Election seen as ‘critical test for democracy’

Brazil’s presidential election campaign has officially begun, with former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva leading all polls against incumbent Jair Bolsonaro amid growing concerns about political violence and threats to democracy.

Da Silva, whose two-term presidency ran from 2003 to 2010, has already taken to wearing a bulletproof vest during public appearances.

He was scheduled to speak at an engine factory yesterday, but federal police officers asked him to cancel the event due to security concerns, according to his campaign. Instead, the veteran leftist launched his seventh bid for the presidency at a Volkswagen plant in Sao Bernardo do Campo, a manufacturing city outside Sao Paulo where he rose to fame as a union leader in the 1970s.

Meanwhile, Bolsonaro revisited the spot in the city of Juiz de Fora where he was stabbed by a mentally ill man on the campaign trail in 2018. He arrived on a motorcycle surrounded by security guards and wearing a bulletproof vest, unlike in 2018, when he plunged unprotected into the crowd.

‘‘For Bolsonaro, this is the image of himself as a rebel, antisystem candidate, and the attack on his life is central to that narrative,’’ said Mauricio Santoro, a political science professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro.

‘‘For him and his supporters, the man who stabbed him was not a ‘lone wolf’ but part of a conspiracy of the political elite against Bolsonaro.’’

The race in Latin America’s largest democracy is a clash of titans, with all other candidates lagging far behind.

Despite the 2018 attempt on Bolsonaro’s life, recent events have caused greater concern that his supporters could engage in attacks.

Bolsonaro backers surrounded da Silva’s car to hurl verbal abuse earlier this year, and in July one of them killed a local official of da Silva’s Workers’ Party in the city of Foz de Iguacu.

Da Silva’s supporters have also been targeted. At a rally in June, a drone sprayed a crowd with a fetid liquid, and at another last month, a man detonated a homemade explosive containing faeces. The assailants in both cases were Bolsonaro supporters, according to social media posts reviewed by the Associated Press.

Bolsonaro is a staunch progun advocate and has loosened restrictions, enabling his supporters to stock up on firearms and munitions. At the launch of his candidacy on July 24, he asked supporters to swear that they would give their lives for freedom, and has repeatedly characterised the race as a battle of good versus evil.

His wife, Michelle, said at that same event that the presidential palace had been consecrated to demons before her husband assumed office.

In Sao Bernardo do Campo, da Silva rattled off the Bolsonaro administration’s failings during the Covid-19 pandemic – which a Senate investigation found contributed to the world’s secondhighest death toll – then said: ‘‘If there’s anyone possessed by the devil, it’s that Bolsonaro.’’

Bolsonaro’s supporters frequently cite da Silva’s 580 days of imprisonment after he was found guilty of corruption and money laundering. Those convictions ejected him from the 2018 presidential race and cleared the way for Bolsonaro.

The convictions were eventually annulled on procedural grounds by the Supreme Court, which later ruled that the judge had been biased and had colluded with prosecutors.

Trailing in the polls, Bolsonaro, a former army captain, has sowed concerns that he could reject the results if he loses the October vote.

The far-right leader has raised unfounded doubts about Brazil’s electronic voting system, which has been in use since 1996. Last week, hundreds of companies and over a million Brazilians signed a pair of letters demanding that the nation’s democratic institutions be respected.

Last year, Bolsonaro declared that only God could remove him from power. Political analysts have repeatedly expressed concerns that he is setting the stage to follow the lead of former US president Donald Trump and attempt to cling to power.

Human Rights Watch said the campaign was ‘‘likely to be a critical test for democracy and the rule of law in the country and in Latin America’’. –AP