Tonight’s victory is also a win for Brazil’s LGBT community, which also saw wins in the first round of voting, which saw two trans candidates elected to congress for the first time in history.
Transgender candidates Erika Hilton and Duda Salabert won easy election to the chamber of deputies where they promised to fight for LGBT rights.
As Gabrielly Soares, a 19-year-old student told my colleague Tom Phillips earlier, “This means we are going to have someone in power who cares about those at the bottom. Right now we have a person who doesn’t care about the majority, about us, about LGBT people”.
Bolsonaro is openly, loudly homophobic, ridiculing LGBT Brazilians, and used homophobic slurs to ridicule mask wearing during the Covid pandemic.
In his third term, Lula will confront a sluggish economy, tighter budget constraints and a more hostile legislature. Bolsonaro’s allies form the largest bloc in Congress after this month’s general election revealed the enduring strength of his conservative coalition.
Here are the key developments over the last few hours:
- Former Brazilian president and leftist candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, beat far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro in the runoff round of Brazil’s national elections.
- The stunning political comeback welcomed by environmental, indigenous and progressive activists. Bolsonaro’s presidency saw deforestation in the Amazon increase to a 15-year high.
- With 100% of votes counted in one of the world’s largest democracies – there are 156 million eligible voters in Brazil – Lula had 50.9% of the vote to Bolsonaro’s 49.1%. The president-elect will take office on 1 January 2023.
- Bolsonaro’s leadership saw nearly 700,000 Brazilians die of Covid.
- Addressing journalists at a hotel in São Paulo, Lula vowed to reunify his country. “We are going to live in new times of peace, love and hope,” said the 77-year-old, who was sidelined from the 2018 election that saw Bolsonaro claim power after being jailed on corruption charges that were later annulled.
- As Brazilians headed to the polls for the second time in a month, there were alarming reports of voter suppression, with members of the federal highway police – a notoriously pro-Bolsonaro security force – setting up roadblocks in Lula strongholds in the country’s north-east.
- Lula’s winning margin is the closest since 1989, when Brazilians voted for a president for the first time since the end of the military dictatorship. With just a handful of votes still to be counted Lula is ahead by approximately 50.7% to 49.3%.
- In the first round of voting, Lula gained 48.43% of votes to Bolsonaro’s 43.20%, failing to secure the more than 50% needed for an outright majority.
(Curtesy the Guardian)
