Evangelicals Start Organizing Campaign to Choose Bolsonaro’s 2022 Running Mate

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The politicized evangelicals are beginning to mobilize to determine who should fill the vacancy of Vice-President in Jair Bolsonaro’s party in 2022, certain that General Hamilton Mourão will not be running. However, the main issue in the milieu is the many denominations, which makes it more difficult to find one that represents the whole evangelical community.

The President makes no secret of the fact that he is already focused on the 2022 elections and he has conceded to people close to him that he may select an evangelical vice-president. It was this sign from the chief executive that ultimately prompted the congressional “bible bench” to take action looking for names.

In the 2018 election this almost happened: a member of Bolsonaro’s party, evangelical Senator Magno Malta was the favorite to take the post, but he turned down the invitation, claiming that he would rather seek reëlection to the Senate – Malta was ultimately defeated.

The vacancy may now be filled by the ex-senator’s protégé and current Minister of Women, Family and Human Rights, Damares Alves. But those who think that she will not suffer resistance from her own evangelical group as a candidate for the position are mistaken.

On Thursday 13th, Bolsonaro praised Damares in his already traditional live stream. “Damares is the Minister with the most challenging Ministry. She deals with a lot of problems. I wouldn’t accept being minister [of her portfolio], given the problems. Only someone like her to solve those issues. There is no better person than Damares in that Ministry.”

Bolsonaro’s alliance with the evangelicals is growing stronger and the choice of a vice-president to represent them in 2022 may actually be required to please this group – today one of his government’s main support bases.

A Datafolha survey in April this year confirmed that the 31 percent of the population who declare themselves to be part of this religious current, have a pro-Bolsonaro inclination and are the ones who most approve of the President’s actions (47 percent of them rated him as excellent and good) in fighting the pandemic.

What is said behind the scenes is that if Bolsonaro decides for an evangelical vice-president, discarding Mourão, he will have a hard time finding a name that pleases the majority of the group. The problem is based on the multiple leaderships and countless evangelical denominations found in the country.

“There is no single leadership, like the Catholic Church, where the Pope speaks and everyone must learn the lesson. It is not like that here. Here you have the Pentecostal section, divided internally among the largest denomination, which is the Assembly of God, with several leaders. You have the Neopentecostals, with the Universal, the Church of Grace, the World Church. There are many. You have the most traditional section, such as Baptists, Presbyterians, they are more historical churches, but they do not have many members. This group is too diverse to bring everyone together and say: this name here pleases 80 or 90 percent of the group,” explained a member of the evangelical bench in Congress.

This mismatch among evangelicals has become a source of complaints from Bolsonaro to some leaders of this religious current. They say they have heard the President say that they need to join together and decide on a name. But according to those in the sector, the position of vice-president is one of trust, and the President will be the one to choose – and when he decides on an evangelical name, he will undoubtedly displease other denominations.

List of candidates

While it is early for resolutions, the group has wasted no time. The list of pastor-Ministers (currently there are three) and sector leaders around Bolsonaro is growing, which adds to the competition for the position.

Even Minister Damares Alves, who is top of the list, is facing resistance. To this day it is unclear to several evangelical leaders what prompted the estrangement between Magno Malta and Bolsonaro, while at the same time, a great rapprochement was built between the chief executive and the current Minister Damares, who was a staffer of the senator at the time.

In the evangelical community, Magno Malta has always been respected. By accepting the invitation to be a Minister for Bolsonaro without trying to include Malta or reestablish his rapprochement with the President, some feel Damares shot herself in the foot. The move was perceived by some evangelical leaders as a kind of betrayal. An evangelical deputy reports that he attended Damares’ inauguration day and says that the group did not feel it was the right way to go about it.

According to him, Damares was present at the beginning of a CPI (Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry) hearing on pedophilia, which was chaired by Malta, advising the ex-senator, but suddenly left the session to be appointed Minister. These leaders believed she should have told the President that she accepted the invitation, but that she wanted Magno Malta at her side.

The opposite was true. Rather than promote the relationship between the two politicians, they say that the ex-deputy adviser and current Minister must have polluted the relationship between Malta and Bolsonaro. The event supposedly led members of the evangelical leadership to regard Damares as unethical, hence the resistance to her name as vice-president in 2022.

Other names on the list of vice-presidential candidates are federal deputy Marco Feliciano, and André Mendonça, the Minister of Justice. The former has the trajectory of a good preacher in the evangelical circles, but has a very small congregation and is not considered a de facto pastor.

The Minister appears as a strong candidate; however, he collided with the evangelical bench by sponsoring Education Minister Milton Ribeiro, supposedly a weaker candidate than other pastors. Now, Mendonça has been engulfed in the scandal of his ministry secretly producing files on government opponents, which has eroded his image.

As a result, the choice of an evangelical name for the position of Bolsonaro’s vice-president in 2022 may become a dilemma. And, depending on who the option is, it may create greater resistance than support for the President from the sector’s leaders in the next elections.

Source: Veja