If it weren't for the Northeast, Jair Bolsonaro would be president of Brazil. Ten of the thirteen states that gave victory to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the October 2022 elections make up this enormous region – three times larger than Spain, closer to Africa and Portugal than to the south of Brazil – , historically poor but already in visible convergence with the rich south. With 50 million inhabitants and 39 million votes, 70% corresponding to the Workers' Party (PT), the Northeast of Brazil is an interesting exception in the heyday of the right. After a decline in Lula's popularity across Brazil, the region is the main obstacle to the return to power of the post-Bolsonista right, already led by the ultraconservative governor of São Paulo, Tarcísio de Freitas, after the disqualification due to coup of former president Jair Bolsonaro.
"The right has a more simplistic, more direct message than the left, but I don't see a major change against Lula here," said Denildo Costa, a young historian at the Casa de Carnaval in Recife, where a series of dolls commemorate the carnivalesque tradition of the subversive maracatu, from when slaves dressed up as Portuguese kings.
It is true that, in the latest polls, Lula's popularity in the Northeast has fallen from 52% to 43%. But the positive assessment of the president here remains 12 points higher than in the south-east of the country – São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte – and even more than in the Bolsonaro deep south.
Conservative commentators do not forgive the Northeast for their attachment to the veteran leader of the Brazilian left. "Lula's popularity, more than ever, is anchored in the wastelands of the interior where a horde of miserable people is carefully manipulated by his welfare programs (...), most of them in the Northeast," he said write Merval Pereira, the star columnist of the newspaper O Globo.
The North-East is used to scorn. "There is an imaginary of the Northeast - actually, a prejudice - that persists; that those of us here vote with our stomachs, and the rest with our heads; that we live in wastelands lost in the interior", said historian Durval Muniz from Albuquerque, author of the reference book The Invention of the Northeast and professor at the Federal University of Natal. "But the truth is that we already have three of the largest metropolises in the country - Fortaleza, Recife and Salvador -, 70% of the population lives in cities and has the same information as the people of São Paulo".
Such is the resentment in the conservative south towards the Northeast that in the middle of last year the “Wall now!” movement emerged, led by the conservative governor of Minas Gerais, Romeo Zema, another aspirant to the post-Bolsonaro presidency. Zema declared a war between regions and proposed to "erect a wall" between the Northeast and the South. But the more the right shows its contempt for this region, the more strongly the Northeast identifies with Lula, who comes from the town of Caetés, in the interior of Pernambuco, three hours from Recife.
"Here there is solidarity with Lula even in the middle class because, despite being president, he is a victim of the same prejudices as all of us", says Muniz from Albuquerque.
The durability of Lula and the PT in this region, punished for centuries by slavery, extreme poverty, droughts and famines, has a fairly obvious explanation.
The governments of Lula (2003-2010) and Dilma Rousseff (2011-2015) reduced the number of poor from 21 million to 12 million with repeated increases in the minimum wage and a well-designed Bossa Família anti-poverty subsidy program.
Essential public works such as the transfer of the San Francisco River in drought areas were carried out. At the beginning of the month, Lula visited the arid interior sertão to inaugurate an aqueduct that brings water from San Francisco to 68 municipalities. He also attended the inauguration of a new railway that will connect the state of Ceará with Piauí.
After hunger returned under Bolsonaro's government, food insecurity, which reached 70 million in 2022, a third of Brazil's population, has dropped to 20 million in Lula's first year thanks to job creation , constant increases in the minimum wage, subsidies and pensions, above inflation. The Northeast is the most benefited region.
But Lula didn't just get the vote of the subsidized poor. The children of poor families in the Northeast have already gone to public university, following the heavy investments approved by the PT governments. “Youth are already qualified in the Northeast; people in the south say that the support for Lula is from illiterate people who received Bossa Família, but if you looked at the audience at Lula's rallies [in 2022], it wasn't the women who received Bossa Família subsidies but the young people", he explain Tania Bacelar, from the Federal University of Pernambuco.
But there are risks for Lula and the PT. With a very narrow fiscal margin for investments and public spending, it is impossible to reach the rate of social transformation of 15 years ago. If food price hikes continue, it may lose more support. "Most people here earn less than two minimum wages - about 500 euros per month - so the prices, especially of food, are very important," said Muniz from Albuquerque.
Another danger for Lula is organized crime. The Northeast has replaced Rio de Janeiro as the region with the most homicides. From February to October 2023, the homicide rate in the thirteen states of the region registered a terrifying 23.4 per 100,000 inhabitants compared to 14 in Brazil as a whole, a figure already high (in Spain it is 0 ,63). Every day 45 people die in violent crimes in the region, more than 50% of the homicides recorded in the entire country. It remains to be seen whether Bolsonaro and Freitas' hard-line message, which has seduced millions of voters in the south, also ends up convincing in the Northeast.
