Vow of Punishment
Analysts warned of Lula da Silva’s narrow margin (less than two percentage points), the public’s punishment for a jair Bolsonaro which he ran among ultranationalist foundations in a context riddled with the COVID-19 pandemic and spiced with the historic spate of looting of the state by many governments.
When citizenship reaches its limits, it tends to forget too quickly. If in 2018 there were Brazilians who, as quoted by the BBC, “preferred a homophobic or racist president to a thief”; Called to the polls in 2022, a high percentage tipped the balance the other way, allowing Lula a third term even after serving a year and a half in prison on corruption charges.
“The penalty vote returned a verdict, and just as Bolsonaro was its main beneficiary in 2018, so in 2022 he is its victim par excellence,” reads a synopsis in La Prensa Gráfica, one of many news programs attributing the outcome to the elections leading up to the aforementioned “Penal Vote”.
In 2018, Bolsonaro (Social Liberal Party) received 99.49% of the vote and 55.21% of the vote, compared to 44.79% for his then opponent Fernando Haddad of the Labor Party.
polarization
This time, the candidate for re-election received 49.27% versus Lula, who received 50.73%. According to the final result map, Bolsonaro won in southern and central Brazil, in many cases by a significant margin, while Lula da Silva prevailed in the north of the country, where he surpassed 70% of the vote in some states.
For Salvador do Bahía-based journalist Lucas Ribeiro and Brazilian columnist Sem Medo, his country is “dominated by the left-wing media,” which tries to treat Bolsonaro as “a fascist monster, a Hitler.” “That’s not what it’s about,” is his vision.
“Yes, he’s a stubborn politician,” he admits. He’s conservative, right. And there are people who hate him, but – he defends – he is not a dictator.
Ribeiro, meanwhile, warned that “the opposite is not happening”. That is, “when the left has the opportunity to censor, it does so without shaking hands. They silence the voices that are not socialists under the pretext of fighting fake news,” he said, alluding to the authoritarian governments that persist in Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba.
Unlike these countries, the election result in Brazil is an expression of the change of power, a value of democracy and the existence, at least formally, of resources to control it, even if limited freedom of the press and expression and extreme political freedom have to generate differences hate messages, fake news and misinformation.
democracy and freedom of the press
Working in Brazil today, which maintains the illusion of being so democratic, hasn’t been easy for Clara Saco, 31, director of Datalab, a research organization specializing in data generation and citizen communications in Complexo do Maré, a marginalized and impoverished neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro like the samba.
Clara Sack Brazil
Clara Saco, project manager for the collection of demographic data.
Darcy Borrero
“We work in the Datalab from the perspective of data generation. It is about producing research results for advocacy and gaining rights in public policy and making working tools with data accessible to populations on the periphery and to community communicators”.
As we chatted, Clara was putting the finishing touches on a community participation event at the Bela Maré Cultural Center that included didactic and craft workshops and a conclusion with music.
beautiful community
Headquarters of the Bela Maré community project, at the entrance to the “Favela” of the same name.
Darcy Borrero
The data collected “deals with issues that transcend the Brazilian outskirts and always offers a racial and gender breakdown,” he explained, acknowledging that before and during the presidential campaign “journalism came under heavy attack, production of data came under heavy attack became. The investigation was heavily attacked. We are now reclaiming the legitimacy of journalism’s importance in building and ensuring democracy from the role of construction.”
He insists the media, mainly social media, has been used to spread fake news. “So we need to resume the true meaning of what freedom of expression is, what freedom in the media is in Brazil,” he stressed.
Outlook 2023-2027
The young researcher agrees that Brazil isn’t having an easy time with Lula’s new mandate either, not only because of the polarization of opinions but also because of the challenge Brazilians face in monitoring corruption, including that of the ruling party itself.
“Even though Lula was elected, the real challenge is to reclaim democratic values with the people, right? It’s not because Lula got elected that this problem is over. I think we have to fight as a society to have mechanisms related to auditing, fighting corruption. That’s a fact, it’s been happening in Brazil for many years, including the last government. There was a very big budget cut in anti-corruption policies; and corruption requires agreements between the government and large contractors.
“And we see direct interference, for example in the appointment of the federal police, which is also responsible for investigating federal corruption cases, and hope that the bodies can now act with some autonomy to investigate, monitor and convict.” the cases of corruption right within the constitutional norms, but surely we are not free from these schemes, which in reality have always forged our republic, so it is not just a problem of the PT government. It’s not just a problem of the Bolsonaro government,” he estimated.