Lula for President: the heritage and the challenges for the democratic field

Abstract

FOR THE PAST SIX YEARS, DEMOCRACY IN BRAZIL HAS BEEN CONFRONTEDwith the fascism that has settled here along with serious political, economic, health, cultural, and social crises. Until September 2022, the COVID-19 pandemic had killed 685,677 people, proportionately one of the highest mortality rates on the planet (14 th place), and the second in the Americas, with 3,214 million inhabitants, lagging behind only Peru 1 .Epidemiological analyses show that half of those deaths could have been avoided had the Federal Government adopted guidelines and measures based on scientific knowledge and acquired vaccines in a timely manner, since, during a pandemic, the time variable is a fundamental one 2 . This reveals the poor health management of the Bolsonaro administration, which should be characterized as silent, mistaken, corrupt, in which the purchase and distribution of vaccines only took place through a broad mobilization of society, including the support of the Legislative and Judiciary Powers. Without carrying out effective immunization campaigns over the period, vaccination coverage is below what Brazil has historically always had. Currently, only 55.7% of the population has taken the booster dose (third dose) of the COVID-19 3 vaccine, which constitutes one of the immediate challenges for the control of the disease which, at the moment, already presents itself in the variant of the Omicron group of extremely high transmissibility, with an exponential increase in diagnoses and hospital admissions.Lula, unjustly imprisoned for 580 days (from April 7, 2018 to November 8, 2019), won the elections on October 30, 2022, in spite of everything and everyone who struck democracy. President Bolsonaro questioned on several occasions the integrity of the electoral process, and the country's far-right continues to refuse to accept the results. Upon being elected, Lula expands his political power and emerges as one of the greatest political leaders of our time, on the one hand, acclaimed for having barred the continuity in power of one of the mainstays of the world's ultra-right and, on the other, for emerging as the redeemer of a country destroyed by fascism and by the return to the hunger map. One of his great challenges will be to unify the country, which is ideologically divided.Bolsonarism, in turn, accumulated victories and managed to elect leaders to state governments and various positions in state and federal legislatures, showing that the far-right and the fascist ultra-right have grown organically within national politics.The hope for changes that resume the foundations of the Federal Constitution of 1988 turns to Lula's third term in the Presidency of Brazil, after the most important and toughest electoral process in the history of Brazilian democracy, in which the people who live in the Northeast, the women, and the youth played an important role in choosing the country's future.