Lula is the next Brazil President and it may decide the fate of the planet. Here's how

Brazil's former leftist President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva aka Lula, has made quite an astonishing political comeback and has won the Brazil's 2022 elections.

Close competition: With strong campaigns from both sides, experts were expecting a close fight between Lula and Jair Bolsonaro from the beginning. The results were announced on Sunday, and Lula won the elections by a narrow margin of 1.8% (Lula: 50.9% votes and Bolsonaro: 49.1%).  

Who is Lula? 

Lula,77, is now known on every street and corner of Brazil. He was a former president who had won the Presidential elections of Brazil in 2002. His term as President ended after he ran for two consecutive terms. 

• According to the Time, during his term, the economic condition of Brazil boomed with a rise in exports and other forms of trade.  
• Before helping in the formation of his Leftist Worker's Party, Lula was the head of steel workers union in Sao Paulo in the 1970s.

However, Lula's reputation started plummeting when he was accused of corruption charges during his tenure and accepting bribes. For this, he was thrown into jail in 2018. (This was during the time of polls and Bolsonaro won that election). 

Lula never pleaded guilty to the charges and claimed it to be a 'plan of the opposition'. His accusation that it was all Opposition's plan got more weightage as the judge who gave imprisonment to Lula later became Bolsonaro's justice minister. 

However, after 580 days of imprisonment, the highest court in Brazil ruled out the previous judgment and freed him. 

Then what? Lula stood in the next possible election (this one) and won. 

BUT

Not everyone in Brazil believed in the innocence of Lula. A human right organisation's poll in September 2022, showed that 44% still believed that he was rightly punished for his corruption charges. 

Why Bolsonaro lost: Bolsonaro lost this election, as experts are predicting, due to his negligence for Covid which threw Brazil into an economic turmoil. 

Bolsonaro had said that Covid is nothing more than a 'little flu' which let to Brazilians going wild and partying with no respect for the Covid norms. This resulted in Brazil having one of the highest Covid deaths in the world. 

Is Lula's win good for our planet?

Apart from all the political turmoil Bolsonaro has caused, the one that created maximum trouble for the scientists and everyone else was his denial to protect the Amazon rainforest.  

In July 2022, reports showed that Amazon rainforest showed the highest deforestation rate in six years. 

• If deforestation continues at current rate, the Amazon will pass an irreversible threshold in just a decade or two, and release billions of tons of heat-trapping gases, scientists warned.
• That would accelerate a climate crisis that's already fueling dangerous extreme weather across the planet. 

In simple words, Bolsonaro promises to increase deforestation in the Amazon, while Lula promises to slow it down