RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro formalized his re-election bid in October, giving him three months to close a double-digit gap and secure victory.
The Liberal Party’s formal endorsement of Bolsonaro’s candidacy took place at its convention on Sunday at a stadium in Rio de Janeiro. The support was widely expected and merely symbolic, given that the far-right president has effectively campaigned for months, criss-crossing the country gathering support and reminding voters why they shouldn’t support his nemesis, the former president. from left Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
“We don’t need another ideology that hasn’t worked anywhere else in the world. We have to improve what we have,” Bolsonaro said on stage, surrounded by ministers, former ministers, his family and other allies. “Our life hasn’t been easy, but one thing comforts me is not seeing a communist sitting in my chair.”
Bolsonaro has sought to characterize the upcoming race as a battle between good and evil, echoing his 2018 campaign which cast him as an outsider on a crusade to restore law, order and conservative values to a wayward nation. . He joined the centrist Liberal Party in November after failing to found his own party.
People squeezed through queues to enter the stadium, where the “Captain of the People” campaign jingle played repeatedly. The cheering fans were dressed in the national colors of green and yellow, despite there being dozens of empty seats in the stadium, which has a capacity of around 13,600.
Several of the president’s supporters have told The Associated Press that if Bolsonaro does not win a second term, Brazil will follow Venezuela’s abysmal example. And many have explained that they don’t trust the polls which show Bolsonaro trailing and expecting him to win.
Alexandre Carlos, 52, said he came to the convention to support Bolsonaro’s quest to improve Brazil, and the president did not shy away during his first term.
“It’s good versus evil and we’re in favor of good,” Carlos said. “Bolsonaro is the only hope we have now to save the country.”
Da Silva, leads all polls in returning to his old job – as he did in 2018 until his withdrawal from that race due to a corruption conviction. This allowed Bolsonaro, then a marginal seven-term MP, to win. Da Silva’s conviction was overturned last year by the Supreme Court which ruled that the judge overseeing the investigation had been biased and colluded with the prosecutors.
Bolsonaro faces an uphill battle. His approval ratings have only recovered slightly since they dipped during the pandemic. A congressional investigation last year recommended that he and administration officials face criminal charges. for actions and omissions related to the second highest number of deaths from the disease in the world.
Pollster Datafolha’s latest survey, in June, found that more than half of those polled said they would not vote for him under any circumstances. And 47% of those polled said they planned to vote for da Silva, compared to 28% for Bolsonaro, according to the poll, which had a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
Political analysts expect the race to narrow somewhat in the coming months.
Bolsonaro’s administration recently limited interstate taxes to reduce gasoline prices for consumers – an effort aided by falling global oil prices – and approved an increased welfare program that will begin next month and will continue until the end of the year. Bolsonaro announced on Sunday that, if elected, the program will be extended until 2023.
The jobless rate also fell below double digits for the first time since 2016, and the economic outlook for this year has risen steadily. Analysts polled by the central bank expect growth of 1.75%, more than triple the level they had forecast in April.
“The cumulative impact of a better economy, inflation relief in July and a larger cash transfer allocation is moving the needle on the election somewhat. But not by a huge amount,” wrote Christopher Garman, managing director for the Americas of political risk consultancy Eurasia Group in a July 19 note, predicting the race would eventually narrow to single digits.
The welfare package will bring limited benefit to Bolsonaro because the social class that benefits from it is more favorable to da Silva, according to Esther Solano, a sociologist at the Federal University of Sao Paulo who conducted a targeted survey of potential voters in Bolsonaro.
“There is a very strong attachment from this popular base to Lula. He is recognized as a political leader who genuinely cared about this base,” Solano said.
Bolsonaro is particularly struggling to garner support from female voters, and turns to his wife, an evangelical Christian, for help. Michelle Bolsonaro took the stage on Sunday and gave a speech filled with biblical passages, at one point referring to her husband as “God’s chosen one”.
To help boost his appeal to women, his allies had encouraged him to appoint his former agriculture minister, Tereza Cristina, as vice-president. Instead, Bolsonaro chose another military man, General Walter Braga Netto, who served as his special adviser.
With the possibility of loss looming, Bolsonaro insisted the electronic voting system used since 1996 is susceptible to fraud, but never presented any evidence. Many political analysts have expressed concern that Bolsonaro – an avowed admirer of Donald Trump – is preparing to follow the former US president’s lead and dismiss the results.
His unsubstantiated claims were flatly rejected, most recently after calling dozens of diplomats to the presidential palace to dissertate on the subject. Associations of prosecutors, judges and federal police have expressed confidence in the current system, as have members of the Supreme Court and the electoral authority, lawmakers include the president of the Senate and the US State Department .
Bolsonaro made no direct mention of the issue in his Sunday speech.
Standing outside the stadium, Marcelo Cunha, 57, said he was not a Bolsonaro fanatic, but that the president was the only one who could prevent da Silva’s return to power, which he said would be “terrible”.
“It was not a government of great achievements, but I was okay with what was done,” Cunha said. “For me, this is the best option at the moment.”
___ Álvares reported from Brasília.