Lula wins tightest presidential race in Brazil’s history
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers’ Party, PT) was elected president of Brazil for the third time in the tightest race ever. With 99.99% of the votes counted, the former president had 50.9% of the votes, while President Jair Bolsonaro (Liberal Party, PL) got 49.1%. The difference between them, which was 6 million votes in the first round of voting, narrowed to little over 2 million in the runoff vote. It is the first time that a Brazilian president has lost a race for reelection. It is also the first time that, in a presidential election, abstention has dropped from the first to the second round of votes. It is also the first time that a president is elected having won in a single region, the Northeast.In his first speech as president-elect, Mr. Lula da Silva acknowledged the need to pacify a country so radically divided. He said it was not a victory of the Workers’ Party, but of democracy. "There are not two Brazils, but a single country, one great nation," he said, before adding: "It is time to put down the weapons that should never have been wielded."Mr. Lula da Silva guaranteed his election in the Northeast region, where he got 69.3% of the votes, and Mr. Bolsonaro, 30.8%. With this victory he was able to compensate for the disadvantage in all the other regions. In the Northeast region, he put up a lead of 12.5 million votes, more than enough to overcome the disadvantage of 10.4 million votes in the other regions. In three states of the region (Piauí, Bahia and Maranhão) Lula had more than 70% of the votes.The elections chief, Alexandre de Moraes, was right not to overestimate the roadblocks in the Northeast. Just as he predicted, the Federal Highway Police action was not able to increase abstention in the region. As in the rest of Brazil, abstention in the Northeast also decreased. In the country, abstention fell to 20.5% from 20.9%. In the Northeast, it fell to 19.2% in the second round of voting from 19.5% in the first round.Despite winning more than 500,000 votes in Minas Gerais, Mr. Bolsonaro was unable to turn around the voting in the state, where he lost the election by less than 50,000 votes. Minas Gerais and Amazonas kept the tradition, that comes since the re-democratization, of reproducing the national result.Mr. Lula da Silva’s third election was by an even narrower margin than that of 2014. That year, Dilma Rousseff (Workers’ Party, PT) had 51.6% and Aécio Neves (Brazilian Social Democracy Party, PSDB), 48.3%. It was an...
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