by Céli Pinto
We usually say that in general elections, we’re choosing a president, governors and lawmakers for the next four years. That much seems obvious. But in this election, with the first round on October 4 and the runoff on October 25, we’re not just choosing who governs. We’re choosing the country’s future for decades to come.
Brazilian electronic voting machine (Fernando Frazão/Agência Brasil)
This isn’t a choice between candidate A and candidate B. It’s a choice between a sharp lurch toward colonized totalitarianism and the survival of democracy. Every voter needs to have this clearly in mind. We are responsible for this country’s future. Future generations will blame us, and rightly so, if we fail and Brazil is handed over to colonizer vultures.
Voters, whether or not they are politically active, whether they are young, middle-aged or elderly, have plenty of issues with the current government. It’s true the government could have done more, particularly if it didn’t have a Congress dedicated almost exclusively to serving its own interests. Even so, the government accomplished a great deal. It did this not despite Congress, but because Congress exists. That made it possible to negotiate with lawmakers and to pressure them through the press and social media.
We can only keep doing that if we also fight to change how Congress does politics. Everyone who wants to speak must be free to speak. Everyone must be free to fight politically. Institutions must be able to investigate, and to be investigated in turn. That means guaranteeing elections that are completely free and fair. None of this is possible unless we secure the survival of democracy, problems and all.
Voters, activists, young, middle-aged and elderly people all have good reason to be frustrated with the Supreme Court. There is a glaring indecency in the conduct of this group of mostly older men, all of them white. As for the court’s only woman, who is conservative, there hasn’t been a single incident involving her conduct as a public official.
But we live in a democracy. The only reason we weren’t overrun by the attempt to sabotage the 2022 election, and later by the attempt to pardon the military officers and their allies behind a heavily armed coup, is that the Superior Electoral Court and the Supreme Court exist. And the only reason we even know what’s happening now is that we live in a democracy, where everything can come to light.
The Trump administration is deepening its imperialist policy to alarming levels, even for those of us who have always understood the United States’ colonial ethos. This current phase of capitalism has abandoned even its weak pretense of democratic values. It now advances unbridled on the autonomy and sovereignty of countries in the Global South, especially in Latin America.
When President Lula said, in his address at the opening session of the U.N. General Assembly, that “Brazil doesn’t fit in anyone’s backyard,” he knew exactly what he was saying. Like many of us, he knows that a plot against Brazilian sovereignty is being assembled, led by the Bolsonaro family and its most obvious financial backers. Everyone involved would be pardoned if the worst were to happen, and the country would be driven into misery and excess.
This is a moment of absolute gravity. Circumstances like these have to be confronted directly, without half measures. If Lula wins the election, paradise won’t arrive overnight. Many people will keep facing frustrations. But I can assure you of this: no one will take the food out of people’s mouths, or the roof from over their heads, their universal right to public health through the Unified Public Health System (Brazil’s Sistema Único de Saúde, or SUS), or free medications, or the economic and racial quotas in education and public sector hiring.
If Lula wins, Brazil won’t magically become a country free of violence. Men won’t stop killing women in the senseless way they do today. But you can be certain that fewer poor, Black youth will die, and that police will be held accountable more often for mass killings.
The government will keep fighting organized crime, as it does now, by cutting off criminal factions’ money and arresting their leaders, including the politicians among them. There won’t be spectacular massacres like the one carried out by a police force whose state governor stands accused of colluding with the commanders responsible for the 122 deaths in October 2025 in Rio de Janeiro’s Complexo do Alemão favela.
Voting for Lula in this election isn’t voting for a myth or a national savior. It’s voting for the certainty that we can keep living our lives, keep fighting to improve them, and keep the power to criticize, to protest and to have a truly free press.
Voting for Lula means putting a stop to the sharp lurch toward a brutal, violent, lawless totalitarianism. It means stopping a world where rights that people fought hard to win can be stripped away with the stroke of a pen, and where violence becomes the guiding principle in relations between authorities and the people. It means preventing a world where there’s license to be misogynistic, racist, homophobic and transphobic, all in the name of a God or a Jesus Christ who denies every idea of equality and justice.
So we face a choice. On one side is the survival of democracy, where we’ll still have room to fight for a country that is more just, more equal and more free. On the other side is a dystopian chaos of truly tragic proportions.
We have never been in as much danger as we are now, despite all the risks this country has already lived through in its history.
Céli Pinto is a writer and doctor emeritus at Rio Grande do Sul Federal University. She has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Essex and has worked as a researcher at UCLA, Free University of Berlin and Oxford.
This article was originally published in Sul21. It has been translated to English by Panamerican Dispatch and can be read in its original Portuguese, here.