The academic who hopes to lead Brazil
Brazil’s ex-leader calls on supporters to back candidate
In a letter from his jail cell, former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has called on tens of millions of supporters to vote for the man he named to lead his Workers’ Party ticket in October’s presidential election.
“I want everyone who would vote for me to vote for Fernando Haddad for president of Brazil,” da Silva, who Brazilians universally call Lula, said yesterday, the deadline for the party to pick another candidate after da Silva’s candidacy was barred. “From now on he will be Lula for millions of Brazilians.”
While long anticipated, the formal designation of Haddad settled one question and launched another: Will da Silva’s supporters actually listen?
The two men are close in their political views and said to be friends, but for many voters in Latin America’s largest nation they are also very different.
While Lula is easily the country’s most recognisable politician after being President between 2003 and 2010, Haddad is largely unknown outside of Sao Paulo, where he was governor or four years. While Lula is charismatic and has an every-man touch, Haddad is a political science professor-turned-Education Minister who comes off as professorial. He also got trounced in his re-election bid as mayor in 2016, raising questions about how well he is at winning over voters.
Haddad, 55, also only begins his campaign in earnest today, less than four weeks before voters go to the polls.
Carlos Melo, a political science professor at Insper university, believes the strength of the party and da Silva’s endorsement will be enough to help Haddad get to a second round of voting. If no candidate gets more than 50 per cent on October 7, as expected, the top two finishers will meet in an October 28 runoff.
“He was introduced as the candidate very late, we have to see if there is time for him to get all the votes he needs,” Melo said.
Before running for mayor in 2012, Haddad served as Education Minister under Lula and President Dilma Rousseff.
He was confirmed as the replacement to Lula after a meeting of his party’s executive committee in the southern city of Curitiba, where the former president is jailed for a corruption conviction. He will be joined on the ticket by Manuela D’Avila, a member of Brazil’s Communist Party.
Recent polls show Haddad with less than 10 per cent of voter intentions, but the party hopes he will now rise with da Silva’s endorsement. The current poll leader is far-right congressman Jair Bolsonaro.
A Datafolha poll published on Tuesday shows Haddad in fourth place, favoured by 9 per cent support. That was a rise of 5 percentage points in just a few weeks, but still behind Bolsonaro’s 24 per cent, left-leaning Ciro Gomes’ 13 per cent, centrist Marina Silva’s 11 per cent and rightleaning Geraldo Alckmin’s 10 per cent.
The poll had a margin of error of 2 percentage points. All the 2804 voters sampled were interviewed on Tuesday, days after Lula’s candidacy was barred by the electoral court and Bolsonaro was stabbed in an incident that might put him in hospital until election day.