By Maria Carolina Marcelo and Lisandra Paraguasso
BRASILIA/SAO PAULO (Archyde.com) – Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and his leftist challenger Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva officially launched their election campaign on Tuesday, weeks before the country’s most polarizing election in decades is due in October.
Bolsonaro, a nationalist leader whose platform has the backing of conservative Christians, is competing with Lula, a former union leader who served two terms from 2003 to 2010 and was imprisoned on corruption charges until his conviction was overturned.
“Our country does not want corruption anymore, it wants order and prosperity,” Bolsonaro, a former army officer, told a crowd of supporters Tuesday in the city of Juiz de Fora.
Bolsonaro’s choice of Juiz de Fora was largely symbolic as he was stabbed there during his 2018 election campaign, an incident that helped him rise to power spurred by a wave of anti-Lula sentiment.
His supporters interrupted his speech, chanting, “If only for a thief.”
Lula, 76, who is nine years older than his rival, started his campaign at the gates of the Volkswagen car factory in the São Bernardo dos Campos industrial zone outside São Paulo, where he became a labor leader in the 1970s demanding better salaries despite a violent crackdown in the shadow economy. Military dictatorship.
In a video posted on social media on Tuesday, Lula said hunger had returned to Brazil under Bolsonaro, and that inflation was weighing on families who might no longer live on the minimum wage.
“We will have a lot to do to rebuild this country,” he added at the start of his campaign to return to the presidency. “I want to become president to change people’s lives once more, because in the current situation, no one can stand it,” he said.
Lula has a lead of more than 10 percentage points in most opinion polls for the Oct. 2 election, and would be more than better than Bolsonaro in the event of a run-off on Oct. 30.
However, Bolsonaro has pared Lula’s lead in recent weeks by increasing spending on welfare programs for the poor and pressuring the state-run oil company Petrobras to lower the price of fuel, a major factor driving inflation.
