The governor of Minas Gerais, (Novo), minimized this Thursday (15) the results of the results released the previous day, which showed him far from the first placed in this year’s presidential campaign.
When asked by Sheet on the topic, he said he was “very happy” with the results of the research.
“Eight years ago, when I started my campaign [para governador] in Minas, my number was ten times smaller than that. I’m not afraid of small numbers, I’m afraid of those who don’t work, don’t make good deliveries”, he told journalists after an event organized by Cemig in Serra da Saudade, the least populous municipality in Brazil.
“During my 2018 campaign, I went to over 200 different cities and [agora] It’s a matter of us traveling around Brazil and showing that we have proposals that are what Brazilians want: combating corruption and providing transparency to everything that government officials spend”, he stated.
He also mentioned documents secrecy orders in the government () and said that “in Minas we show everything” and in Brasília “only in a hundred years”. “Here we don’t have a corruption scandal, nor incompetent people in government, which is what doesn’t seem to be missing in Brasília. So, as we show this, these numbers should change,” he added.
The survey carried out by Genial/Quaest shows that, in a possible second round in October, he would receive 31% of the votes, against 46% for Lula. In this case, the proportion of those who do not vote or vote blank or invalid would be 19% and those who are undecided, 4%. Zema added two percentage points less than in December, within the margin of error of two percentage points.
According to the survey, the right-wing candidate best placed numerically in a possible second round would be the governor of , (Republicans). In a dispute with Lula, he appears with 39%, against 44% for the current president. The senator (PL), son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, has 38%, against 45% for Lula.
Numerically, Zema appears with lower percentages than those of the governor of Paraná, Ratinho Jr. (PSD), and the governor of Goiás, (). In first round simulations, Minas Gerais scored between 2% and 5%, depending on the opponents.
In 2018, when he won the race for state government, Zema surprised in the final stretch of the first round. At the time, the growth of the campaign meant that the then governor, Fernando Pimentel (PT), was left out of the second round. In the second vote, the victory was over the former governor and current minister of the (Union Audit Court) Antonio Anastasia, then affiliated with the PSDB.
The reporter traveled at the invitation of Cemig
