Lula: Democracy is back
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva edges rival Jair Bolsonaro in the presidential runoff election, 50.9 percent against 49.1 of the votes
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Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva edges rival Jair Bolsonaro in the presidential runoff election, 50.9 percent against 49.1 of the votes
SAO PAULO, Brazil (AFP) — Brazilian president-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva declared that democracy is back and called for "peace and unity" after narrowly winning a divisive runoff election Sunday.
Lula made the declaration to a tightly packed crowd of hundreds of thousands of supporters who flooded the city center clad in his Workers' Party red.
"This country needs peace and unity," Lula said to loud cheers in a victory speech in Sao Paulo.
"The challenge is immense," he said of the job ahead, citing a hunger crisis, the economy, bitter political division, and deforestation in the Amazon.
His reelection caps a remarkable political comeback by defeating far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro — who has yet to accept defeat.
Electoral officials declared the election for Lula, who had 50.9 percent of the vote to 49.1 percent for Bolsonaro with more than 99.9 percent of polling stations reporting, in the closest race since Brazil returned to democracy after its 1964 to 1985 dictatorship.
Lula's victory marks a stunning turnaround for the charismatic but tarnished leftist heavyweight, who left office in 2010 as the most popular president in Brazilian history, fell into disgrace when he was imprisoned for 18 months on controversial, since-quashed corruption charges, and now returns for an unprecedented third term at age 77.
All eyes will now be on how Bolsonaro and his supporters react to the result after months of alleging — without evidence — that Brazil's electronic voting system is plagued by fraud and that the courts, media and other institutions had conspired against his far-right movement.
Silent
Bolsonaro, 67, was silent in the hours after the result was declared.
"Anywhere in the world, the losing president would already have called to admit defeat. He hasn't called yet, I don't know if he will call and concede," Lula told the massive crowd.
Some Bolsonaro supporters, gathered in the capital Brasilia, refused to accept the results.
"The Brazilian people aren't going to swallow a faked election and hand our nation over to a thief," 50-year-old teacher Ruth da Silva Barbosa said.
Bolsonaro, the vitriolic hardline conservative dubbed the "Tropical Trump," becomes the first incumbent president not to win re-election in the post-dictatorship era.
With no word from Bolsonaro, some of his key allies appeared in public to accept the results. They included the speaker of the lower house of Congress, Arthur Lira, who said it was time to "extend a hand to our adversaries, debate, build bridges."
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