By making it official this Monday (30), the governor of Goiás, revives a dispute that has already taken place in the past: in 1989, at the age of 40, he also ran for the position — and had (PT), at the time aged 44, as one of his opponents.
Caiado’s poor performance in the electoral polls in a debate shown by TV Band before the first round.
At the time, Lula needed to ask a candidate a question and chose Paulo Maluf to answer. Caiado then interrupted him and asked Lula to ask him the question. The PT member replied: “when you grow up, I’ll do it.” And, looking at the debate mediator, he said: “When it reaches 1.5%, I’ll do it.”
In that election, Caiado finished in tenth place, with 0.72% of the votes.
At the time, the now governor was still little known outside of Goiás and, with a strong Goiás accent, defended himself on television by saying he was “confused”, in the big cities, as “the candidate from the interior”. The 1989 election was won by , who defeated Lula in the second round.
Now, 37 years later, Caiado once again shares the platform with Lula and, this time, also with (). In, the governor, when speaking of Flávio, said that “the impetus of young people is not enough” and that “you cannot govern by arm wrestling”. According to the latest Datafolha, Caiado has 4% of voting intentions in the first round with the PT and Bolsonarists.
Caiado’s candidacy was announced at the headquarters, in São Paulo, by the party’s president, Gilberto Kassab. The governor was competing for the party’s endorsement with the governor of Paraná, Ratinho Junior, who withdrew from running, and with Eduardo Leite, from Rio Grande do Sul. Leite criticized the choice, arguing that it “tends to maintain this environment of radicalized polarization that limits our country so much.”
A doctor with a long history in Congress — five terms as a federal deputy and one as a senator —, Caiado arrived at the Goiás Executive in 2018 and was re-elected in 2022. He left União Brasil in January of this year after failing to obtain support for his presidential candidacy and migrated to the PSD.
Despite having distanced himself from Jair Bolsonaro during the Covid-19 pandemic, Caiado reconnected with the former president hoping to receive his support. This Monday, he promised that his first act as president would be to grant amnesty to Bolsonaro, currently imprisoned at home after being convicted of an attempted coup d’état.
