Lula and Bolsonaro: The war unleashed by the vote of evangelicals in Brazil

After repeated nods to the evangelical segment and a day after saying that the Bible must be fulfilled, former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said Friday that he will not campaign based on religious issues. “Religious issues will not be on my political agenda,” assured the presidential candidate of the Workers’ Party (PT). Despite reiterating that it was he who sanctioned the law that created the Day of the March for Jesus, in 2009, proposed by the bishop and then senator Marcelo Crivella, of the Universal Church, Lula insisted: “It is not the first campaign that I have disputed . I have never used religion in my campaign (…) Religion does not matter, what matters is that I want to talk to men and women to discuss what kind of country we want to build. I don’t want to be disputing religious votes, because it is not part of my political culture to establish any principle of holy war politics.”

But the holy war already seemed to be declared. On Tuesday, on the first official day of the electoral campaign, Lula and her main rival at the polls, President Jair Bolsonaro, along with greeting the evangelical electorate, exchanged harsh religious attacks. While the PT leader accused his opponent of being “possessed by the devil”, the chief executive suggested that if he loses the elections, people may be prohibited from speaking about God.

“Let’s talk about politics today, yes, so that tomorrow nobody forbids us to believe in God,” Bolsonaro told his supporters in the center of Juiz de Fora, the same Minas Gerais city where four years ago he was stabbed at a rally, an attack that catapulted him to the presidency of Brazil. Earlier, addressing the religious, he recalled the churches closed during the Covid-19 health crisis, when states and municipalities implemented social isolation policies to try to stop the spread of the virus. According to the daily Folha de Sao Paulo, the PT is launching an offensive to deny rumors that Lula will close evangelical churches.

“He is a Pharisee and is trying to manipulate the good faith of evangelical men and women who go to church to talk about their faith, their spirituality,” Lula accused Bolsonaro on his first campaign day in Sao Paulo. The PT also criticized the handling of the Covid pandemic by the current president, saying that he did not “shed a tear for the victims.” “You were a denier, you didn’t believe in science, you didn’t believe in medicine. You believed his lie. If anyone is possessed by the devil, it is this Bolsonaro.”

But the president, three days before the official start of the campaign, had already winked at the evangelicals. On August 13, he participated with thousands of people in Rio de Janeiro in a new “March for Jesus”, as he did weeks ago in other Brazilian cities, in an attempt to guarantee the support of the influential evangelical electorate with a view to the presidential elections on August 2. October. Accompanied by the first lady, Michelle Bolsonaro, the head of state asked that the country not experience “the pains of communism” and once again positioned himself against “abortion, gender ideology and the liberation of drugs.” “Today everyone can say that we have a President of the Republic who believes in God, who respects his police and military, the Brazilian family, and who owes loyalty to the people,” he said.

Thus, despite the fact that Lula affirmed yesterday at an event in Sao Paulo that religion “is in fashion” and that “churches do not have to have a political party”, Folha de Sao Paulo highlights that “the religious segment has become a target dispute between campaigns. According to the São Paulo newspaper, the allies of the PT have seen an advance of Bolsonaro among the evangelicals, a group in which the president already had an advantage and that mostly supported the current president in 2018.

This segment of the population worries the PT, since it encompasses a low-income segment that benefits from social programs such as Auxilio Brasil. And Lula focuses her discourse on the poorest population. Thus, while the former president tries to contain the advance of Bolsonaro, the current president is striving to maintain and expand dominance among evangelicals, reports Folha.

Although the latest polls place Lula as the favorite, they also show the predominance of Bolsonaro among evangelicals. The PT leader has an advantage of 15 percentage points over the current president, according to the latest Datafolha survey released on Thursday.

According to the survey, Lula has a 47% voting intention, while the leader of the Brazilian extreme right reaches 32%. With the advantage that the PT maintains, Datafolha points out, the former president would have a chance of winning the election in the first round by a small margin with 51% of the support against 35% for Bolsonaro, considering the valid votes (without blanks or null) . In an eventual ballot, on October 30, the leftist would surpass the current president by 54% against 37%.

But the same poll reveals Bolsonaro’s favoritism among evangelicals. The president increased his advantage over Lula in this religious group from 10 to 17 percentage points: he jumped from 43% to 49% of intention to vote in the last month, while the PT fluctuated negatively from 33% to 32%.

Among Catholics, the variation between the last two rounds was not significant. Lula continues to lead with almost double the intention to vote (52%) than his main rival, who fluctuated positively, from 25% to 27%. In Brazil, 50% of the electorate declare themselves Catholic and 27% Evangelical, also according to Datafolha.

Another poll, prepared by Ipec for TV Globo, reveals that Bolsonaro has 47% of the voting intentions among evangelicals, while Lula reaches 29%. A relationship that is reversed among Catholics, where the PT leads with 51% of the preferences, compared to 26% for the current president and candidate for re-election.

“The last official data on the proportion of evangelicals in Brazil is from 2010, when the last census was carried out. At that time, the proportion of evangelicals was 22%. In our last poll we got 28% of voters who declared themselves evangelical”, he comments to Third Márcia Cavallari Nunes, CEO of the Ipec pollster.

Anna Virginia Balloussier, a journalist for Folha de Sao Paulo, points out that the entry of this Christian bloc into Brazilian politics began in the Constituent Assembly that formulated the 1988 Constitution. There, the first evangelical caucus was formed, which gave it “a biblical bath ” to the president of the Constituent Assembly, Ulises Guimarães, in his own words.

“Evangelical leaders, especially Pentecostals, took advantage of the context of democratic opening to invest in political activism,” says Ricardo Mariano, a sociology professor at the University of São Paulo who coined the term “neo-Pentecostals” in his master’s thesis in the decade. from 1990.

But today experts differ on the impact evangelicals may have on the outcome of the next election. “The evangelical vote will indeed be important in these elections, it has always been true, but that was more noticeable in local elections, especially for mayors or even governors,” he comments. Third Paulo Afonso Velasco Júnior, political scientist at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. “Bolsonaro surely has an easier time (in capturing the evangelical vote), because his wife plays that role for a long time, she is very close to the evangelical churches and all the time she is talking about God. In addition, Bolsonaro’s conservative agenda ends up having a lot to do with evangelicals in general. And in his government he has had the support of the evangelical group in Parliament”, he adds.

On the other hand, says the academic, “Lula has a little more difficulty, since he is a left-wing politician and has a much more progressive agenda that often does not interest evangelicals, but he is also knowing how to play the game. We can remember that a few months ago he stated that he supported the broader abortion in Brazil and the next day, he said no, that he was wrong and that he did not support it”. “Lula is avoiding some statements that can be very dangerous and have unwanted effects by losing those votes,” he says.

On the other hand, Rafael Duarte Villa, an analyst at the University of Sao Paulo, says that it should not be forgotten that Catholics, who constitute almost half of the population in Brazil, “vote mainly for Lula in this election, which neutralizes the vote majority evangelical in Bolsonaro.” Likewise, the academic points to other factors as more important in this election. “I think there is an exaggeration that the religious factor will be decisive in this election. Probably the regional and socioeconomic dimensions (especially the percentage of votes for each candidate in the regions with the highest concentration of population, Southeast and Northeast, as well as the percentage of votes for each candidate among the poorest) will be the ones that will have the greatest impact on the election. , relegating the religion variable a bit”, he explains to Third.

However, Lula tries to recover this electorate by all means. As part of his seduction operation, the PT leader has organized several meetings with influential pastors, such as Paulo Marcelo Schallenberger, from the Assembly of God. The election of Geraldo Alckmin as his vice-presidential candidate, a moderate right-wing Catholic who has good relations with conservatives and evangelicals, brings the PT closer to this community.

However, Cavallari Nunes believes that the die has already been cast. “In this election, Lula and Bolsonaro have antagonistic voter profiles, I find it difficult for there to be any reversal among evangelicals,” he says.