Brazil’s President Bolsonaro is known for his failures. In the TV duel before the runoff election, however, his challenger Lula repeatedly misrepresented his tone and made accusations against his opponent.
Two weeks before the run-off election for the presidential office in Brazil, the far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro and his left-leaning challenger Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva exchanged blows in a televised debate. Bolsonaro’s “omissions” killed 680,000 Brazilians in the corona pandemic, more than half of whom could have been saved, Lula accused the president in the debate on Sunday evening.
Bolsonaro, in turn, accused Lula of the fact that during his two terms as head of state between 2003 and 2010, corruption was rampant in the country and his record as president was “disgraceful”: Lula “did nothing for Brazil except put public money in her and her friends’ pockets stuck,” he said. Lula is a “national disgrace”. Both candidates also accused each other of lying and false information.
The election campaign in Brazil, which was already characterized by smear campaigns and aggressive verbal arguments, has increasingly resembled a mud fight since the first round of voting. Lula’s camp in particular has recently resorted to strategies that had previously been pursued primarily by the extreme right: The left-wing camp dug up old videos of Bolsonaro performances and extracted individual quotes from them that link Bolsonaro to Freemasonry and cannibalism, for example must.
In a recent attack, Bolsonaro has been linked to pedophilia. Lula’s campaign camp on Saturday called the president a “degenerate criminal” and was “disgusted” by statements made by the head of state a year ago during a visit to a house where apparently underage girls from Venezuela were working as prostitutes.
Arriving in Sao Paulo for the televised debate, Bolsonaro said the past 24 hours had been “the worst of my life” because of these attacks. Lula did not raise the issue during the debate but wore an anti-child abuse campaign pin on her lapel.
The latest polls put Bolsonaro around six percentage points behind Lula two weeks before the runoff. In the first round of voting on October 2, Lula got 48 percent of the votes, Bolsonaro got 43 percent. Polls had predicted a significantly larger lead for Lula and made victory in the first ballot seem possible.
