Por Brian Mier
The massive size of Lula’s last dozen street rallies across the country, including a huge one on Augusta Avenue in São Paulo on Saturday, gave a lot of people hope that the polling information was wrong and that he was capable of getting the 50% +1 votes necessary to win the election in the first round. Needless to say, many people were disappointed, not only that this didn’t happen, but that he ended up losing to far right candidate Flávio Bolsonaro (whose vice presidential running mate, Álvaro Gaspar, is under investigation for allegedly raping a 13-year-old girl) by two points.
After the final results were tallied, I watched Lula’s speech in the press room of the Renaissance Hotel in Jardins, where he and his other allied candidates had watched the results. “I’ve run for president seven times, and I’ve been in runoff elections twice already,” he said. “I was in a runoff election with my friend Geraldo Alckmin, who is standing right next to me. Remember that, Geraldo? I’m not afraid of a runoff because I have already won two of them, and I know we can win this election on October 25.”
Lula went on to say that the key to winning the election will be to reach out to people who didn’t vote in the first round. In a country where voting is mandatory and people who don’t vote have to fill out annoying paperwork, 21% of Brazil’s 158 million registered voters did not show up at the polling stations yesterday. This is the highest number of abstentions since 1998, and there are already indications that in some places, low turnout may have been provoked deliberately to favor Flávio Bolsonaro.Watching Lula’s speech in the press room
Sunday afternoon, an old friend who lives in São Gonçalo, a Rio satellite city with a far-right government and a population of nearly 1 million, called me up to tell me that bus service had been altered on routes going through the favelas and poor neighborhoods. Apparently word got out that buses were taking people to the voting centers but weren’t running back through the neighborhoods. As Lula was ahead by a 2:1 ratio among working-class and poor voters in the polls, this could be a sign of a deliberate strategy to aid the Bolsonaro campaign.
In a paper circulating within the Workers’ Party today, titled The Smell of Cambridge Analytica Is in the Air, political sociologist José Roberto Paludo notes The Guardian report showing the Trump administration had pumped money into a Brazilian NGO that was running a PR campaign to undermine Brazil’s judiciary. He cites this as an example of a Cambridge Analytica style tactic. He makes clear that he is not claiming the defunct Cambridge Analytica is operating in Brazil, but that there are groups here using foreign funding to apply those types of tactics. With this in mind, he argues that stimulating low turnout could be one of those tactics, if it can be confirmed that turnout was lower in areas with high percentages of Lula voters in 2022 than in areas with high percentages of Bolsonaro voters. After all, he writes, it’s a lot easier to convince someone not to vote than to convince a progressive to vote for a conservative. He shows a preliminary analysis of two small towns in Minas Gerais, Rio Vermelho and Santo Antônio do Itambé, both of which had around 40% abstention yesterday, compared to the national rate of 21%. In 2022, Lula won 70% of the vote in Rio Vermelho and 75% of the vote in Santo Antônio do Itambé. If this turns out to be something that happened on a wider scale, it could be compared to the Cambridge Analytica low turnout campaign coordinated in Trinidad, as described in the movie “The Great Hack.”
Congressional elections show hope for new generation of leftists
Brazil has always had a conservative Congress, and even at the height of its popularity, the left has never held more than around 23% of the lower house. This year, however, the number of elected federal deputies from the inner circle of left wing parties, the Workers’ Party (PT), the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL), the Green Party (PV) and the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB), rose from 91 to 102. Afro-Brazilians made up 49% of all candidates in this year’s elections. Several young rising stars on the left moved up from state to federal deputy, including Rosa Amorim, 30, one of the most successful examples to emerge from the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement’s (MST) recent foray into electoral politics.
The fight is on
There is no need to emphasize how important this runoff election is going to be. Important issues at stake include the future of the Amazon rainforest, autonomy over Brazil’s natural resources and Brazil’s weight on the international stage, as Flávio Bolsonaro appears poised, if elected, to transform Brazil into a protectorate of the United States.
We have 20 days to turn this thing around. It’s not the time for opportunistic social media addicts in the Global North to try to out-left each other at the Brazilian people’s expense by blaming the victims in an election that is being heavily manipulated by the U.S. government, the international far right and Silicon Valley tech fascists. If you are up there and want to help out, try to hold those forces accountable. Call your lawmakers and complain. Expose their crimes, not just against Brazil, but against every other country in Latin America that they have worked together to transform into dictatorial, libertarian hellscapes over the last few years.
This first appeared on De-Linking Brazil.
Brian Mier is a native Chicagoan who has lived in Brazil for 25 years. He is co-editor of Brasil Wire and Brazil correspondent for TeleSur English’s TV news program, From the South.
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Lula speaking to party members after the end of voting last night at the Hotel Renaissance in S. Paulo. Photo: Ricardo Stuckert. |
The massive size of Lula’s last dozen street rallies across the country, including a huge one on Augusta Avenue in São Paulo on Saturday, gave a lot of people hope that the polling information was wrong and that he was capable of getting the 50% +1 votes necessary to win the election in the first round. Needless to say, many people were disappointed, not only that this didn’t happen, but that he ended up losing to far right candidate Flávio Bolsonaro (whose vice presidential running mate, Álvaro Gaspar, is under investigation for allegedly raping a 13-year-old girl) by two points.
After the final results were tallied, I watched Lula’s speech in the press room of the Renaissance Hotel in Jardins, where he and his other allied candidates had watched the results. “I’ve run for president seven times, and I’ve been in runoff elections twice already,” he said. “I was in a runoff election with my friend Geraldo Alckmin, who is standing right next to me. Remember that, Geraldo? I’m not afraid of a runoff because I have already won two of them, and I know we can win this election on October 25.”
Lula went on to say that the key to winning the election will be to reach out to people who didn’t vote in the first round. In a country where voting is mandatory and people who don’t vote have to fill out annoying paperwork, 21% of Brazil’s 158 million registered voters did not show up at the polling stations yesterday. This is the highest number of abstentions since 1998, and there are already indications that in some places, low turnout may have been provoked deliberately to favor Flávio Bolsonaro.Watching Lula’s speech in the press room
Sunday afternoon, an old friend who lives in São Gonçalo, a Rio satellite city with a far-right government and a population of nearly 1 million, called me up to tell me that bus service had been altered on routes going through the favelas and poor neighborhoods. Apparently word got out that buses were taking people to the voting centers but weren’t running back through the neighborhoods. As Lula was ahead by a 2:1 ratio among working-class and poor voters in the polls, this could be a sign of a deliberate strategy to aid the Bolsonaro campaign.
In a paper circulating within the Workers’ Party today, titled The Smell of Cambridge Analytica Is in the Air, political sociologist José Roberto Paludo notes The Guardian report showing the Trump administration had pumped money into a Brazilian NGO that was running a PR campaign to undermine Brazil’s judiciary. He cites this as an example of a Cambridge Analytica style tactic. He makes clear that he is not claiming the defunct Cambridge Analytica is operating in Brazil, but that there are groups here using foreign funding to apply those types of tactics. With this in mind, he argues that stimulating low turnout could be one of those tactics, if it can be confirmed that turnout was lower in areas with high percentages of Lula voters in 2022 than in areas with high percentages of Bolsonaro voters. After all, he writes, it’s a lot easier to convince someone not to vote than to convince a progressive to vote for a conservative. He shows a preliminary analysis of two small towns in Minas Gerais, Rio Vermelho and Santo Antônio do Itambé, both of which had around 40% abstention yesterday, compared to the national rate of 21%. In 2022, Lula won 70% of the vote in Rio Vermelho and 75% of the vote in Santo Antônio do Itambé. If this turns out to be something that happened on a wider scale, it could be compared to the Cambridge Analytica low turnout campaign coordinated in Trinidad, as described in the movie “The Great Hack.”
Congressional elections show hope for new generation of leftists
Brazil has always had a conservative Congress, and even at the height of its popularity, the left has never held more than around 23% of the lower house. This year, however, the number of elected federal deputies from the inner circle of left wing parties, the Workers’ Party (PT), the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL), the Green Party (PV) and the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB), rose from 91 to 102. Afro-Brazilians made up 49% of all candidates in this year’s elections. Several young rising stars on the left moved up from state to federal deputy, including Rosa Amorim, 30, one of the most successful examples to emerge from the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement’s (MST) recent foray into electoral politics.
The fight is on
There is no need to emphasize how important this runoff election is going to be. Important issues at stake include the future of the Amazon rainforest, autonomy over Brazil’s natural resources and Brazil’s weight on the international stage, as Flávio Bolsonaro appears poised, if elected, to transform Brazil into a protectorate of the United States.
We have 20 days to turn this thing around. It’s not the time for opportunistic social media addicts in the Global North to try to out-left each other at the Brazilian people’s expense by blaming the victims in an election that is being heavily manipulated by the U.S. government, the international far right and Silicon Valley tech fascists. If you are up there and want to help out, try to hold those forces accountable. Call your lawmakers and complain. Expose their crimes, not just against Brazil, but against every other country in Latin America that they have worked together to transform into dictatorial, libertarian hellscapes over the last few years.
This first appeared on De-Linking Brazil.
Brian Mier is a native Chicagoan who has lived in Brazil for 25 years. He is co-editor of Brasil Wire and Brazil correspondent for TeleSur English’s TV news program, From the South.
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