00:00Brazil saw a shift toward the right wing after Sunday's polls, with the Liberal
00:04Party achieving the majority of seats in both the Chamber of Deputies and the
00:08Senate. The presidential election is heading to a runoff after neither of the
00:11main candidates secured the amount of votes required to win. Let's go live to
00:15Sao Paulo with our correspondent Brian Muir. Welcome to From the South. What
00:19details can you give us this Monday after the election day?
00:28Brian, can you hear me? I'm having audio issues. Please turn up the
00:34volume. Brian, you're on air. I was asking what can you tell us about Brazil this
00:40Monday after the election day? Okay, well, you know, the polls had tightened during the
00:50week before the election. In the same way that happens in countries around the
00:56world, when far right, these kind of far right candidates supported by Silicon
01:01Valley tech giants and the international far right are in the race. The polls
01:05tightened at the end. Most of them had predicted that Lula would win by two or
01:11three points with a two or three point margin of error. So what that means is
01:16it's not an exact science. And what happened actually was that Flavio
01:21Bolsonaro won by two points, but that's not outside of predicted range by most
01:26polling agencies. So it's really kind of like a symbolic, almost a symbolic defeat
01:32for people who had their hopes of that Lula might be able to win in the first
01:37round. But the experts didn't think everybody was going to win in the first
01:42round. Meanwhile, a lot of other interesting races took place across the
01:47country. Pernambuco, the state where I live now, has three left wing senators.
01:52Rosa Morin is now the first member of the Landless World Workers Movement to be
01:58elected to federal Congress, the first female member of the MST. And the PT picked up
02:05an additional three slots in Congress. What's really interesting is the Communist
02:10Party of Brazil almost doubled the size of its presence in Congress. It went up from
02:17five to 11. Pessoa also saw some gains. So in general, the inner circle of the
02:23Workers' Party and its closest allies now has increased its presence in Congress by
02:29about 15 seats. Meanwhile, in Senate, there were advances made by the far-right
02:36Liberal Party connected to Bolsonaro. This was also predicted. It's regrettable to people who
02:44are Lula supporters. However, when it's all tallied, they don't have enough power to change the
02:52Constitution or impeach anybody with the number of slots they have in the Senate at this point.
02:59They're five short. So really, there's some ups and downs, but the tone is upbeat among the Lula
03:06campaign. He's been in seven presidential elections. He's been in second round elections many times.
03:12And so he says he believes that he can win on October 25th.
03:18Brian, what can we expect from the campaign of Lula? Looking forward to that second election and the
03:25work that can be done to convince the voters that voted, for example, for other candidates to draw
03:31them to his side? Well, there's a good article about this in Brazil 247 today. Their opinion
03:40is that it's not... it would be a waste of time trying to focus on the voters who voted for
03:46other candidates
03:47because it was a very small amount of votes. The really significant thing is there was the second
03:53highest number of abstentions in the history of Brazilian elections. Over 21% of voters decided not
04:03to go out to the polls. There was a major storm in Sao Paulo, Brazil's most popular state,
04:09populous state. And normally when there's heavy weather incidents, this affects the poor vote and working
04:15class voters more than the rich who have their vehicles to get to the polling stations in.
04:19So they want to focus on the people who sat out the first time around. And they believe that if
04:25they
04:25can convince a good percentage of them to vote for Lula in the second round, that they can win the
04:30election
04:31easily. Thank you, Brian, very much for this first contact during the day. We'll stay in touch,
04:36of course, throughout the day to continue monitoring everything that has to do with the electoral process
04:41in Brazil.
