October 1 is election day in Brazil and the most important race this year will be for president. Right now it looks like Lula will win re-election in the first round, beating the conservative candidate Geraldo Alckmin, but the real balance of power will be decided by congressional seats. Lula's party (PT) probably won't do so well due to a corruption scandal that seriously destroyed their credibility last year. It's a sign of Lula's popularity that he can recover from such a large-scale crisis with the majority of the electorate still preferring him to the conservative alternative.

The sad thing is that there was a lot of optimism for change attached to Lula when he was elected in a landslide victory in 2002. An uneducated, unionist leader from Brazil's impoverished Northeast, Lula was the complete opposite of the elitist string of previous presidents. So imagine the disappointment when it was discovered that his political party turned out to be just as corrupt as many other parties and politicians in Brazilian history.

Fortunately for him, there is no evidence that Lula was connected to 2005's corruption scandals, but that didn't stop it from fueling the fire of his enemies. (If the U.S. is bitterly divided between Republicans and Democrats, Brazil is bitterly divided between the rich and the poor. Lula represents the poor.)

Whether Lula is personally guilty no one can know, but the frustrating part is that this scandal overshadows of a lot of his achievements during his first term. Before moving to Brazil I took my parents to see João Moreira Salles' in-depth 2004 documentary Entreatos, which followed Lula around while campaigning for election. My parents, who knew very little about "South America" (let alone "South American politics"), were comforted by the portrait of a politician who seemed to play against the stereotype of Latin American leaders as radical, ego-centric, power-hungry men full of a lot of empty rhetoric.

In anticipation of the big day, we've been bombarded by countless political ads for a dizzying amount of candidates (there are many positions at stake), a lot of which have amusingly low production values. A friend of mine asked me if we had political ads in the United States, and I said yes. Then she asked if they looked as sophisticated as high school students running for class president. She's right: a lot of the commercials are so amateur, it's unbelievable.