Brazil - Debate and election notes
Lula still leads. Bolsonaro's disinformation machine is running full speed.
During last Sunday’s debate, both President Jair Bolsonaro and former President Lula da Silva showed that they are better at attacking their opponent than defending their own records. They are also focused on the past rather than the future.
Lula’s strongest moment was when he attacked Bolsonaro’s record on Covid. Lula was uncharacteristically direct (Lula can be quite direct in his speeches, but he’s usually more restrained during debates when he is face to face with his opponents), claiming that the deaths of Brazilians are the president’s fault.
Bolsonaro’s strongest moments came as he forced Lula to respond to accusations of Petrobras-related corruption. Bolsonaro did something uncharacteristically smart here and simply shut up at one point, letting Lula stumble over his own words and run out his clock so he lacked time to respond to later critiques.
If you were hoping to hear a vision for how either candidate would govern over the coming four years, this was not a good debate. The focus on the past has been an issue for both sides during this election. Here is my comment on that from this week’s WPR column:
And yet, Lula’s ability to unite his historical rivals also shows a critical weakness of his current campaign: It’s focused on the past. While Bolsonaro is usually the candidate compared to former U.S. President Donald Trump, Lula’s entire campaign has been conducted as if its unofficial motto is to “make Brazil great again,” harking back to the decade of the 2000s when Lula was president and the economy was better. That vision is almost conservative in its outlook, calling for a return to the better days of Brazil’s past, rather than seeking to be “the country of the future,” as the long-running cliche about Brazil would have it.
I thought the debate was practically even, with Bolsonaro perhaps even doing slightly better (he benefits from lower expectations). A focus group of 100 undecided voters from Atlas found a majority favored Lula’s performance.
Prior to the debate, Bolsonaro spent most of the weekend fending off his own awful comments about Venezuelan teenage refugees who are sex workers in Brazil. When a campaign has to purchase internet ads to state the president is not a pedophile, they are probably losing. There is some debate (gleefully promoted by the Lula campaign) as to whether the president may have committed a criminal offense with his comments, adding to the list of things he could be charged with once he is out of office.
In spite of being placed on the defense over those remarks, the Bolsonaro campaign’s disinformation machine is otherwise in full swing and is more effective at getting traction online than Lula’s communications team. This can be seen with manipulated clips of the debate in which they make Lula’s comments appear worse than they are. It can also be seen with the shootout in São Paulo that occurred near a campaign event being held by Tarcisio Freitas, a former Bolsonaro cabinet minister running for governor in the state. The Bolsonaro campaign swiftly pushed a false message on social media that the candidate had been ambushed by organized crime groups linked to Lula and the PT.
Expect to see additional controversies over the coming week and half as the Bolsonaro campaign does everything it can to change the narrative and get anti-PT voters out to the polls.
Lula still leads by about four points and remains the strong favorite to win the election.