Lula's challenge to Bolsonaro: "He is afraid of losing because he could end up in jail"

Jair Bolsonaro, president of Brazil, at an event in São Paulo. AMANDA PEROBELLI (REUTERS)

During his visit to Minas Gerais, the second largest state in the country, Lula da Silva, who continues to dominate the polls as the winner of the October presidential elections, has openly challenged his opponent, Jair Bolsonaro, stating that the president fears losing the elections “ so as not to end up in jail.”

petitions are being held in Congress about Bolsonaro and

have not yet been put to a vote.

Many of these accusations could not only force him to resign, but could lead to legal proceedings that could land him in jail.

Lula has been tough on his first public outings these days.

Always without pronouncing his name, he has affirmed that “we are facing an adversary who represents ignorance, who represents violence, who represents fascism in Brazil and we are going to have to throw that fascism into the sewer of history from where it should never have been. stepped out".

Lula is striving to create a range of political forces not only from the left, but even from the right to try to convince that today in Brazil the most urgent thing, before it is too late, is to remove Bolsonaro from power to prevent the demons from resurrecting. of the dictatorship.

He has said it this way: “Bolsonaro speaks every day at once.

He is going to see the hit.

He is going to suffer it on October 2 [date of the elections].

The people are going to strike a blow against authoritarianism and restore democracy, a popular democratic coup without rifles or machine guns.”

Bolsonaro in turn, according to the opinion of political analysts, is preparing the way so that if he sees himself as a loser he can challenge the election results with the support of the closest military under the pretext that the polls are not safe and can be manipulated.

And he does it with an ambiguous speech, as is his style, presenting himself as a champion of the defense of freedom and customs, according to him, crushed by the left.

All his desire in these years of Government has been to arm the population, allowing ordinary people and even encouraging them to buy up to six weapons.

According to him, "only dictators fear the armed people."

And he has stated: "I want every good citizen to have their firearms to resist, if that were the case, the arrival of a dictator."

That dictator would, of course, be his opponent, Lula seen as a communist, something that the former trade unionist never was.

In his blog

, Ricardo Noblat comments that what Bolsonaro wants is for the people to be armed in a kind of militia so that a part of them can use them to challenge the elections if they lose them.”

And Noblat adds: “And the dance continues.

Or to put it another way, the coup advances.”

Bolsonaro has reached the sarcasm of saying that people have to fight even with arms against the dictator and against those who refuse to comply with the Constitution and seek to take away people's freedom.

They are his usual ghosts: that the left is trying to establish a dictatorship and that it was the military dictatorship that restored freedom to Brazil.

According to him, the only problem with the Brazilian dictatorship is that, compared to others on the continent, it was too light.

"I should have killed 30,000 more people," he said candidly.

Today, five months before the elections, there is already a consensus that only Lula with his record is the only one who could dethrone the far-right Bolsonaro since no other candidate has stood out strongly.

Hence, all the efforts of the Democrats, even from a part of the right, is to support him so that he wins the elections while the fear grows that he could suffer an attack.

This has led his team to determine that his electoral acts be held, if possible, in closed places with a metal detector.

A few days ago, in São Paulo, when leaving a meeting with some political leaders, his car was suddenly blocked by a group of Bolsonaristas shouting threats that the police had to disperse.

In this climate of tension that politics is experiencing and in which democracy is seriously threatened, the declarations of the literary novelist, Vargas Llosa, that he prefers Bolsonaro to Lula, have been surprising.

These statements have been received with surprise and disbelief by the media and social networks and with exaltation by the most radical hosts of Bolsonarism.

Although the liberal mentality of the Peruvian writer is well known, it has been surprising that he is not informed that what is at stake in Brazil, with the re-election of Bolsonaro, is the future of its democracy.

Meanwhile, Brazil suffers with greater force every day from the consequences of an economic crisis that martyrs millions of people that the Government has not been able to face.

As Vinicius Torres Freire has written in the

newspaper “instead of inflation and hunger, Bolsonaro talks about weapons and civil war”.

According to him "it is easy to see that the economy is adrift in a misruled country, subjected to the objectives of a coup project."

And he adds that Bolsonaro "links hunger with the will of an authoritarian power even through an armed conflict."

The political tension at this time is such that although the electoral campaign could only officially start in August, whether it is Bolsonaro or Lula who are already in full campaign touring the country, with the aggravating circumstance that the president has practically stopped governing to dedicate himself in body and soul to fight the ghosts and windmills of the return of a communism that, in truth, has never existed in Brazil and that was just an excuse to establish a bloody military dictatorship and that today seems to want to repeat itself.

Hence the hopes of a victory for Lula, even by those who would not vote for him in another less dangerous political situation than the one the country is experiencing.

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