There will be a second round of the Brazilian presidential elections. I’m still waiting for research institutes to explain Bolsonaro’s growth in the polls, especially in key states like Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo. Lula got where the polls indicated, the surprise was Bolsonaro. One possible explanation is that undecided voters, or voters with no chance of winning, shifted their vote to Bolsonaro in the second round. If this hypothesis is reasonable, who would these people be?
The Bolsonaro voter is the typical Brazilian man. They are men who have projected themselves as bosses in the family and as bosses at work. Men who seek power and fear losing the privileges of a patriarchal colonial legacy. Bolsonaro presents himself as the archetype of robust masculinity: his politics are man-to-man. It is true that Bolsonaro elected women MPs and senators, which shows that it is not enough that there are women in politics, but that women with a critical awareness of the effects of patriarchy on democracy are needed.
Where are the Bolsonaro voters? There is an apparent regional distribution that overlaps with other historical systems of oppression such as class inequality and racism. Brazil, which considers itself white and educated in the South, voted massively for Bolsonaro, while Brazil in the Northeast, heir to slavery, voted for Lula. It is the white and bleached middle- and upper-class man who pushes Bolsonaro forward as a political force.
How can this bleak picture be reversed? Lula has no choice but to reach out to young people, women and people of different genders. We are the ones who occupied the streets in 2018 and chanted “#EleNo” against Bolsonaro in one of the largest consensus movements in Brazilian political history. It is we women who once again rejected Bolsonaro in the elections. We are not the typical Bolsonaro voters. It is true that for many of us Lula may not have been the candidate for the country’s necessary democratic transformation, but he is the possible candidate to curb the consolidation of Bolsonarianism in the country.
Lula shouldn’t be afraid to answer simple questions like whether there will be gender parity in his ministries or whether he will appoint black women to the Supreme Court. She must not shy away from urgent issues that affect women’s lives, such as domestic violence or the criminalization of abortion, hunger or unemployment. There is a female electorate who didn’t vote for Lula in the first ballot but who, like me, fear Bolsonaro. There is an urgent need to embody politics: women are most affected by the Bolsonaro government and we are most keen to remove him from power.
Deborah Diniz She is a professor at the University of Brasilia.
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