The Irish Times view on the Brazilian election result

By narrowly electing Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva over far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro in Sunday’s presidential election, Brazilian voters have given their troubled democracy some desperately needed breathing space. Bolsonaro’s record during four years in office gave little reason to assume that the country’s current constitutional arrangements would have made it through a second term intact. Whatever else they achieve, Lula and the broad democratic front he assembled to eject the far-right from power will provide some institutional respite after four years of authoritarian menace.

Relief at the former left-wing president’s victory should not obscure just how close Bolsonaro came to securing a second term. His shameless and unconstitutional manipulation of the advantages of incumbency, allied to a sophisticated fake news operation run from within the presidential palace, almost delivered a victory that seemed unimaginable during most of his disastrous term. Now Lula must try and heal a nation scarred by the culture wars that Bolsonaro’s confrontational tactics stoked and whose state apparatus has in many areas been wrecked either out of ideological spite or to better allow unchecked economic pillage.

Nowhere was the latter dynamic more starkly illustrated than in the Amazon jungle. Under Bolsonaro, the regime for preserving the world’s largest rainforest and its indigenous inhabitants was dismantled as the region was declared open for exploitation by loggers, miners and agribusiness. What followed was inevitable – a series of burning seasons during which large swathes of a crucial planetary carbon sink go up in flames. The environmental destruction was accompanied by a wave of violence against the forest’s defenders, brought to world attention by the murders in June of Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips, the Brazilian indigenous expert and British journalist.

Lula faces many challenges when he is sworn in on New Year’s Day. Though not an immediate priority for most Brazilians, he has vowed to end the war on nature currently under way in the Amazon. The world must hope he keeps his word. Any chance of limiting global warming needs to see the Brazilian Amazon reverse its recent switch from being a planetary critical absorber of carbon to an emitter.

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The best way for Lula to achieve this would be to give his former environment minister Marina Silva a central role in his government’s efforts. She ran the most successful environmental protection regime in Brazil’s history and though the problem has spiralled dramatically since Bolsonaro came to power, it was her removal from Lula’s government in 2008 that marked a turn for the worse in the Amazon’s fortunes. Now the incoming president should rely on her leadership again and this time back her to the hilt.