With Lula’s new state, it wasn’t easy in Brazil

Punishment vow

Analysts who warned of Lula da Silva’s narrow margin of victory (less than two percentage points), the crowd’s punishment for Jair Bolsonaro which he led under ultra-nationalist institutions in the context of his navigating the COVID-19 pandemic, and seasoned with the historical accumulation of state plunder, across many governments.

When citizenship reaches its limits it tends to be forgotten very quickly. If there were Brazilians in 2018 who preferred, as the BBC cited, “a homophobic or racist president to a thief”; In 2022, the polls called for a high percentage that tipped the scales to the other side, allowing Lula for a third term even after he spent a year and a half in detention for corruption.

“The vote on sanction is back to pass the verdict, and just as Bolsonaro was the main beneficiary of it in 2018, in 2022 he was his victim par excellence,” reads a summary in printing pressIt is one of several news programs that attribute the election result to the aforementioned “disciplinary vote”.

In 2018, with 99.49% of the votes counted, Bolsonaro (Social Liberal Party) won 55.21% of the vote against 44.79% for his then-rival Fernando Haddad of the Workers’ Party.

polarization

This time the candidate for re-election got 49.27% ​​against Lula who got 50.73%. According to the final results map, Bolsonaro prevailed in southern and central Brazil, in many cases by wide margins, while Lula da Silva prevailed in the north of the country, in some states exceeding 70% of the vote.

By journalist Lucas Ribeiro, who is based in Salvador de Bahia and columnist for Brazil Sim Mido, in his country “the left-wing media is dominant” that is trying to treat Bolsonaro as if he were “a fascist monster, Hitler”. In his view, “it’s not about that.”

“Yes, he’s a tough-talking politician,” he admits. He’s conservative, right-wing. There are people who hate him, but he – he defends – is not a dictator.

Meanwhile, Ribeiro warned that “the opposite does not happen.” That is, “when the left has the opportunity to censor, it does so without shaking its hand. They silence non-socialist voices under the pretense of belligerent False newsHe said, referring to the authoritarian governments that have persisted in Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba.

Unlike those countries, the electoral outcome in Brazil is an expression of alternation in power and a value of democracy and having the resources, at least formally, to control it, even when press freedoms, freedom of expression, and extreme politics are involved. The differences generated hate messages, fake news, and misinformation.

Democracy and freedom of the press

Clara Sacco, 31, director of Datalab, a data generation and citizen communication research organization in Mary complexa marginalized and impoverished area of ​​Rio de Janeiro, it was not easy to practice in today’s Brazil, which maintains the illusion of democracy like samba.

“We are working on data lab From a data generation perspective. It is about producing research for advocacy, gaining rights in public policies and making tools for working with data available to peripheral residents and community contacts.”

While we were talking, Clara was laying the last stitches at a community engagement event that included educational and craft workshops and closing with music, at the Bella Marie Cultural Center.

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Beautiful community

Headquarters of the Bella Marie Community Project, at the entrance to the eponymous “favela”.

Darcy Borrero

The data it collects “deals with issues that traverse the Brazilian urban fringes and always presents a classification of race and gender,” he explained and estimates that before and during the presidential campaign “journalism was under attack, data production was under attack. Investigation was under heavy attack. We are now in an exercise to restore legitimacy, From the constructive role, to the importance of the press in building and ensuring democracy.

He insists that the media, especially social networks, have been used to spread false news. He stressed that “we must therefore resume the true meaning of what freedom of expression is, what freedom is in the media in Brazil.”

Predictions for 2023-2027

The young scholar agrees that with Lula’s new term, Brazil is not having an easy time either, not only because of the polarization of opinions but also because of the challenge Brazilians face in keeping tabs on corruption, including what comes from the ruling party itself. .

Although Lula was elected, we are actually facing the challenge of restoring democratic values ​​with the population, right? Not because Lula was elected, this problem is over. I think we should fight as a society so that we have mechanisms in terms of oversight, and fighting corruption. This is a fact, this has happened in Brazil for many years, including the last government. There has been a significant budget cut in anti-corruption policies; Corruption means agreements between the government and major contracting companies.

“And we see direct interference, for example in the appointment of the Federal Police, which is also responsible for investigating cases of corruption at the federal level, so we hope that the bodies can now act with a certain independence to investigate, supervise and condemn cases of corruption specifically within constitutional rules, but we are certainly not free And, you know, from these schemes that in fact have always shaped our republic, so it’s not just a problem for the PT government, and he estimated that it’s not just a problem for the Bolsonaro government.