The Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has claimed he is the only thing standing in the way of far-right “fascists” reclaiming power, as he led a huge rally through the streets of Rio ahead of Sunday’s crunch election. Speaking on the eve of the demonstration, the 80-year-old leftwinger said he had decided to seek a historic fourth term because he believed only he could prevent the family of his rightwing rival, Flávio Bolsonaro, returning to government. I’m the one standing in their way,” Lula told a popular podcast called Flow, before adding: “It’s either me, or it’s barbarism.” Hours later, Lula flew to Rio, staging what his team called a “victory march” between two highly symbolic downtown locations that played an important role in Brazil’s fight for democracy during the 1964-1985 military dictatorship.
The church is the location where more than a million people, including Lula, famously gathered in 1984 to demand direct presidential elections. Lula, who was among those who spoke at that historic demo when he was an up-and-coming politician in his 30s, added: “Either we consolidate democracy, or we will lose it.” From Candelária, a sea of red-clad Lula supporters marched a mile south towards Cinelândia, the scene of an equally well-known pro-democracy protest in 1968 called the March of the Hundred Thousand. The decision to hold Friday’s rally between two such politically charged places spoke to how this year’s election has stirred up renewed fears over the future of Latin America’s biggest democracy.
Election-eve polls suggest Lula holds only a slender lead over his adversary, whose father, the ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, is serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a failed coup after Lula beat him in the 2022 election. Many Brazilian democrats fear that if 45-year-old Bolsonaro wins this year’s election, he will move quickly to free his father and his fellow coup-plotters from jail – and then set about dismantling and co-opting the country’s democratic institutions, such as the supreme court. Freixo warned: “We spent 21 years living under a really harsh dictatorship.
We fought so hard to attain our democratic institutions. And a victory for the Bolsonaro family – a family that always … openly defended the dictatorship and tried to stage a coup … would spell the end for our democratic process and institutions.” Valmir Aleixo, a 55-year-old history teacher who was one of thousands of people who joined Friday’s pro-Lula demo, said: “This is [a choice] between democracy and the savagery of far-right fascism. This is perhaps the most important election since the return of democracy in the 80s.” Noni Ostrower, 74, came to what was Rio’s largest leftwing protest in years carrying a homemade banner that read: “Democracy Is Valuable”.
They came to Brazil from Germany because of this,” Ostrower said. That’s why I’m here today.” During the campaign, Flávio Bolsonaro has vowed to pardon his 71-year-old father if elected, with some speculating Jair Bolsonaro could even become a minister. His brother, Eduardo Bolsonaro, a radical former congressman with ties to Trump’s Maga movement, reputedly hopes to become foreign minister.
Flávio Bolsonaro has announced plans to appoint five firmly conservative supreme court judges. Luiz Eduardo Soares, a prominent anthropologist and writer, said he feared what might happen if the Bolsonaro clan managed to reclaim power. Diogo Nogueira, a famous samba singer who came to the rally wearing his trademark panama hat, said: “We need to win in the first round so we don’t allow this type of people to get back into government.
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