–between Bolsonaro and Lula!

GUYANA, Suriname and the rest of CARICOM are keeping eyes and ears peeled on Brazil, where 156 million voters in South America’s largest nation will get a last chance, on October 30, to vote for regime change, or to maintain the status quo; to keep incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro, or return Luiz Ignacio ‘Lula’ da Silva to the presidency he was forced out of in 2010 on corruption convictions overturned by Brazil’s Supreme Court last year.

Bordering Guyana, Suriname, Venezuela and many other South American nations, Brazil is home to the largest parts of The Amazon, a member of the BRICS grouping representing the majority of humanity (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), and a key player in literally everything continental in The Americas.

The October 30 elections are drawing regional and international attention for many reasons, including the direction the country will go, whichever of the two candidates, with near-equal support, wins.

Bolsonaro is a rightwing ex-army captain, and Lula is an established left politician with a long trade union background, and revered at home and abroad for implementation of socialist policies during his seven years in office (2003-2010) that saw millions of poor Brazilians enter the middle class, as the country became the first in The Americas to eradicate poverty, by United Nations (UN) standards.

Lula won the first round of the two-stage contest last Sunday with 48.4 per cent to Bolsonaro’s 43.2 per cent, the incumbent defying polls that mistakenly gave Lula a double-digit lead.

Bolsonaro, an eternally stern critic of the media and the electronic voting system who opposes gun control, and claims to have the powerful national army behind him, raised anxieties and fears during the campaign by saying, ahead of the poll, that he wouldn’t accept the results if he lost.

But after doing well, his new message is that Brazil’s biggest risk is that a Lula victory would return the country to the ever-present continental left fold that today includes Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Honduras, alongside Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

Eleven candidates contested last Sunday’s first round, with Lula and Bolsonaro attracting 90 per cent of the votes between them and the remaining 10 per cent shared among the nine smaller parties, undecided voters and 16 million evangelical voters in a nation with 30 million facing hunger.

The tale-of-the-tapes reveal quite a lot about why global attention is focused on the final month-end poll, as the two candidates are diametrically opposite in everything, from ideology to administration to interpretation of rights and values.

Bolsonaro said nothing during the campaign to dissuade fears about violence if he lost, and his victory has so emboldened his worst supporters that some paraded in the streets of Rio, fantasising that “The beautiful blood of leftists and gays will flow in our streets…”

But LGBT groups, women, trade unions, supporters of Indigenous Amazon tribes and others want Lula to win to restore and protect rights lost or suppressed under Bolsonaro, whose supporters see same-sex marriage as a “mortal sin” worthy of punishment by Christians and President Bolsonaro himself.

The election also included much drama.

Bolsonaro, who was stabbed during a nationally-televised campaign rally as he sought to unseat Lula’s successor, Dilma Roussef in 2018, thinks and acts much like ex-US President Donald Trump.

He’s also a Climate denier, as well as a COVID-skeptic who didn’t support vaccination, and is now being blamed for hundreds of thousands of deaths that could have been prevented.

Lula’s insufficient victory drew both cheers and tears from supporters, who are understandably nervous about Bolsonaro’s surprisingly good performance, despite Lula leading by over six million votes — a small amount nationally — and since Bolsonaro’s party now controls the Congress.

The two men started their campaigns at strategic locations: Bolsonaro returned to where he was stabbed four years ago, and Lula returned to where he launched his trade union base.

Bolsonaro insists it’s a fight of ‘Good vs Evil’, while Lula says it’s a matter of ‘Policies over Personalities’. But, in the coming three weeks, the two will each work to keep their registered levels of support from the first round; Bolsonaro fishing for the six per cent, or seven million more votes he’ll need to win; Lula digging deep for six million more, and the winning six per cent lead.

Once upon a time, Guyanese heard more news about complaints of illegal incursions by individual and groups of Brazilian miners entering Guyana to dig for gold and diamonds, or the Guyana Defence Force (GDF) reporting successful interceptions.

But closer ties have long been facilitated by and between successive governments on both sides of the long border that have also led to stronger levels of public and private sector cooperation, before and since the COVID Crisis and the Ukraine War.

The two neighbours share The Amazon, and have many similar interests, including in petroleum development, and they’re also home to several similar natural resources, leading to more trade and cross-border transactions of all types in the past two decades.

Brazil, Guyana and Suriname just recently engaged, at the government level, on energy matters, including CARICOM.

Careful commentators on both and all sides will say that no matter who wins, Guyana-Brazil ties will continue, the pace of which, under Bolsonaro having been seen for the past four years, while ties with Rio under Lula also lasted seven years.

Current global circumstances make it impossible to directly predict what either candidate will do after winning, but while both predict victory, the extremely close results of the first round actually confounded both, leaving wide open the strong chances that either will do all he can, by any means deemed necessary, to be reelected to the Presidency on October 30.

Lula is seeking an anti-Bolsonaro alliance, while the incumbent is hoping to encourage undecided voters to stay home. But who was listened to most won’t be known until the evening of October 30.