Brazil’s leftist ex-President Lula still favored to win, but it’s not a foregone conclusion | Opinion

Brazil’s former leftist president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is still widely believed to be the favorite to win Sunday’s elections in Latin America’s biggest democracy — despite a last-minute upswing in the polls by far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.

The big questions are: Will pollsters get it right this time? More important, will the loser accept the results?

The best-known polls underestimated Bolsonaro’s support in the Oct. 2 first-round election. Many pollsters had predicted Lula would win by a landslide and perhaps reach the more than 50% of the vote needed to avoid a runoff. Instead, he won by a much smaller margin, 48% to 43%, forcing him into a second-round vote.

In a new report, the U.S.-based Eurasia political-risk consulting firm says it continues to believe that Lula will win, “But his odds of victory have dropped from 65% to 60%.” It adds that, “Not only did this past week give evidence the race has tightened somewhat, but Bolsonaro’s campaign has been more effective than Lula’s in this second round.”

One reason many expect Lula to win is that pollsters allegedly have recalibrated their surveys to correct their mistakes of the first round, when they failed to detect many hidden Bolsonaro supporters.

While Bolsonaro’s approval rating has risen from 40% before the first-round election to 44% today, Lula is still leading by at least a three-percentage-point margin in most recent polls. Bolsonaro’s rise is largely because of an improving economy and massive government expenditures in recent weeks.

Both candidates bode badly for Brazil. Lula spent 580 days in prison on corruption charges before being released by the Supreme Court on what critics consider a technicality, and is soft on Venezuela and Cuba’s leftist dictatorships. Bolsonaro condones the Amazon’s massive deforestation, abstained on key United Nations votes condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and often sounds as if he wants to become a right-wing autocrat.

Sergio Fausto, a political scientist who heads the Fernando Henrique Cardoso Foundation, a Brazilian think tank, told me that his educated guess is that Lula will win by a two- to four-point margin.

This might actually be good for Brazil, because it could push the former leftist president to move to the center, Fausto told me.

“A tight Lula victory would be a sort of blessing in disguise,” he said. “It would drive him to tell his Workers Party’s leftist followers that, in order to govern effectively, he would have to broaden his base of support beyond the party and appoint technically proven (pro-market) economists.”

On the contrary, a Lula victory by a wide margin would energize his far-left base and could drive him to adopt more radical domestic and foreign policies, Fausto added.

But many other analysts argue that a tight victory by either candidate would be the worst possible scenario, because the loser — especially if it’s Bolsonaro — may not accept the results.

Bolsonaro, often called “the Trump of the tropics,” long has claimed that Brazil’s electoral system is flawed, and has repeatedly suggested if he loses, it will be because the elections are rigged. He has claimed that voting machines are imperfect, and attacked electoral authorities and the courts as biased against him.

“If the result is close, there will be greater tensions,” Anthony Pereira, a Brazilian political scientist who heads Florida International University’s Latin American and Caribbean Center, told me. “Bolsonaro could come up with some reason for not conceding.”

Brazil is one of the few countries in the world in which votes are counted entirely digitally, without paper backups. But Bolsonaro’s fraud claims have been investigated by numerous international and local watchdog groups, and they didn’t find irregularities that could affect election outcomes.

I’m among those who fear that a very tight result could lead to violence, like the Trump-tolerated — if not supported — Jan. 6 takeover of the U.S. Capitol. Sunday, in the race between these two bad candidates, the thing to watch will not just be which of them wins, but whether the loser will accept the result, so that Brazil will continue to be a democracy.

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