Sao Paulo, Oct. 31 (BNA): Luis Inacio Lula da Silva has done it again: Twenty years after winning the Brazilian presidency for the first time, incumbent leftist Jair Bolsonaro defeated Sunday in a narrow election that marked a turnaround for the country. After four years of far-right politics.
With 99.9% of the vote counted in the runoff, da Silva got 50.9% and Bolsonaro 49.1%, and the election authority said da Silva’s victory was mathematically certain, the AP reports.
At about 10 p.m. local time, three hours after the results came out, the lights went out in the presidential palace and Bolsonaro did not concede or act in any way.
Before the vote, Bolsonaro’s campaign made repeated, unsubstantiated allegations of possible election tampering, raising fears that he would not accept defeat and would challenge the results if he lost.
The high-stakes vote was a stunning reversal for da Silva, 77, whose imprisonment on corruption charges kept him out of the 2018 election that brought Bolsonaro, an advocate of conservative social values, to power.
“The only winner today is the Brazilian people,” da Silva said in a speech at a hotel in central Sao Paulo. “This is not a victory for me, the Labor Party, nor the parties that supported me in the campaign. It is a victory for a democratic movement that was formed above political parties, personal interests and ideologies until democracy emerged victorious.”
Da Silva promises to rule outside his own party. He wants to bring in the centrists and even some of the right-leaning who voted for him for the first time, and take back the country’s more prosperous past. However, it faces headwinds in a politically polarized society where economic growth is expected to slow and inflation remains high.
It was the country’s toughest election since its return to democracy in 1985, and the first time an incumbent president has failed to win re-election. Just over two million votes separate the two candidates; The previous closest race, in 2014, was decided by a margin of nearly 3.5 million votes.
Highly polarized elections in Latin America’s largest economy have extended the recent wave of leftist victories in the region, including in Chile, Colombia and Argentina.