The speech of the president and his supporters is in the opposite direction, though main research institutes point to a widening gap between leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and second-placed Jair Bolsonaro in terms of intentions to vote for President. The Bolsonaristas reiterated that they would emerge victorious from the first round of voting. “If we don’t win in the first round, something abnormal has happened in the TSE (Supreme Electoral Court),” Bolsonaro said in an interview with SBT in London yesterday. For researchers, this misconception is actually a tactic to disrupt the election.
The most reliable polls show that the odds of Lula winning in the first round are increasing. But the president’s statements and a lot of messages on social media, especially on messaging apps, try to create the illusion that the opposite is true.
“The purpose of this narrative is to repeat Donald Trump’s strategy,” historian João Cezar de Castro Rocha, who studies the behavior of Bolsonarists and follows the president’s followers’ WhatsApp groups, told the column. “As you know, Trump attempted a coup by occupying the Capitol”
In recent months, the Bolsonarista digital militias have repeated their version that Bolsonaro would win the election in the first round without being based on facts. Contrary to figures submitted by research institutes, they present what they call ‘datapovo’, photos and videos of concentrations of supporters attending the president’s rallies. This strategy intensified after September 7, when Bolsonaro led the green and yellow crowds to Brasília, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.
Monitoring by the National Institute of Science and Technology in Digital Democracy (INCT.DD), affiliated with the Federal University of Bahia, caught this activity on social networks. “Especially after September 7, we realized that this ‘already won’ climate is very hidden in Bolsonarismo groups,” says INCT.DD researcher Maria Paula Almada, who analyzed data from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Last week, 17,000 of Jair Bolsonaro’s 61,000 words on these platforms brought threats to the electoral system. “There is a consolidation of the narrative that the only possibility of the current president losing the election is due to ballot rigging,” the institute’s report says. On the other hand, the left has taken more action in recent days and the hashtag #LulaNoPrimeiroTurno is the second most used hashtag.
But Bolsonaro’s strategy of disinformation continues, and João Cezar de Castro Rocha points out the phenomenon perceived by political scientist Christian Lynch, that bolsonarismo is on the decline as an electoral phenomenon, and thus has nothing to do with 2018. radicalizing in discourse to compensate for negative reality.
“The Brazilian elections are no longer just an electoral phenomenon with the Bolsonaristas and belong to the pages of the police, because the president is committing various crimes in order to try to be re-elected,” the professor who organized and started the program evaluates. book Tudo for a close call [Civilização ou Barbárie], by Kotter Editorial. It is a collection of texts written by several authors about the authoritarian threat of Bolsonarism.
According to him, the violation of the president can reach an even more serious level. “Bolsonaro wants to provoke turmoil in his militancy, he wants Bolsonaro to take to the streets and cause chaos to justify the declaration of a state of emergency,” Rocha warns.
source: Noticias
