Brian Winter on CNN about How Lula Won Brazil's Election
Brian Winter on CNN about How Lula Won Brazil's Election
While Lula is a man of the left, "it's also fair to say that he tacked to the right on many issues in order to win," said the AS/COA vice president.
Brian Winter, vice president of Policy at Americas Society/Council of the Americas and editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly, was interviewed by Fareed Zakaria on CNN's program GPS about how Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won Brazil's presidential election and what comes next for him.
Zakaria said that he couldn't remember ever hearing of a case where the person who lost the first round of an election pretty handily manages to swing ten million voters and wins the second round. "We were all surprised, Fareed," said Winter. "There had never been a comeback like this in Brazilian modern democratic history, very rare in Latin America. And I can tell you that even people in Lula's campaign were surprised, not only by the fact that they won, but by a relatively large margin of four million votes."
"How did he do it?" asked Zakaria.
"There was no single cause, but if you had to highlight one reason, it would be these things. It would be smartphones," said Winter. "Prior to the first round, you had an 80-year-old candidate who was running for reelection who was not really connecting with the masses in the way that he did during his first two terms, twenty years ago, during the 2000s. After they lost that first round, Lula surrounded himself with younger aides and essentially gave them carte blanche to do what they wanted on social media."
