There are ten days left for the presidential elections in Brazil that will not fail to have a strong influence on the rest of the Latin American continent and beyond.
This time it is not just another routine competition.
As the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Pérez Esquivel, has just indicated: "It's not Bolsonaro and Lula, it's fascism or democracy."
If Lula wins, according to the most reliable polls, his task will be more arduous, if possible, than when he won the first time, since he will first need to clean up the rubble of a country devastated by Bolsonarism, which has dismantled and poisoned it.
I have been analyzing this country for 22 years and I have never seen it so besieged by the danger of an attempted civil war, given the depth of hatred that Bolsonaro has managed to inject into all sections of society.
At the same time, the leader of the neo-fascist extreme right is not going to be able, with his destructive spirit, to die like the biblical Samson along with the Philistines.
In the end he is more cowardly and confesses that sometimes he cries alone locked in the toilet so that his wife does not see him.
His public boasts and rudeness of sexual power, which he has just repeated in London, sound like the bravado of a suburban bar and they no longer thank anyone;
they seem more like a trick to hide their human, political and intellectual emptiness.
A president whose government let almost 700,000 people die in the pandemic not only without a hint of compassion but even humorously imitating those who died asphyxiated by the lack of oxygen that was denied them, ran to London, without anyone inviting him, to honor the corpse of the Queen in a clear electoral campaign gesture.
It will not be easy for whoever replaces the current extreme right —as our correspondent Naiara Galarraga reported— to rebuild so many economic, social and moral ruins, since the country ends its turbulent political journey broken in the best of its idiosyncrasies.
Brazil is also infested with the other pandemic: that of hatred and disappointment in the face of an uncertain future, especially among the youngest.
According to a Datafolha survey, 60% of these young people would go abroad today if they could.
It is a doubly sad figure if one considers that in the previous governments of Lula da Silva the opposite occurred.
It was the young Europeans who set their eyes on the so-called country of opportunities, of the future and of the search for happiness and joy.
Today Brazil is a country that is not only sad, but also sulky and afraid, where it is difficult to trust even one's neighbor.
It is a country where instead of giving away books, rifles and revolvers are given away, following the slogans of the president who tries to teach children the art of firing a weapon with his fingers.
If Brazil, in its atavistic contradictions, was always a country threatened by the violence of the caciques, aggravated by a slavery that was the last to end in the world, today it finds itself doubly ill with the bacteria of hatred, inoculated by a leader who has no scruples in calling himself a friend and admirer of the torturers and executioners of the dictatorship, nor of hiding his contempt and coldness for the weakest.
If there is no last-minute surprise, Lula will be able to preside over the destiny of this country for the third time, not to mention that the six years of Dilma Rousseff's government are also due to him, who brought her to power.
The former trade unionist and creator of the Workers' Party (PT), the largest left-wing political organization in Latin America, will have to face, however, three not-small challenges.
The first is that his government, supported by a dozen parties ranging from the extreme left to the center and the non-fascist right, cannot be seen as a PT government, but rather as a center government, which creates the first problem for him. within his party, the most structured of all the other political formations.
There is already talk that if Lula wins the elections this time it will not be a left-wing government, since he will have to distribute power among all the forces that support him.
There is talk, which flatters businessmen and stockbrokers, that Enrique Meirelles, who was already minister of the World Bank, a liberal who has just announced his vote for Lula, may be part of his government.
The fact that Lula must distribute power among his allies has generated some discomfort and concern among the members of the PT, who will have to assimilate this distribution among those who are not only not from the left, but who were staunch enemies of it, such as the case of the conservative and member of Opus Dei, Geraldo Alckmin, chosen by Lula as vice president and whom he has already defeated in other elections.
A third challenge, no less, will be to rebuild the battered Brazilian democracy, because the new fascist right to which Bolsonaro has given shelter will continue to stand.
All this encourages those who continue to bet on the light of democracy against the black crepes of authoritarianism and the most rancid machismo to go to the polls.
They go with the hope of recovering the lost joy of a society that loves life even in the poorest outskirts and that today account for six million families.
In those conglomerates suffocated by the crossfire of drug trafficking and unpunished police violence, the embers of culture and art remain alive, mixed with the indomitable hope of redemption.
The writer Zuenir Ventura explains in his book “Río, la ciudad parted” that the young people of those ghettos of the favelas have fun and risk their lives knowing that violence will not allow them to reach adulthood.
It is significant that, according to the polls, this time they will vote more than ever for Lula.
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