SAO PAULO (AP/JNS) — Brazil’s electoral authority said Sunday that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the leftist Worker’s Party defeated incumbent Jair Bolsonaro to become the country’s next president.
With 98.8% of the votes tallied, da Silva had 50.8% and Bolsonaro 49.2%, and the election authority said da Silva’s victory was a mathematical certainty.
Da Silva — the country’s former president from 2003-2010 — has promised to restore the country’s more prosperous past, yet faces faces headwinds in a polarized society.
It is a stunning return to power for da Silva, 77, whose 2018 imprisonment over a corruption scandal sidelined him from that year’s election, paving the way for then-candidate Bolsonaro’s win and four years of far-right politics.
A former union organizer turned longtime democratic socialist politician, da Silva was president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010, during which he enacted ambitious social programs — such as an economic movement to tackle income inequality nicknamed “Lulism” — and prioritized foreign policy.
But his tenure was plagued by scandal. In 2017, he was convicted of corruption and money laundering — which he denied — and was sent to jail.
Da Silva also tried to enact a press law calling for changes to rules governing journalists that some feared would begin a slow reversion to an era of dictatorship.
He additionally supported dictatorial regimes around the world in countries such as Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, Libya, and several African nations.
The governments of da Silva and his political goddaughter Dilma Rousseff — who succeeded him as president but was eventually removed from office for manipulating the budget — faced continual hiccups and controversies in regard to Israel, leading to a confrontation with the local Jewish community.
In 2009, da Silva warmly welcomed former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a notorious Holocaust denier whose regime persecuted minorities and critics, for a visit that drew international criticism.
During his first official visit to Israel in 2010, da Silva refused to visit Theodor Herzl’s grave, which was part of the itinerary for visiting foreign officials in honor of the 150th birthday of the father of Zionism.
Days after, he laid a wreath at Yasser Arafat’s grave in Ramallah.
In the final month of his administration, his government officially recognized Palestine as a state.
Under Rousseff, Palestinian leaders inaugurated an embassy in Brazil, their first in the Western Hemisphere. Her government fomented a diplomatic crisis with Israel in 2015 for rejecting Jerusalem’s right-wing choice for ambassador in Brasilia.
Some say that she was retaliating for being called a “diplomatic dwarf” by a senior Israeli diplomat a year earlier, after the South American nation recalled its ambassador from Tel Aviv to protest Israel’s attack on Hamas during that summer’s Gaza war.
As reported by VINnews