Media Spin Lula Victory as Defeat
OCTOBER 5, 2022
BRIAN MIER
From the way that the Anglo media are treating the October 2 Brazilian first-round presidential elections, a casual news consumer may get the impression that the Brazilian Workers Party suffered a crushing defeat. It takes an incredible amount of spin to create this impression. In order to pull this off, several important facts have to be downplayed or ignored.
Workers Party candidate Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva beat incumbent Jair Bolsonaro by 6.2 million votes. This represents the first time since the return to democracy in 1985 that a challenger has ever beaten an incumbent in a Brazilian first-round presidential election, and no incumbent has ever lost reelection.
There are reasons for this. The incumbent has the entire weight of the state behind them. This enables them to, for example, issue an executive order to bypass constitutionally mandated spending caps during election season to artificially lower the prices of food, cooking gas and gasoline, and dish out billions of reais in pork to fickle center-right allies in Congress, as Bolsonaro did this year.
Political comeback for the ages
Brazil has two-thirds the population of the US, so Lula’s win on Saturday would be the equivalent of a victory by over 9 million votes in a US presidential election—something which has not happened since 2008.
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