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Brazil candidates make final campaign pitches
SAO PAULO, Oct 28, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – Brazil’s presidential candidates made
their final push for voters Saturday, with pitches that echoed the gulf
between them: leftist Fernando Haddad held a “peace rally” in the favelas,
while far-right frontrunner Jair Bolsonaro took to Twitter.
A day before a runoff that will decide who leads Latin America’s biggest
country for the next four years, Brazilians are deeply divided — though the
clear favorite is Bolsonaro, an ex-army captain nicknamed the “Tropical
Trump,” whose aggressive social media campaign has tapped into widespread
anti-establishment rage.
Two final polls published Saturday gave Bolsonaro a lead of between eight
and 10 percentage points, with around 55 percent of the vote.
Haddad has made up ground — he trailed by as much as 18 points two weeks
ago — but it would take a truly dramatic surge for him to win at this point.
Haddad is standing in for ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a
popular but controversial politician who was barred from running while
serving a 12-year jail term for corruption.
The Workers’ Party candidate insisted in an emotionally charged rally that
he can still pull off a comeback.
“This thing is going to turn around,” Haddad, 55, told a crush of
thousands of white-clad supporters in the largest shantytown in Sao Paulo, a
city he formerly served as mayor.
“Brazil still remembers,” he added — a pointed reference to Bolsonaro’s
outspoken nostalgia for the military regime that ruled Brazil with an iron
fist from 1964 to 1985.
Amid the sea of frenzied supporters, Emerson Santana, 44, told AFP: “We’re
going to win.
“Democracy is going to win, not authoritarianism. We don’t want another
dictatorship.”
– Different visions –
Haddad is promising voters a return to the golden years under Lula, who
slashed poverty while presiding over an economic boom from 2003 to 2010.
But that was before the economy went bust and the Workers’ Party, along
with most political parties, got bogged down in the slime of several massive
corruption scandals.
Bolsonaro, 63, harks back to a different past: that of the “Brazilian
miracle” of rapid industrialization under the efficient but brutal military
dictatorship.
In a country disgusted with massive corruption, violent crime and economic
malaise, his message has sold better than Haddad’s.
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He has also successfully presented himself as an anti-establishment
outsider, despite the fact he has served in Congress for the past 27 years.
But he repulses a large part of the electorate — and many outside the
country — with his overtly misogynistic, racist and homophobic rhetoric.
He once told a lawmaker he opposed that she “wasn’t worth raping;” he has
said he would rather see his sons die than come out as gay; and he said after
visiting one black community that they “do nothing — they’re so useless I
doubt they can procreate.”
Bolsonaro made his final campaign pitches Saturday on social media — as
he has done since he was stabbed in the stomach by an assailant at a rally
last month.
“God willing, tomorrow will be our new independence day,” he wrote on
Twitter.
Hundreds of backers meanwhile held motorcades to show their support,
waving Brazilian flags as they paraded through the streets of Sao Paulo.
“We worked hard to clean up Brazil, to rip Brazil from the communists’
hands, and now we’re entering a new era in Brazilian history,” said one,
Dorival Andrade.
– ‘Scares me’ –
Bolsonaro softened his tone in the final hours.
“We went a free Brazil, without prejudice: white or black, homo or
hetero,” he said in a Facebook webcast, accompanied by black lawmaker Helio
Negao.
“Who knows, maybe I’m gay. If I were, what would be the problem?”
He fended off accusations of authoritarianism, vowing to respect the
constitution.
Haddad nevertheless got a key last-minute endorsement from former Supreme
Court judge Joaquim Barbosa, the country’s first black chief justice and a
widely respected figure.
“For the first time in 32 years of exercising my right to vote, a
candidate scares me. That’s why I will vote for Fernando Haddad,” he tweeted.
But the man who came third in the first-round vote on October 7, center-
leftist Ciro Gomes, refused to endorse either candidate — a blow to Haddad.
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