Brazil does not resolve

The recount of votes in the early hours of Sunday ended up offering two conclusions.

The left-wing candidate Lula da Silva will have to wait for the second round of the elections to ratify his victory by 48% and, secondly, the hidden vote in Brazil, or not detected by the polls, favors the expectations of the current President Bolsonaro, which reaches 43%, around eight points above the forecasts of most polls.

The objective of relieving the extreme right of Trumpian lineage in Brazil has been frustrated this Sunday while the possible continuity of a president with undetectable support has been reinforced, among which there may be a good part of the more than 60 million evangelicals Brazilians as a powerful civil and political force.

The two chambers, the Congress and the Senate, also have Bolsonarista majorities while the competition in the elections for governor has been unequal.

In nine states (and among them Rio de Janeiro or the Federal District) candidates backed by Bolsonaro win, while those related to Lula take five.

Another significant surprise has been the seven-point advantage of the Bolsonarista candidate for governor of São Paulo (which concentrates around 31% of GDP as the richest and most populous state in Brazil) ahead of Fernando Haddad, of the Party of the Workers, and the closest thing to a successor to Lula.

The campaign that is starting now leaves Bolsonaro in a more advantageous position than expected and almost no analyst dares to make too clear forecasts for the second round.

The six million votes that separate them, before an electorate of more than 156 million, can change sides.

The same election night began the campaign to also cast the minority vote for the option of Senator Simone Tendet with 4% and the center-left of Ciro Gomes, with 3%.

Lula da Silva will have to open up to political dialogue with the centrist forces that did not support him and that possibly live with less nostalgic intensity the stages in which he governed as president.

On the horizon is 20% of the population that could vote,

It was Lula himself who evoked at the time of voting the 20 months he spent in prison, convicted of corruption in sentences that were later annulled.

Before the polls, he assured that the objective of the electoral day was to return to the lost normality and "restore peace and democracy" in the face of the unleashed increase in violence thanks to the new legislation on weapons approved by Bolsonaro, the civil festering and, especially in networks, the lacerating discredit of the institutions that Brazil has experienced.

The country is among the 15 largest economies in the world and has all the conditions to become a regional protagonist and relevant actor.

The meaning of a future victory for Lula in the second round scheduled for October 30 has both symbolic and political weight beyond the borders of Brazil itself.

It would ratify the turn towards a diverse and non-monolithic left in governments such as that of Gabriel Boric in Chile and Gustavo Petro in Colombia, but also in relation to the protection of the Amazon as a zone that regulates the climate on a planetary scale, and increasingly threatened under the term of the current president.

Lula da Silva's demonstrated aptitude for diplomacy must be one more reason that allows the autocratic extreme right to be defeated in defense of a more egalitarian democracy.