A gift for Bolsonaro’s polarizing agenda that allows him to shake the ghost of the left

RIO DE JANEIRO.- Jair Bolsonaro smiled. In Brasilia, it was raining heavily and, as it is seldom when he spoke with journalists, evening fell, the president went to meet a group of journalists who were waiting for him in front of the Alvorada Palace. Bolsonaro knew a question awaited him on the decision overturning the sentences handed down against Lula.

“Everyone was surprised by this. At the end of the day, all the thefts committed by this government are clear to society. It was a catastrophic management of the PT government»Answered the Brazilian president.

Judge Edson Fachin’s ruling has encouraged Bolsonaro to straddle the specter of the left’s return to power in Brazil. He said he did not believe that “the Brazilian people want to have a candidate like that (Lula) in 2022”. And aware of the impact of failure on the markets, with the fall of the stock market and the rise of the dollar, tried to show how damaging the return of the left to power would be. “We all suffer from a decision like this.”

Judge Fachin’s decision swept the board and rearranged the rooms for the 2022 presidential election. If Lula, one of Brazil’s most popular politicians, lets him start dreaming of competing for what would be his third presidency by restoring his political rights, he puts Bolsonaro in front of his favorite antagonist in an attempt to grow in polarization.

The heads-up between Bolsonaro and Lula could allow him to repeat the fight with the left of 2018, an atmosphere in which the Brazilian president feels at ease and which he has worked to reproduce.

Right-winger suffers decline in popularity, which accompanies deteriorating health from pandemic that has caused nearly 270,000 deaths and to a struggling economy whose rebound may be delayed longer than expected by the restrictive measures that cross most states. According to the consulting firm IPEC, in a poll published last Thursday for the newspaper Or balloon, the right broke the popularity floor by 30% and fell to 28%. The decline had already been measured by other consulting firms, such as Datafolha, in January.

After denigrating the vaccination, the government is trying to strike deals with new laboratories to speed up the vaccination plan and prepare to relaunch emergency aid, a grant that in 2020 took Bolsonaro’s popularity to an all-time high . However, the impact of the aid, which will reach fewer people and be worth less than half of the original $ 115, will hardly strengthen the right as in the first year of the pandemic.

Faced with weakness and the increasingly difficult possibility of achieving satisfactory management results by 2022 Bolsonaro will allow himself to give meaning to his candidacy and feed his platform by refusing, once again establishing himself as the candidate capable of “liberating” the Brazilians from the left..

In the words of Mauricio Santoro, political scientist at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, the decision meant a “gift” for the president. “In the face of the tragedy of the pandemic and growing economic problems, the letter of rejection from Lula and the PT hardly remains to be seen as the alternative to their return to power,” he said.

Leftist Ciro Gomes or San Pablo Governor Joao Doria can be seen as the losers of the day. If it already appeared with little space, the political center will find new difficulties in opening up the space and attracting forces from other areas. For the left represented by Gomes, presenting itself as a competitive alternative with Lula obscuring her, almost a chimera.

“Everyone must rethink their plans for 2022,” said Ricardo Ismael, political scientist at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro.. “There will be an intensification of political polarization that interests both parties, Bolsonaro and the PT. The decision will give a lot of visibility to Lula and his speech of political persecution and it will be easy for Bolsonaro to reverse the speech that led him to win in 2018 ”.

The same IPEC poll on Thursday, which showed a decline in popularity, reported that Lula is now the politician with the highest voice potential in the country. He didn’t measure any scenario in which the two would clash. Embarked on the alternative of polarization, the Brazilian president has started to play a risky bet. And in the Brasilia rain yesterday he could have starred in one of his first campaign events.