The Brazil that does not want Bolsonaro or Lula gets timid support in the streets

Protesters against Bolsonaro this Sunday on Paulista Avenue in São Paulo.Fernando Bizerra / EFE

The calendar is overflowing with demonstrations in Brazil, although the pandemic still kills hundreds of people daily and infects thousands. The first march promoted by those who long to have a presidential candidate other than Jair Bolsonaro or Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2022 has gathered a few thousand people in several cities this Sunday. The original slogan,

Neither Lula nor Bolsonaro

, was modified at the last minute in an attempt to attract the participation of the Workers' Party. They left him in

Bolsonaro Out

but not for those. The PT did not attend, which even in low hours is the most powerful political machine in Brazil.

Those who have marched in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and a handful of other cities want to oust Bolsonaro with an impeachment or in elections.

But they don't want the PT left either.

"The more we are, the more options we will have to kick Bolsonaro out, but we are still few," said 53-year-old doctor Denise, disappointed, at the São Paulo protest.

Like the rest of those consulted, he preferred to identify himself only by his first name.

Denise added: "I will vote for the third way, whoever the candidate is, whoever is not Lula or Bolsonaro."

Three years ago he voted for the retired military man in the second round.

It is one of the disappointed, especially because of its disastrous management of the pandemic.

This was the first time in the street to measure the strength of the so-called third way, which is talked about a lot in the press, among businessmen and elites, but which the polls so far portray more as an intense desire than as a reality under construction that embodies a specific person 13 months before the elections. Those who do not want to be dragged by polarization have taken to the streets, those who have been left politically orphans when Bolsonaro abandoned the liberal agenda in economics and the fight against corruption, or those who are suspicious of Lula because of his sentences - already annulled -. In response to the summons, many wore white, to distinguish themselves from the green / yellow Bolsonarista and the red of the PT.

The event in São Paulo was on the same avenue, Paulista, where last Tuesday President Bolsonaro gathered and harangued a crowd on the occasion of Independence Day. The president issued various threats to the Supreme Court judges, which he retracted on Friday. The street vendors of T-shirts adapt their samples to the demonstration on duty. Business is business. The tables that a few days ago offered yellow shirts with the word "myth" next to Bolsonaro's face, today they were black and next to the president's face they showed the slogan

Fora Bolsonaro

.

Speeches have focused on beating the current president, but his leftist predecessor has not been spared verbal blows.

Lula's party has refused to participate because among the organizers are two of the liberal youth movements that were the vanguard-anti-Dilma, led the street protests that led to the dismissal of Dilma Rousseff in 2016. Those groups, Movimiento Brasil Libre (MBL ) and Vem para a Rua (Come to the street), which some federal deputies achieved in the heat of that traumatic change and the Bolsonaro wave are now disappointed and agree with the PT in the desire to see the extreme right leader away from the Presidency.

Lula's party has supported the mobilization but without joining.

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During the last five years, Brazilian politics seems to have been on a roller coaster ride, the culminating points of which were the dismissal of Rousseff, the imprisonment and release of Lula and the unexpected victory of Bolsonaro.

These sudden movements have seen the birth and death of all kinds of affinities and disagreements.

Among the many names that sound like a third way, Governor João Doria, who managed to bring the first vaccines to Brazil from China, Governor Eduardo Leite, who has implemented a fiscal adjustment plan, is 36 years old and has just declared himself gay, the Prime Minister of Health who was ousted by Bolsonaro from the Government, Henrique Mandetta, and Ciro Gomes, a caudillo from the northeast of Brazil and from the center-left who was third in the 2018 elections, and so on.

Although they are still a long way off, one of the keys that is looming for the next elections is who will vote for those who detest the Bolsonaro-Lula duo, who leads the polls, if the second round is a duel between the two.

Lopes, a 58-year-old engineer, who has come out to demonstrate on Paulista Avenue, would like to see Ciro Gomes in the Presidency, but if the final dilemma is Bolsonaro-Lula he has it very clear.

“They can say what they want, but Lula is a democrat, he always has been.

And Bolsonaro is a prototype of a coup leader ”.

Robson, a logistics operator, and his partner, Jessica, both 31, would like the candidate to be former judge Sergio Moro. "Or another way to the right other than Bolsonaro," he adds. But the truth is that, after his departure from the Bolsonaro government and break with the retired military man, the polls give few options to the person in charge of the great investigation against corruption. Robson lost faith in Bolsonaro "when he broke all the commitments made to defend a liberal policy with a minimal State, which offers Health and Safety, and more efficient." There is still a lot of party left until the Brazilians elect a president in October 2022.