Michelle Bolsonaro vs 'Janja' Lula da Silva in 2026?

Politics is sometimes excessively slow and other times faster than light.

Brazil is a unique case.

Lula has just begun to govern the country and her eyes are already set on her succession in 2026, with the particularity that three women with presidential claims already appear.

For Lula at this moment, the most important thing is to prevent former president Jair Bolsonaro, from the extreme right, from being able to contest the elections again.

This would only be possible if electoral justice prevented him, due to his possible crimes against democracy, from contesting again for the Head of State for eight years.

And it is with the threat of returning that Bolsonaro, a fugitive in the United States, is playing with at this moment.

It is a fear that invades the democratic and progressive forces, since no one is unaware that, despite all the crimes imputed to it, there is no doubt that Bolsonarismo, with its apparent liberal politics, still enjoys millions of voters both among the upper classes as well as the poorest and least educated, especially within the evangelical world.

And it is in this parenthesis in which Brazil lives on the possible condemnation and ineligibility of Bolsonaro in which new candidates are already appearing, among which three women curiously stand out: Lula's current wife, Rosangela da Silva, known as Janja, 56 years old, sociologist, who has been a member of the Workers' Party (PT) since 1983. During Lula's recent visit to the United States, attention was drawn to the fact that Janja entered the White House hand in hand with the American President, Biden .

There is beginning to be a consensus that Janja, who enjoys popular sympathy and who has been a key player in Lula's re-election with her political activism, will be a possible candidate in 2026 if by then the president does not feel physically strong enough to undertake a new electoral campaign.

The other woman who is already being talked about as trying to run for the Presidency is Bolsonaro's current wife, Michelle, a fervent evangelical who, without waiting for her husband, has already returned from the United States.

The politicians who until now were followers of Bolsonaro and are looking for a replacement for him in case he ended up ineligible begin to look at her.

Michelle Bolsonaro has to her credit the fact of being a fervent evangelical without the macho raptures of her husband, who, as the professor of Sociology Christina Vital de Cunha affirms, "mobilizes symbols very well to communicate with most women among the millions of evangelicals, before whom she appears as possessed by the Holy Spirit”, and who has always worked in favor of those who suffer from physical deficiencies and in helping to rebuild broken families among the poorest.

And it is not possible to ignore that today Evangelicals make up a third of the electorate, something that Lula understood very well in her campaign, in which she strove for the first time to attract the vote of the Evangelical Churches.

The third possible female candidate to succeed Lula is the former senator and current Planning Minister of the center-right conservative party, MDB, Simone Tebet, who was the third most voted in the elections after Lula and Bolsonaro.

She drew attention during the campaign for announcing her second-round vote for the leftist Lula.

She justified it with these words: “What is at stake is greater than each one of us.

I will vote in my condition as a democrat and my Brazilian conscience.

At this time there is no neutrality."

If Tebet were to run for the next presidential elections, she would be the candidate of a center-right located between the PT left and the Bolsonaro right, something that until now has been lacking on the political map.

As is well known, millions of Brazilians voted for Bolsonaro so that the left would not return.

In fact, Lula's victory was given only by a difference of 2% of the voters, something that Bolsonaro used to challenge the legitimacy of the ballot box.

In the political unconscious of millions of Brazilians, Tebet somehow represents those who refuse to vote, whether to the left or the right.

Considered a liberal and conservative politician, but solidly a Democrat, who stands as a center, Tebet has stood out as a senator for her absence of corruption scandals, her absence of extremism and her good relations, either with the left or with the center-right. democratic.

Far from extremism, with good relations with the powerful world of agribusiness, the heart of the Brazilian economy, Tebet calls himself liberal but without anti-democratic arrogance.

Her role during the Senate Investigation Commission on the possible crimes of then President Bolsonaro during the covid was exemplary and forceful, in favor of the values ​​of democracy and the condemnation of the coup leader.

Lula, whom few are capable of winning in political cunning, has already known from now on that, as a possible antidote to the danger that Bolsonaro's coup could play the trick of the mystic Michelle, he must encourage his wife Janja, a progressive, and the democrat and liberal, Tebet, as possible opponents.

What does not mean that he continues to think that also in 2026 the best card against a possible resurrection of Bolsonarismo in the person of Michelle continues to be himself, for which he has come to cherish, perhaps with excessive complacency, the trick of being the only politician capable of ending the war between Russia and Ukraine, an issue that would consecrate him worldwide and ensure his new and fourth re-election.