(Bloomberg) -- Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro is seeking a second term amid growing economic challenges that will potentially determine the outcome of this year’s election.
The right-wing leader is launching his pre-candidacy on Sunday at an event organized by the Liberal Party, which will also host Defense Minister Walter Braga Netto, whom he may tap as running mate. According to Brazilian law, candidates for the October vote will only be considered official when they register with electoral authorities in August.
Bolsonaro was elected in 2018 on a conservative, anti-corruption platform that resonated with Brazilians outraged by a series of graft scandals plaguing the 13-year rule of the leftist Workers’ Party. But economic problems have returned to the forefront since then: Inflation and unemployment are both above 10% in the wake of the pandemic, the economy is expected to grow only 0.5% this year, and poverty has returned to levels last seen in 2010.
It’s a difficult economic situation that has weighed on the president’s popularity and boosted the chances of his main challenger -- Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the leftist former president and leader of the Workers’ Party whom many Brazilians associate with a period of economic bonanza that was largely supported by a global commodities boom.
Lula, who was behind bars and unable to run in the 2018 election, would now receive 44% of the votes in a first-round vote, while Bolsonaro would get 26%, according to a XP/Ipespe poll published Friday. He would defeat Bolsonaro with 54% of the votes in a second round, the same poll found.
Yet Lula’s lead over Bolsonaro could shrink as the incumbent rolls out a package of social spending that will inject 165 billion reais ($34.8 billion) into the economy, on top of a program of cash handouts he’s been paying since the beginning of the year.
Old Strategy
So far Bolsonaro has insisted on a rhetoric not very different from the one that got him elected four years ago, warning voters against the threats of corruption and communism that he says Lula and the Workers’ Party represent.
While that still resonates with his most radical supporters, it does little to win the backing of poor Brazilians who have suffered the most during the Covid-19 crisis, or women who in their majority disapprove of the president’s handling of the pandemic and his often sexist remarks.
He’s been trying to plug in those gaps by considering fuel subsidies or larger cash handouts to the poor, while trying to appeal to female voters by showing up in public events accompanied by First Lady Michelle Bolsonaro.
Yet he’s unlikely to depart much of his original platform, according to Deysi Cioccari, a political science professor with the Pontifical Catholic University of Sao Paulo.
“He will likely use the same strategy of 2018: talking about corruption, communism, guns,” she said. “And it works for him.”
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