Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – With little to gain and possibly much to lose, Brazil’s president skipped the final candidates’ debate prior to Sunday’s vote in which he is seeking re-election, leaving the stage to rivals who denounced him as a coward and corrupt.
Three candidates took part in the Thursday evening forum – Social Democrat Geraldo Alckmin, leftist Heloisa Helena Lima and Democratic Labor standard-bearer Cristovam Buarque. All commented disparagingly on the glaring absence of incumbent Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a pragmatic socialist who is favored in all polls to win Sunday’s race.
What remains to be seen is if he will garner more than 50 percent and avoid a runoff with Alckmin, the former governor of Sao Paulo state expected to finish second.
“I cannot deliver myself to the premeditated and coordinated action of adversaries who intend to transform the debate into an arena of abuse and aggression against me, a game with a marked deck,” Lula said Thursday afternoon in a letter to the Globo television network broadcasting the encounter.
If no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the ballots, a runoff between the top two finishers is set for Oct. 29.
Though all three candidates blasted the incumbent for his absence, the Marxist Lima was the most acerbic.
Lula “had the obligation to come down here from his throne of corruption and political cowardice, but he is not here because he has no moral authority,” she said.
She referred to a series of bribery, influence-peddling and illicit enrichment scandals that have rocked the government over the past years.
In recent days the governing Workers Party, or PT, was once again tarnished as police investigated an attempt by members of the president’s campaign committee to purchase a dossier that falsely implicated his main opponent in corruption.
A Brazilian judge ordered the arrests of six PT members earlier this week in connection with the dossier scheme.
“Dossiergate,” as the Brazilian press has dubbed the affair, is just the latest in a series of scandals that have plagued the PT since shortly after assuming power in 2002.
The party has been accused of everything from having links to organized crime to bribing members of Congress and engaging in a fraud scheme involving the purchase of ambulances.
Fraud has tainted members of almost every political party in Brazil, and congressional investigations ended with the formal filing of corruption charges against 40 leaders and businessmen with links to the PT.
