It is hard to believe that a politician with as many moral weaknesses as Jair Bolsonaro could be the candidate of "good" against "evil" in the presidential elections on October 30. But, advised not only by evangelical leaders, such as televangelist Silas Malafaia, but also by former superjudge Sérgio Moro, who headed the anti-corruption crusade known as Lava Jato, the Brazilian president has narrowed the lead of his rival Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to only four points.
Reelection will still be difficult for the president. Bolsonaro needs six million more votes than he got in the first round; Lula, only 1.8 million more. But everything indicates that the result will be much more disputed than was thought a month ago.
To get those six million votes, Bolsonaro is trying to rebuild the winning coalition of 2018. That means joining the votes of some 70 million Brazilian neo-Pentecostals with those of another unshakable faith in part of the Brazilian middle class: antipetism, that is, the visceral hatred of the Workers' Party (PT).
It is not easy for the president to personify biblical good. Baptized as an evangelical in Israel's Jordan River in 2016, he is not an exemplary Christian. He has been married three times. His barracks rhetoric – with constant references to his sexual potency – does not sit well in the temples. Neither does the interview in which he confessed to advising his first wife to terminate a pregnancy at a time of financial hardship.
And the corruption? Bolsonaro is also not a saint. An investigation by the federal police indicates that his son Flavio got rich embezzling public money laundered with the help of the paramilitary mafias in western Rio. It is just the tip of the iceberg of a family network of corruption that explains the mysterious increase in the Bolsonaros' assets, according to Juliana del Piva, in her new book Jair's Business.
There are already signs that the president is regaining the confidence of his electorate after the collapse of popularity during the denialist management of the pandemic, more lethal in Brazil than in any other country, except the United States. Bolsonaro already has the support of 66% of evangelicals, 16 points more than in August. And he also benefits from a recrudescence of antipetism in the conservative and extra-urban interior of states such as São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais.
In trips made this week through the interior of the Brazilian center-west, dotted with national flags and portraits of the president, the language of evangelism was mixed with denunciations of corruption. “Here 99% of us are all Bolsonaristas because of the corruption of the PT,” said Dirceu Paulo, a businessman in the rural state of Mato Grosso. "We believe in biblical meritocracy."
Bolsonaro has distributed subsidies of 600 reais –117 euros– a month to more than 20 million poor families under the Aid Brazil program. Forgotten the previous criticisms of the clientelistic welfare of the left, the president made fun of his rival in a television debate last Tuesday. "Look, Luna! I have given more with Auxilio Brasil than you with Bolsa Familia”, which was the anti-poverty program of the PT governments. Lula still has almost 60% of the votes of the poorest, half of the electorate that earns less than 220 euros a month. But "what is worrying for the PT is that there are signs that the Bolsonarist vote is rising among those who receive Aid for Brazil," said political analyst Jorge Chaloub in Rio.
Bolsonaro has deployed two heavy weapons in this second round. First, his current wife, Michelle Baptista. The young first lady has just led a caravan of evangelical women with the aim of reducing Lula's advantage in the female electorate. "Hell is rising," she said in reference to the PT during a rally in Maceió (Alagoas), in the poor northeast, where Lula has more than 60% of the voting intentions. She also repeated there the latest hoax of the Bolsonarist campaign: that Lula, following Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, wants to close all the evangelical churches in Brazil.
After responding in a surreal statement that "Lula is not the devil", the PT has published this week "an open letter to the evangelical people", in which Lula reaffirms his commitment to religious plurality and cites the chapter of Santiago 1,27 : "True religion is caring for orphans and widows."
Bolsonaro's second weapon is the former judge Moro, responsible for sentencing Lula to nine years in prison in 2018 a few months before being appointed Minister of Justice in the Bolsonaro government. Plagued by irregularities, the trial against Lula was later annulled by the Supreme Court
Despite leaving the government indignant in 2020, Moro is already fully reconciled with Bolsonarism. He was whispering advice into the presidential ear before Tuesday's debate. For his part, Deltan Dallagnol, the chief prosecutor of Lava Jato and a devotee of another Baptist church already elected to the Chamber, will be the perfect link between evangelism and antipetism in Bolsonaro's campaign.
Supporting Bolsonaro “is a gigantic moral error,” Matthew Stephenson, a lawyer from the prestigious Harvard Law School, who has been one of the closest international allies of Moro and Dallagnol, lamented in statements to La Vanguardia.
But the signing of the two lawmen has once again focused attention on the bribery scheme in the state oil company Petrobras, which, despite being a historical element of patronage in Brazilian politics since long before the PT governments, always complicates Lula's plan to come back from jail like a Nelson Mandela. "Moro's presence in the campaign is having very positive effects in the southeast (São Paulo, Rio and Minas Gerais)," said Fabio Faria, Bolsonaro's communication minister.
The Bolsonarist message is transmitted by the already famous Cabinet of Hate, the nerve center of the president's campaign on social networks. “They produce factoids and conspiracy theories that have nothing to envy Q-anon,” anthropologist Marcio Meira, one of the founding members of the PT in the 1980s, said in an interview.
Some examples from the last few days: a video states that Lula is a member of the PCC drug cartel. A secret plan of the PT to legalize petty theft is denounced. Another message alerts that under a Lula government, bathrooms in schools will have to be unisex. The most morbid hoax was released a few days ago by the newly elected senator Damares Alves, a pastor and former Bolsonaro minister who accompanies Michelle in the evangelical caravan. According to Alves, the PT is responsible for the trafficking of children from the Amazonian island of Marajó to supply foreign pederasty.
Lula has tried to fight back. A clumsy comment by the president about two pretty fifteen-year-old girls – alleged Venezuelan prostitutes, exploited for electoral purposes – created the opportunity to launch accusations of pederasty against the president himself. But, paraphrasing André Janones, the new guru of the PT networks, the left always plays at a disadvantage since it limits itself to exaggerating reality and not inventing it.
Aware of the danger facing the fourth largest democracy in the world, Alexandre de Moraes, the president of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, which regulates elections, has sanctioned Bolsonaro's campaign, reducing the number of propaganda spots assigned to the president.
But this only serves to feed the Bolsonarist conspiracy theory: that there is a plot between the PT, the Supreme Court and the old establishment to prevent the re-election of the president. As Donald Trump did, Bolsonaro presents himself as the anti-system candidate even though he occupies the presidential palace.
For this reason, it is likely that a narrow margin of victory for Lula will be used to mobilize the Bolsonarist bases against a non-existent fraud, after a year of presidential warnings about alleged failures in the electronic voting system. To pave the way, a bill presented this week in Congress proposes sentences of ten years in prison for the authors of opinion polls who underestimate the vote for Bolsonaro.
