A second bulletin released by the PT Election Commission on its internal election which took place on Sunday (September 18) reports that Ricardo Berzoini, of the Campo Majoritário (Majority Field) faction, continues to lead in the race for the presidency of the party with 42.8% of a total of 201,096 votes counted.
The party has a total of over 820,000 members who are eligible to vote. However, the election needs the votes of only 15% of eligible voters to be valid. The commission reports that more than 15% have already voted.
At 8:00 pm last night, the situation of the other candidates was as follows: Valter Pomar (Articulação de Esquerda), 17%; Plínio de Arruda Sampaio (Ação Popular Socialista), 13.4%; Raul Pont (Democracia Socialista), 12.7%; Maria do Rosário (Movimento PT), 12%; Markus Sokol (O Trabalho), 1.4%; and Luís Gonzaga da Silva, aka Gegê (Movimentos Populares), 0.6%.
Ricardo Berzoini who is the general secretary of the PT, said that Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva demonstrated sincerity in his latest speech to the nation, last week, at the opening of the 11st ministerial meeting of his mandate.
For Berzoini, the fact that Lula affirmed that he felt betrayed “means that he is being sincere when addressing the Brazilian people and, particularly, those who voted for him in 2002”.
The secretary added that there are no evidence linking the President to the charges being investigated and that is necessary to have “a lot of responsibility” on the hypothesis of opening impeachment procedures against Lula as suggested by the opposition.
Berzoini admitted though that this is a constitutional possibility: “The matter involves, fundamentally, the country’s rule of the law and should be complied with within the legal frame with responsibility, without precipitation and without any kind of institutional crisis”.
Agência Brasil
