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RIO DE JANEIRO: "If regret killed, I'd already be dead," says Brazilian Reginaldo Gomes, who campaigned for President Jair Bolsonaro in 2018, but is now calling for a Lula vote on social networks.
Four years ago, this rodeo announcer from Juazeiro, in the northeastern state of Bahia, didn't hesitate to spend 5,000 reais (around 1,200 euros at the time) to have t-shirts made bearing the effigy of Jair Bolsonaro during the campaign.
Today, he bitterly regrets having voted for the far-right politician.
"He's an inhuman, heartless being, who only talks rubbish," the 50-year-old mixed-race man, who had voted for Lula in the past, before becoming disillusioned by the corruption scandals that splashed the left, told AFP.
"I used to call Lula a thief, but I hope to be able to see him one day to ask his forgiveness in person for voting Bolsonaro," he says in his stentorian voice in a video viewed over 300,000 times on TikTok.
Reginaldo Gomes has a particular grudge against the outgoing president for downplaying Covid, a "flu" that killed 686,000 Brazilians, while ironizing about the side effects of vaccines, which can turn people into "crocodiles" or "bearded women".
"Macho and narcissistic"
Elected with 55% of the vote in the 2018 run-off, Jair Bolsonaro, is well ahead in the polls of leftist ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
The latest poll by the benchmark Datafolha institute credits the far-right president with 33% of voting intentions, against 47% for Lula.
"Voting Bolsonaro was the worst bullshit of my life," says Carlos Eduardo de Souza, a 51-year-old bricklayer who lives in Rio de Janeiro. "I feel like a repentant husband after going elsewhere thinking everything would be better," he confides.
Carlos Eduardo, who has a transgender daughter, is particularly up in arms about Mr. Bolsonaro's many homophobic blunders. "She did warn me (in 2018), but I was blind," he admits.
The same is true of Joana Alenso, 41, who was born in Brazil but grew up in Venezuela, a country with a socialist regime reviled by the far-right president.
This psychologist has since returned to her native Rio de Janeiro, fleeing the economic crisis and shortages like many of her compatriots.
Four years ago, she voted Bolsonaro, but mostly against Lula's Workers' Party (PT), which maintained close ties with Hugo Chavez in the 2000s.
"As a Venezuelan, I couldn't vote for the PT. But now I've decided to take my Brazilian side into account and I'll be voting Lula. I can't support a macho, narcissistic, rude guy" like Jair Bolsonaro.
"Nostalgia"
This anti-Bolsonist sentiment led many voters to choose Lula, hoping to dislodge the far right by electing the former trade unionist in the first round.
"Bolsonaro's rejection rate (52%) is higher than the voting intentions for Lula in the first round (47%)", points out Adriano Laureno, political analyst at the consulting firm Prospectiva. Not to mention "nostalgia for the Lula government, when social advances were more important than under Bolsonaro".
But the left-wing ex-president also has his share of repentant former voters, like Paulo Ferreira, a 70-year-old retiree and former employee of the state oil company Petrobras.
"The PT is a criminal organization, which dismantled Petrobras. Impossible to vote for them," he says.
Matheus Fernandes, a VTC driver from Lula's home state of Pernambuco, chose to vote blank. "I'd rather be shot than vote for Lula or Bolsonaro. It would go against my principles," sums up the 27-year-old.
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WASHINGTON: The head of US diplomacy, Antony Blinken, will visit China on February 5 and 6, a US official confirmed on Tuesday.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the US Secretary of State would arrive on the 5th and also hold talks on the 6th during this trip designed to try and ease tensions with the USA's main diplomatic and economic adversary.
Mr. Blinken's trip, which will be the first at this level since 2018, had been announced in November by the White House, but the dates had not been officially communicated.
It will take place despite concerns about the Covid-19 pandemic in China.
Speaking at a press briefing on Tuesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin welcomed Mr. Blinken's upcoming visit to China, stressing that "the US and China are communicating on the details" of the visit.
"China pursues U.S.-China relations based on the three principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation", he added, saying he hoped the two countries would "get back on track with a relationship that is healthy and stable".
Taiwan, North Korea, the South China Sea, semi-conductors: there are plenty of contentious issues at a time when Washington has made China its long-term strategic priority.
At the end of December, the head of US diplomacy declared that he would ask Beijing to push North Korea to take part in negotiations.
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MADRID: France and Spain, who have just resolved one of their rare disagreements, will be celebrating the closeness of their relations with great fanfare in Barcelona on Thursday. This rapprochement with Spain's southern neighbor comes against the backdrop of a stalled Franco-German dialogue. 
While a massive mobilization of trade unions is expected in France against pension reform, French President Emmanuel Macron and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez will sign a friendship treaty designed to strengthen cooperation between the two countries in a wide range of areas. 
This treaty is only the third of its kind signed in Europe by France, after the Elysée Treaty, initialled in 1963 with Germany and completed by the Aachen Treaty in 2019, and the Quirinal Treaty, signed with Italy in November 2021. 
The signing comes three months after an agreement between the two countries and Portugal to bury the "Midcat" gas pipeline project, opposed by Paris, and replace it with a "green" hydrogen pipeline linking Barcelona to Marseille. 
"Barcelona has been chosen" to celebrate the "friendship and cooperation" between the two countries, "because it will be at the center of this strategic project", explained Spanish government spokeswoman Isabel Rodríguez recently. 
Supported by Germany, Spain wanted to relaunch the Midcat project to transport gas from its numerous LNG terminals via France to Northern Europe, which was facing a halt in Russian gas deliveries. 
But the energy crisis didn't allow Spain's left-wing government to change Paris' mind. 
Supported by Brussels, the two countries finally agreed on the "H2Med" project, a pipeline to transport hydrogen produced from renewable electricity from the Iberian peninsula, which aims to become a champion of this energy of the future, to the north of the EU via France. 
Operational by 2030, if the schedule is adhered to, the project, launched with great fanfare in early December, is expected to cost around 2.5 billion euros. 
"Assuming" disagreements with Berlin 
Like the Quirinal Treaty, the ultimate aim of the Barcelona Treaty is to set in stone the strengthening of Paris's relations with neighbors other than Germany. 
However, the Quirinal Treaty did not prevent the emergence of high tensions between Paris and Rome last November, almost a year after it was signed, due to the new Italian government's refusal to take in several hundred migrants stranded off the Italian coast. 
"We've waited far too long to bring our differences with Germany out into the open," said a member of the French presidential party, Renaissance, recently on condition of anonymity. 
This has led to "many missed opportunities in 30 years with other European countries on certain subjects, in the name of the relationship with Berlin". 
From now on, "we'll be taking on more of these disagreements and building partnerships with other countries" in southern Europe, he added, referring to the Quirinal Treaty and France's close relations with Spain and Greece. 
Relations between Paris and Berlin have recently suffered from a number of disputes, ranging from energy to defense, leading to the postponement of the Franco-German Council of Ministers scheduled for late October. 
Tensions have since eased, and the council will take place on January 22 in Paris, a symbolic date coinciding with the sixtieth anniversary of the Elysée Treaty. 
Independence demonstration 
Beyond the future green hydrogen pipeline, Pedro Sánchez chose Barcelona for this summit in an attempt to show that the situation had calmed down in Catalonia, the northeastern region of Spain that was the scene of an attempted secession in 2017. 
Having come to power in 2018, Mr. Sánchez, a socialist, has made this appeasement one of his top priorities. He has resumed dialogue with part of the pro-independence faction that supports his executive in Parliament, and in 2021 pardoned separatist leaders sentenced to prison for their role in the events of 2017. 
But while the region's pro-independence president, Pere Aragonès, will be taking part in the summit, his party and other separatist organizations will be demonstrating outside at the same time against its celebration. 
"No colonial state will be the tomb of our nation," the pro-independence ANC launched on Twitter. 
 
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TEHERAN: A German national was arrested in southwest Iran while taking photos of an oil site, local media reported on Tuesday.
"A German citizen was arrested while taking photos of oil installations in the city of Omidieh," reported the website of Jam-é Jam, a state TV daily, which would not reveal his identity or the date of his arrest.
Omidieh is located in the Khouzestan province, home to Iran's main oil fields.
Iran has been rocked by protests since the death on September 16 of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, following her arrest by the morality police for allegedly violating the dress code for women.
Iran has sparked a wave of international outrage after announcing several executions, including that last Saturday of a former official, the Iranian-British Alireza Akbari, sentenced to death for spying for British intelligence services.
An Iranian-German dissident, Jamshid Sharmahd, arrested in August 2020 in a Gulf country, faces the death penalty after being accused by the Iranian judiciary of involvement in a 2008 attack.
German-Iranian human rights activist Nahid Taghavi, 67, was sentenced to 10 years and 8 months in prison after her arrest in October 2020, for membership of an illegal group and propaganda against the Islamic Republic.
On January 10, the Iranian judiciary announced that a Belgian aid worker, arrested almost a year ago in Iran, would have to serve 12 and a half years of a total sentence of 40 years.

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