The 2022 Brazilian presidential election gives people a sense of déjà vu.
Although 11 people qualified in the first round of voting on October 2, only two familiar faces were truly considered competitive – the most vocal former president, Lula, Brazil's first directly elected left-wing president in history; Second-ranked incumbent Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is bidding for his re-election.
When the results of the first round of voting were released, sure enough, the two presidents entered the "ultimate showdown".
If placed in other countries, such as the United States, the current incumbent Bolsonaro should have a first-mover advantage and be more likely to win re-election; In Brazil, however, Bolsonaro's polls in the months leading up to his election were consistently inferior to Lula, who had been in office for more than a decade.
Although some believe that Bolsonaro's approval rating is underrated and not without the possibility of a headwind, Lula has a better chance of winning as of the days leading up to the final showdown.
When it comes to the politics of Latin American countries, it is often summed up as the vacillation of the left and right wings. In Brazil, some say that Lula's high approval rating means a strong return of the left.
Those who say this may have forgotten what Brazilian politics was like a few years ago. The 2018 election has long proved that Lula can represent the left, but there is no new person to replace Lula.
In 2018, the trend of polls before Brazil's election was quite similar to that of today, with Lula's approval rating on the fly, followed by Bolsonaro.
Even more dramatic than this election was that Lula was still in prison for huge political controversy.
Since 2014, the vigorous "car wash movement" has affected many important figures in Brazilian politics. While Lula's "hand-picked" heir, Brazil's first female president, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached and removed from power by parliament, Lula himself was embroiled in a corruption lawsuit. In 2017, Lula was found guilty of corruption.
Lula was in prison when Brazil's 2018 presidential election began. His opponents abhor the candidacy of a former leader accused of corruption; His supporters see the prison spell as a witch hunt out of nothing.
Although in Brazilian politics, the court that overthrew the president's parliament and punished the former president was eager to exterminate Lula and his henchmen, polls in the months leading up to the election showed that more voters believed Lula's innocence.
As a politically experienced former president, Lula does not fail to understand the dire constitutional crisis that his election in prison could trigger. In mid-September, less than a month before the 2018 elections, Lula compromised and his running mate Fernando Ada became the Workers' Party's presidential candidate.
Ada, however, was far less politically prestigious than Lula. A large number of Lula's supporters were reluctant to vote for the left-wing candidate who had taken a back seat, and Bolsonaro, the antithesis of the left and claimed to be "the only one without corruption controversy", took the opportunity to gain momentum.
Thus, for the first time since Lula's election in 2002, the candidate of Brazil's left-wing Workers' Party lost the presidential election – not so much that the westerly wind of the right overwhelmed the east wind of the left, but rather that the left that lost Lula collapsed and was picked up by opponents.
In this way, Bolsonaro was sworn in as president of Brazil on New Year's Day 2019, adhering to the neoliberal line economically and becoming a "non-NATO main ally" of the United States politically.
However, the "effectiveness" of this combination boxing is somewhat difficult to say. Coinciding with the unstable world economic situation, on the whole, it is difficult to say that the Brazilian economy has improved in recent years.
Right-wing Latin American leaders are mostly pro-American and pro-Western, and Bolognaro is no exception. In the West, however, Bolsonaro was placed in Trump's camp and not accepted and sheltered by "mainstream public opinion." Even his attempt to keep a low profile for agricultural development in the Amazon has been scolded by environmentalists.
When I went to Brasilia on a business trip in late 2019, the futuristic and once-vigorous capital of a big country could not hide its old decay; Then, when the new crown epidemic came in 2020, the world's major economies were struggling to survive.
At this time, it is difficult not to remember Lula's reign as Brazil, which became the world's seventh-largest economy and began to be known as the "BRICS". In this context, the stigmatized Lula's support did not decline but increased, until 2021, when the Brazilian Supreme Court overturned all previous guilty verdicts against Lula, allowing him to come out again with a clean slate.
This time, Lula and his supporters no longer have to worry about legal obstacles to running for president, but Brazil's judicial system has been convinced of "witch hunting" because of the changes in the rules of the past few years.
Lula, who has achieved brilliant achievements in the early 21st century and completed two terms of presidential terms with a very high approval rating of 80%, is a political legend whether or not he can "return" smoothly this time.
However, his successors in the Brazilian Workers' Party, whether Rousseff or Ada have been able to withstand the storm of Brazilian politics in recent years. Instead, it was Bolsonaro on the right wing who sprang up and gradually gained a foothold.
Today, half of Brazil's voters expect Lula to regain the country's early 21st century glory. However, Brazil is also facing various problems and challenges, and there are many internal and external constraints.
Even if Lula is elected, will he be able to meet people's expectations on his own? I'm afraid only time will give the final answer.