The rally they were separated by 24 hours, 30 miles, and an apparent gap in enthusiasm between the two crowds. A few weeks ago in Brazil, I attended campaign events for both President Jair Bolsonaro and the leader in the polls, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and also met a variety of figures from politics, business, and the military. The bottom line: This election remains unpredictable in many ways, and may already be closer than some polls suggest.
Bolsonaro’s event, held on Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana beach on September 7, was the more closely watched of the two rallies, given concerns that the President is using Brazil’s independence bicentennial celebrations to stage a new attack on its democratic institutions.
In the end there was no blow, but there was plenty of spectacle: the Air Force’s ‘Smoke Squadron’ made dramatic low-altitude flyovers, trailing the blue, yellow and green colors of the Brazilian flag, paratroopers parachuted onto the sand , and the historic Fort of Copacabana fired a cannon shot every hour, thrilling the crowd.
Military officials publicly and privately insisted that none of this was intended as a partisan show of support for Bolsonaro. But the public clearly believed otherwise, and that may be significant in the coming weeks. “It’s so good!” gushed Milton Garcia, a 38-year-old man who brought his children to the rally, dressed in T-shirts in support of the “God, country, family” campaign and “The Armed Forces are on the side of the good”.
(Keep reading: A mud house: place of the beginning of the political career of Lula da Silva).
I have written elsewhere that I think Bolsonaro will do everything in his power to avoid giving Lula the presidency, including forcing an institutional crisis if he loses the vote in October.
Military officials publicly and privately insisted that none of this was intended as a partisan show of support for Bolsonaro. But the public clearly believed otherwise.
What struck me most at the event, as I spent five hours talking to Bolsonaro supporters, was their almost unanimous belief that “the coup has already begun,” and it is the other side that is acting in an anti-democratic manner. In his opinion, Bolsonaro is the victim of a conspiracy by Brazil’s “leftist” institutions, particularly the Supreme Court.
“We are not on the side of Venezuela or on the side of Nicaragua,” Bolsonaro told the crowd. “It is the other side… that does not respect the Constitution,” he added. The potential next step is obvious from this narrative: if the left has already sabotaged democracy, then anything Bolsonaro does after the election is justified, including refusing to recognize the result. Whether it will come to that remains uncertain. Just about everywhere I went, I heard optimism about the economy. Vendors, bankers, workers and, yes, even some people at Lula’s rally said things seemed to be moving in the right direction.
To be sure, there is still unacceptable misery in Brazil, a legacy of a decade of economic stagnation and, more recently, of the pandemic. Hunger is estimated to affect 33 million Brazilians and homelessness is highly visible in major cities. But now, GDP is expected to grow 2.5% in 2022, much better than the average forecast of 0.3% at the beginning of the year.
(You may be interested in: María Belén Bernal: What is known about the feminicide of the lawyer in Ecuador).
Inflation, to which Brazilian voters are historically very sensitive, has dipped below 10% again, while unemployment is at an all-time low, the lowest level since 2015. This is no miracle: Bolsonaro has flooded the economy with stimulus and subsidies, at the cost of likely future growth. But that’s an election-year game that Lula and his Workers’ Party (PT) used to play too, and it’s one of the reasons a sitting president has never lost an election in Brazil.
The polls
Many polls suggest that Bolsonaro is, in fact, slowly closing the gap, though he remains six to 15 percentage points behind Lula as the first round of voting on October 2 (a runoff, if any) fast approaches. necessary, it would occur on October 30).
The major polls have a pretty good track record in Brazil. So I was surprised to hear serious people raise doubts this time. An executive of a polling company told me that he believes the margin could be only half of what his own company’s poll shows, due in part to Bolsonarists hiding their true intentions from institutions that believe they they are biased.
Hunger is estimated to affect 33 million Brazilians and homelessness is highly visible in major cities
Another problem: there has been no census in Brazil since 2010 and this has been delayed due to the pandemic. That means that for two critical demographic groups, those earning less than two minimum wages per month (Lula’s base) and evangelical Christians (Bolsonaro’s base), pollsters are essentially blind when it comes to weighing their importance in the overall sample. .
Polls earlier this year in Chile’s recent constitutional plebiscite and Colombia’s presidential runoff were inaccurate, possibly for similar reasons. In the meantime, we are left to rely on our eyes and ears.
(Be sure to read: Cuba thanks Colombia for its request to remove it from the US terrorism list).
Which brings me to Lula’s event. It happened on the side of a highway in Nova Iguaçu, a working-class industrial suburb of Rio. I have attended probably two dozen PT campaign rallies over the years as a reporter and columnist, going back to 2006. This seemed to me the least energetic and the most tense.
Part of the crowd was searched upon entering and enclosed by tall metal barricades. The people on stage were mostly the same PT leaders from the 2010s and even the 2000s: Aloízio Mercadante, Benedita da Silva, Gleisi Hoffman… even former President Dilma Rousseff, whom many voters still blame for the economic crisis of the mid-2010s, was in attendance. Lula spoke well, as he almost always does. But the crowd seemed curiously mute, as if she were watching a television show they had seen before. Which? Does it matter? I’m not sure.
Much of Lula’s working-class base is too busy to attend a 5 pm event on a Thursday. Rio has always been challenging territory for the PT. If Bolsonaro gave a more entertaining and better attended party, well, he did it on a federal holiday, on the postcard beach of Brazil, with all the budgetary power of the Armed Forces behind him.
(Before leaving: Chile: the revelations of the hacked documents of the military high command).
And as is often the case in Brazil today, there is a possible parallel with the United States. Throughout the 2020 campaign, it was Donald Trump who had by far the biggest and most spectacular campaign events, while Joe Biden was famous for “hiding in his basement.” But Biden won anyway, as voters chose the unexciting but familiar candidate who represented a certain return to normalcy.
Most Trump supporters simply couldn’t believe the result and many refused to accept it. We will soon know if that history also repeats itself.
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BRIAN WINTER
Americas Quarterly
(Rio de Janeiro / Nova Iguacu)
Editor-in-Chief of Americas Quarterly and Vice President for Policy of the Americas Society/Council of the Americas. A best-selling author, analyst, and speaker, he has been living and breathing Latin American politics for the past 20 years.
Lula would win in a possible second round
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