Will Lula da Silva run for presidential elections in 2022?

Former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said on Wednesday that he will define whether he will run for the next presidential elections between “February and March” 2022.

“This is not the time to prioritize the 2022 elections. We are still recovering from a pandemic that claimed the lives of more than 600,000 people and left thousands of orphans.” in Brazil, said the leader of the Workers’ Party (PT) in the interview with the radio “A Tarde de Salvador”.

The progressive former president, who ruled Brazil between 2003 and 2010, also lamented that “hunger” and “unemployment” are “punishing the life of the Brazilian people.”

“I will define the candidacy towards February / March,” he declared.

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All the opinion polls released to date place Lula as the top favorite for the presidential elections in October 2022. The former president recovered his political rights this year after the Justice annulled the two convictions for corruption that weighed against him.

The current head of state, the far-right Jair Bolsonaro, also intends to present himself at those elections, whose popularity has plummeted in recent months due to the serious health and economic crisis caused by covid-19.

Although he still maintains the mystery about his candidacy, which would be his seventh at almost 76 years of age, Lula traveled to Brasilia earlier this month to meet with leaders of different political parties in search of possible alliances for the elections.

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This Wednesday, the former president guaranteed that “they will work to build the union of progressive sectors.”

“I am a defender of the idea that it is normal for each party to want its candidate, but progressive sectors can unify around the construction of a program that prioritizes the social issue”, he stated.

However, that union seems still far away after the latest scuffles between the Brazilian Labor leader Ciro Gomes, who was a presidential candidate in 2018, and several PT leaders, including Lula and his successor in the Presidency, Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016 ). (I)