Brazil: A “de-mediated” election

The official campaign for the presidency of Brazil kicked off in August. The October election will most likely come down to a contest between the current president, the right-wing Jair Bolsonaro (known in many circles as the “Brazilian Trump”), and the Workers Party (PT) candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known popularly as Lula. This article, originally appearing in the Uruguayan newspaper Brecha and reprinted by Correspondencia de Prensa, provides a preview of what is likely to be a nasty and hard-fought campaign. As Trump did in the U.S. in 2020, Bolsonaro has already threatened not to accept the results if he loses to Lula, as polls suggest he will. The ISP translated this article to English.

On August 16, the presidential election campaign formally began in Brazil. In reality, August 16 marked the official start of the period when candidates can ask people for their vote. Free radio and television ads begin on August 26 and the first presidential debate is set for August 28. Lula has already confirmed that he will attend the debate, but Bolsonaro has not yet officially confirmed. But Bolsonaro has said that he will indeed participate in the debates, unlike what he did in 2018. The first poll, commissioned by TV Globo, showed Lula in the lead with 44 percent, with Bolsonaro only winning 32 percent. These results leave open the possibility that Lula could win the first round if he wins more than 50 percent of the vote. In case of a second round, the poll gives 51 percent to Lula and 35 to Bolsonaro.

From setback to setback

On Tuesday night the new president of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), Alexandre de Moraes, was sworn in. The ceremony, which is usually a mere formality, was this time a political powder keg. During his speech, De Moraes praised electronic voting machines and the Brazilian electoral system as a guarantee of democracy. Everyone in the room applauded, except for the person sitting next to De Moraes: Bolsonaro. In the audience were, in addition, Lula, [former president Dilma Rousseff, impeached in 2016] and one of the main proponents of Rousseff’s impeachment: Michel Temer. De Moraesis a member of the Supreme Federal Court, leading the investigation on “fake news” and attacks on democracy that has focused on Bolsonaro’s entourage. So he is the perfect villain for Bolsonaro’s followers—the character they love to hate.

The appointment of De Moraes as head of the electoral authority was not the only strong and clear message Bolsonaro received these days. On August 11, in a massive event at the University of São Paulo Law School, the “Letter to Brazilians in Defense of the Democratic Rule of Law,” signed by more than 1 million people, was read. The widely publicized event recalled the reading of the 1977 “Letter to Brazilians,”protesting the then-governing military dictatorship. The open letter responds to the constant attacks from Bolsonaro and his followers—including sectors of the Armed Forces—against electronic voting and the electoral system.

The August 11 event takes place in the shadow the right’s events on September 7, planned to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the country’s independence. Bolsonaro’s followers have treated this national holiday as “D-Day”using it to promote disguised or blatant coup threats.

Deception machine

“É fake”(“It’s fake”) has become a commonly used expression in Brazil. Luciana Panke, a doctorate in communications and researcher at the Federal University of Paraná and vice-president of the Latin American Association of Researchers in Electoral Campaigns said that “fake news by way of rumors are as old as politics. They were always used or were always present.But nowadays we see an amplification of this strategy through the Internet and the level of organization to spread these rumors, which is very advanced in Brazil”.

The most paradigmatic case is perhaps the 2018 election, in which news such as the “gay kit” and the penis-shaped bottles that the Workers Party (PT) had allegedly distributed in schools to “homosexualize” children were echoed in the population. The right-wing deluge was then at its peak. Visceral hatred of the PT dominated the public debate, and this made it possible for such absurd stories to be believed.

But it is not the relative decline of the anti-PT wave that will make fake news disappear. State institutions had to take concrete measures, not stand aside from the controversy. The TSE relaunched this year the Program for Confronting Disinformation, created in 2019, to which Google, Telegram, Whatsapp, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have submitted. But the initiative that has generated the most debate is the Supreme Court’s fake news investigation that De Moraes launched three years ago. Those who support it say that it has pointed out those directly responsible for disseminating and financing such false information. Some specialists, on the other hand, have called attention to a certain bias in its processes and in its calls for imprisonment. And Bolsonaro and his followers shoot at it 24 hours a day.

Since earlier in August, a rumor circulating among many evangelical faithful warns that, in the event of his eventual victory, Lula would close the churches. On Saturday, during the March for Jesus, in Rio, the Assembly of God pastor and federal congressman Marco Feliciano admitted to CBN radio that he spreads this “alert” among his followers.

Pablo Ortellado, coordinator of the Monitor of Political Debate in the Digital Media and professor at the University of São Paulo, told Brecha that the scenario is both like and unlike the situation in 2018. “What is similar is that several problems remain. The most serious case is Whatsapp, which allows the distribution of viral messages to become massive without us knowing who started it. This is practically an invitation to foul play.” What is new for Ortellado is that “from the TSE there was an improvement in the action regarding this phenomenon, and the court now has its own team, well trained to deal with disinformation. Some companies are very active, such as Whatsapp itself, which, despite not solving the main problem, has a team dedicated to monitoring fake news”.

The art of alliances

Since his “Letter to the Brazilian People” in 2002, when he reassured the financial markets ahead of his election as president, Lula has sought to present himself as a bulwark of social peace. Today, as it was 20 years ago, the context is repeated: the need to rebuild the country. But this time, there is a different component that brings it closer to that of the 1984 campaign for direct elections: the need to vindicate democracy. Panke told Brecha: “In Lula, we see in his speeches a return to themes like the fight against hunger, that he has used since the beginning of his public life. He takes it up again now, in a critical moment in which, together with the fight against misery, he appeals to the idea that it is necessary to become a democratic country again”.

This search for an image of democratic conciliation can be seen in his alliances. The first officially announced alliance was with his vice-presidential candidate, the former conservative governor of Sao Paulo, Geraldo Alckmin, once his rival in the 2006 presidential elections. Alckmin seems to be a reassuring figure for the business, centrist or even non-Bolsonarist right-wing sectors.

Now the former president has won another unexpected alliance: the federal deputy André Janones. A PT supporter between 2003 and 2015, Janones had distanced himself from the party and had gained notoriety as a leader of the 2018 truckers’ strike. In April of that year, his name had gone viral for not knowing what the president of Argentina’s name was, but four months later he would be elected to the Lower House at the head of his own party, Avante. An evangelical Christian and close to that sector of the electorate, he is the federal deputy with the largest number of social media followers. Janones was also one of the main defenders of Auxilio Brasil, the pandemic social program for income support directed to the poorest families. Bolsonaro is trying to capitalize on the popularity of that program to boost his own reelection chances. Passing this program through Congress was an arduous task, and Janones played a decisive role.

The leader of Avante had positioned himself this year as a candidate for the presidency. Butin August, he announced that he was stepping down to support Lula’s candidacy. He is expected to lead the PT response to the official narrative about Auxilio Brasil. “For Lula it’s a golazo” (or “a home run” in U.S. slang), said Marta Arretche, a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of São Paulo.

In the digital ecosystem, another fundamental support for the PT leader is from the very famous singer Anitta, a sales record holder in her country, number 1 this year in the world ranking on Spotify platform and with triple the followers on Instagram and double the followers on Twitter than Bolsonaro has. “Lula’s and Bolsonaro’s personal accounts have many followers, but they are nothing compared to the influencers, blogs and digital media that support them. In Lula’s case there is a large troop of intellectuals, Brazilian popular musicians and actors, and Anitta is one more of that group. Bolsonaro, however, also has many supporters and has the backing of celebrities from sertanejo (similarto country music in the U.S.) and soccer, for example,” says Ortellado.

Broken record

The fact that the current president and candidate for reelection started his campaign is an understatement. The truth is that he has never stopped campaigning since he took office, and his performance at the head of the government during these four years was always guided by the search for reelection. At no time did he stop speaking for his hard core of supporters, and he dedicated endless hours of his working hours to tour the country in the so-called motociatas, motorcycle marches accompanied by his most radical bases. For Panke, “Bolsonaro’s rhetoric follows the same logic since 2018: trying to create confusion all the time.He repeatedly says: “You are exaggerating, that’s not exactly what I meant”, and his message is that of 2018: fight corruption and defend the traditional family and God.”

The slight improvement of some economic indicators as the election draws near hasn’t changed the population’s dismal standard of living. According to a study the Brazilian Research Network on Food and Nutritional Sovereignty conducted between November and April, hunger doubled in the last two years. More than 33 million Brazilians (15 percent of the population) go hungry. Six out of ten are food insecure.

With these negatives dragging on Bolsonaro, his entourage is left to appeal on social media to the fear and threat of the return of the PT and “the ex-convict” Lula. [Note: In 2018, right-wing prosecutors won conviction of Lula, imprisoning him on trumped-up charges of corruption and money laundering. The Supreme Federal Court threw out the charges in 2019 and released Lula from prison and allowed him to run for office again.] There are frequent mentions—even in the president’s official accounts—of communism, Nicaragua, Venezuela, the ghosts of abortion and the legalization of drugs. A possible prison sentence if he is not reelected—something he himself has referred to on several occasions—keeps Bolsonaro awake at night. The president has already announced to the world—in a July meeting to which he summoned all foreign ambassadors—that he does not believe in the electoral system that elected him so many times. And this increases uncertainty about what will happen in October, when, if the polls are correct, voters will put his main rival at the head of the republic.