral campaign in Brazil, former president and opposition leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has already started work to rebuild the allied base that once supported their governments and today, in a meeting with social organizations in the outskirts of São Paulo, he asked them for help in encouraging participation in next year’s elections, not only to elect a president, but also to build a progressive majority in Congress, a peak he could never reach.

“We need to convince people that it’s not enough to vote for the president, we need to vote for progressive MPs. And young people, anyone over 16, need to bring the document to vote.

The rich vote for the rich. He is defending his class ”, declared the former president accompanied by the former presidential candidate of the Workers’ Party (PT) Fernando Haddad, who lost at the polls with the current president Jair Bolsonaro, and the leader of the force Gleisi Hoffmann .

“Now, how do we build a black majority in Congress? We have to learn to communicate. Now every time we open our mouths, we have to convince people of our ideas. We won’t win votes by cursing people. What. we say we have to strike people’s heads and hearts, ”Lula continued during a meeting with social organizations such as Evángelicos por la Democracia and Uneafro Brasil, a group that fights for the human rights of the black population. from the suburbs of San Pablo, mainly through the promotion of popular education.

Aware of the bad political moment that Bolsonaro is going through – collapsed in the polls after his management of the pandemic which ranked the country second among dead in the world – but also of the climate of tension that exists and which in the past has played against the PT and from the left, Lula proposed a campaign that escapes the verbal virulence of the present day.

“In the 1980s, I loved going up on the platform and shouting: ‘Let’s do a broad and radical land reform! “One day a young woman said to me,” Oh Lula, why are you so nervous? ‘And then I understood that I needed to speak in a different way because otherwise people wouldn’t understand me, ”he explained.

It is still too early to formalize the nominations for next year, but it is already clear that Lula will be the presidential candidate of the PT and perhaps of a broad arc of opposition that could unite to avoid a re-election of Bolsonaro, today an option that always seems far away in the polls.

For this reason, the ex-president is wasting no time and wants to take advantage of his popularity to start the electoral discussion as quickly as possible.

“It’s good that they know that there is only one reason for me to be a candidate for the Presidency of the Republic again. I believe that we can recover what we have already done and do well more. I used to say that any third way the candidate can promise what he wants … But I can’t. I have to go back to do more, “promised the ex-president during the meeting, which he reproduced on his social networks.

General elections in Brazil will be held on October 2 next year, but President Bolsonaro and the opposition have set up the pre-election debate, another example of the deep political crisis facing the neighboring country, not only because of pandemic figures, but because of recent explicit clashes between the executive and the judiciary, which just a few weeks ago sparked a wave of complaints and warnings about a possible institutional breakdown of the president.

(With information from Telam)