Dilceia, fifty-something, black with gray hair, who has just left the Copacabana headquarters of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, loves God and Michelle Bolsonaro. “Michelle is humble; she prays with her mouth on the ground; I was on the street for two years and she helped me”.
The young first lady of neo-Pentecostal faith could be the secret weapon of the Brazilian president's campaign in the second electoral round. “The evangelical vote is going to be the most disputed; and Michelle Bolsonaro is a key figure,” said Rodrigo Toniol, an anthropologist at the Federal University of Rio. “She has an ability to get to Bolsonaro if she alone can't.”
A member of the modern Atitude church, linked to the conservative Baptists of Texas, Michelle, 40, cultivated for years the image of shy, without interest in politics, thus shielding herself from the criticism that rained down on her husband.
But it is already fully used. "I prefer to be a mother, a wife (...), but if God wants it, I will ask him to give me wisdom," he said after his third electoral rally of the week.
The day after the narrow victory of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in the first round of elections, Michelle appeared with her husband at the Assembly of God macro-church in São Paulo, the largest in the country, with 55 million believers. “The church has to position itself,” she announced. It is a battle of “light against darkness”.
He continued: "It is inadmissible for a Christian to vote for a being who goes against the word of the Lord," he said, referring to Lula, a president "consecrated by demons."
Everything was perfectly synchronized with the videos of a "satanist" who asked for the vote for Lula and that were distributed by the so-called hate cabinet of the Bolsonarist campaign. The PT had to respond in a surreal spot: "Lula does not have a pact with the devil."
The day after, the news broke that the Assembly of God – whose powerful president, televangelist Silas Malafaia is a close friend of Michelle – intends to expel any practitioner who “defends the guidelines of the left”.
According to the latest polls, two out of three evangelicals will vote for Bolsonaro and one out of three for Lula. It is estimated that a third of the Brazilian population is already evangelical. According to data compiled by the newspaper O Globo, an average of 21 evangelical churches are opened every day, usually small premises on the working-class outskirts of cities. There are already 178,000 in the country.
“We grow so much because every believer is an evangelizer,” said Anderson Silva, a young pastor at the Assembly of Deus church, in the small town of Cascavel, in Ceará, the northeastern state, a fiefdom of Lula. Michelle – whose father is from Ceará – will participate next week in an electoral caravan in the Northeast to try to mobilize the vote of the “Northeastern” evangelicals and thus reduce Lula's wide advantage in the region. "All our believers will vote for Bolsonaro because he is the one who defends the family," Pastor Silva added.
Brazilian evangelism is becoming more and more politicized. The so-called Bible bench – mainly evangelicals – has 102 deputies and 13 senators, most of them Bolsonaristas. But it is not a monopoly of the right. A dissident pastor of the Universal Church, Romualdo Panceiro, has just asked for the vote for Lula, and there are minority currents that support the left.
“Lula's vote is quite stable; who is at risk of losing evangelical votes is Bolsonaro,” Toniol predicted in an interview.
In search of young votes, Michelle has been modernizing her image. She already has a bob hairstyle and dresses that are not at all puritanical. At the Queen's funeral last month, she wore an outfit inspired by Kate Middleton, Letizia and Jacqueline Kennedy. She did not seem the same person as the one who, last year, after the appointment of the evangelical judge André Mendonça to the Supreme Court, she began to shout: “Cantaramaya! Sing yours!”
He doesn't like to talk about his origins. He was born into a poor family in Ceilandia do Norte, one of the satellite cities of the capital Brasilia. A visit to his neighborhood a week ago confirmed the extent to which he endorsed the evangelical ideology of self-improvement. Without being a favela, the houses are dilapidated and the streets are narrow, nothing to do with the futuristic capital 20 kilometers away.
His grandmother was jailed for drug trafficking in the 1990s. Her mother was tried for falsifying her identity card. An uncle was imprisoned for belonging to a paramilitary militia. In Ceilandia, like the entire region of the Brazilian capital, "everyone belongs to Bolsonaro," said the owner of a stationery store near the family's home.
In her twenties, Michelle tried to work as a model, then as a salesperson in a wine bar in Brasilia. One day, a client suggested that she go to work as a secretary in the Chamber of Deputies.
Bolsonaro – then a deputy – hired her in 2007. He was 52 years old; she 25. They were married soon after. Soon Michelle – the third wife of the current president – would be in Rio, enjoying the Bolsonaros' condominium in front of the beach, in the ostentatious district of Barra da Tijuca. Next stop, the modernist presidential house on the shore of the lake in Brasilia. If the rise has been rapid for Jair Bolsonaro, for Michelle it is meteoric.
To date, the first lady has been treated rather delicately in the media. But the journalists are taking off their silk gloves. Michelle's disconnection from social reality is already discussed. On the eve of last Sunday's elections, she announced a 12-hour Christian fast in support of Bolsonaro, a proposal that did not convince the 30% of Brazilians who do not earn enough to feed their families.
What's more, if Michelle's family has had its problems with the law, the Bolsonaros may have more. The police are investigating a scandal in which former police officer Fabricio Queiroz, an old friend of the Bolsonaros, deposited 27 checks worth half a million dollars in Michelle's account. Juliana Dal Piva in her new book, Jair's Business, links the gift to the involvement of the Bolsonaros in a corruption and money laundering scandal in districts adjacent to Barra da Tijuca controlled by ex-police mafias. There are already those who have changed the name Michelle to Micheque.
