Bricklayer: Without Lula, the country will be plunged into institutional disaster.
Journalist Fernando Brito believes that the new round of Datafolha polls reaffirms what everyone knows: Lula has every reason in the world to maintain his candidacy and fulfill the wishes of a large majority of Brazilian voters; "The country is on the verge of being plunged into institutional disaster if the former president is excluded from the ballot box," he says.
By Fernando Brito, from brick - The latest round of Datafolha polls reaffirms what everyone knows and, in the mainstream press, almost no one admits: Lula has every reason in the world to maintain his candidacy and fulfill the wishes of a large majority of Brazilian voters.
More important than the scenario in which Brazilians are asked who their candidate would be – where Lula maintains the 30% he's supported in polls conducted since his imprisonment in April – are the second-round simulations, in which voters make a clearer and more unequivocal choice. In these simulations, Lula, step by step, is proving himself, without a shadow of a doubt, to be the one the population wants and needs to lead the country.
The 49% he obtains when facing Alckmin or Bolsonaro, or the 46% he has against Marina, represent, considering valid votes, 60 to 63%, the same level of support that Lula obtained in the 2002 and 2006 elections, when he had 61% of the votes in the second round.
If no one doubts that those were indisputable votes and that they enabled him to lead the country with the political strength to implement administrations that even his opponents dare not question, why wouldn't that happen now?
The indisputable fact is that now, as before, a collective will has formed and consolidated, and it is about to be violated and confronted.
The country is on the verge of being plunged into institutional disaster if the former president is excluded from the ballot. At best, the dubious situation of electing someone clearly committed to being his interpreter in power would bring all the potential conflict that entails, because legitimacy is something one possesses personally and that is easily lost when borrowed.
The next president will be, regardless of the "solutions" found in the face of the absurdity into which judicial tyranny has plunged us, "the one who is because they didn't let Lula be."
This can't end well, not at all. Because what begins as a farce very rarely doesn't end in tragedy.