Brazil and the very predictable unpredictability

By Eric Nepomuceno

On Saturday, August 5, the deadline for Brazilian political parties to hold their conventions, seal their alliances and indicate their candidates for the presidential elections of October. And the truth is that no one has any idea what's going on.

A good example of this is the statement of Carlos Augusto Montenegro, who for nearly half a century presides over one of the most influential election pollsters, the IBOPE, Instituto Brasileo de l'Universidad Public opinion and statistics.

With such experience in forecasting results, Montenegro admits that 2018 will be the most difficult election in the history of Brazil, according to Bernardo Melo Franco, of the very conservative O Globo newspaper.

Like virtually all badysts Brazilian politicians, he says that he had never seen the voter so cold and unmotivated with just under two months to define the name of the future president.

At this point, there is a reasonably defined picture of alliances and candidates. But the great unknown persists, on which to support the real image that will come out of the polls: the fate of Lula da Silva.

A survey published these days indicates that after the confusion recorded on Sunday, July 8, when the decision of a second instance judge to release Lula was responded by another lower instance, which has the complicity of the federal police in committing a clear and clearly illegal act, keeping Lula in jail after a trial of arbitrariness and abuse of the most basic principles of Justice, its popularity has increased.

Those who declare the intention to vote for the former president reached 41 percent of those surveyed. The sum of all the others, those already named and those that will surely be, is 29. This is a scripted situation, which indicates up to how much confusion has been reached in a country that is absolutely troubled .

At the same time, sell the alliance of the so-called center parties, which effectively respond to the right and gather the largest contingent of politicians denounced or under investigation, around the former governor of San Pablo, Geraldo Alckmin, whose charisma is comparable to that of an old leaf of Lettuce

Alckmin, whose declared intention to vote in the polls is around the mark of 6%, continued to stop the largest space in election propaganda that will be broadcast on radio and television from September. It's an enviable capital. The other candidates, with the exception of a homophobic and racist racist troglodyte, defender of the last military dictatorship, of the current state coup, murder and torture, named Jair Bolsonaro, have a

The rare mix of evangelist and environmentalist Marina Silva, who supported the coup that ousted President Dilma Roussef and approved the unlawful detention of Lula da Silva, had than eight seconds of TV propaganda.

A center-left candidate named Ciro Gomes also skates: unless at the last minute he reaches a formal alliance that is more and more unlikely, he will have very little election campaign time. Bolsonaro, in turn, is still stationed as a favorite, though Lula fails to formalize his candidacy, but at an astronomical distance in the polls. Any minimalist badyst bets that, in a no-favors scenario, Bolsonaro will dissolve through his inconsistency, his absolute lack of control over what he says and his cavernous radicalism, and cede a substantial portion of his electorate to the right Alckmin .

The others do not have a way to take off, those on the left and those on the right. And popular figures survive, which are presented every four years with the sole purpose of literally selling their insignificant support to the highest bidder. In the meantime, the big determining question prevails: what will Lula do? At the present time, the most popular and important Brazilian political leader reiterates that he will maintain his candidacy until the last consequences. He even refuses to admit an alternative. Go stretch the rope beyond any limit. And then tell them who your strong electorate should choose.

With that, another question arises: how many will remain loyal to Lula?

With the sum of the actions, all absurdly illegal, designed to prevent Lula from going to the polls, what was achieved was the most predictable situation in the world: absolute unpredictability and very dangerous. Not even an old Brazilian saying the future, to God belongs is based in Brazil today.

It is here that the future hardly exists. And that's why it does not belong to anyone.