Brazilian elections 2022: The war unleashed by evangelicals’ votes in Brazil

After repeated winks to the evangelical segment and a day after saying that the Bible has to be fulfilled, former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said on 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 he 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 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 contest religious votes because it’s not part of my political culture to establish any principles 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 his main rival at the polls, President Jair Bolsonaro, greeting the evangelical electorate, exchanged harsh religious attacks. While the PT leader accused his opponent of being “possessed by the devil”, the president suggested that, if he loses the elections, people may be forbidden to talk about God.

“Let’s talk politics today, yes, so that tomorrow no one forbids us to believe in God,” Bolsonaro told his supporters in downtown Juiz de Fora, the same city in Minas Gerais state where four years ago, he was stabbed at a rally.

Earlier, while addressing religious voters, he recalled the churches closed during the Covid-19 health crisis when states and municipalities implemented social isolation policies to try to curb the spread of the virus. According to Folha de S.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 day of campaigning in São Paulo.

The PT candidate also criticized the current president’s handling of the Covid pandemic, saying he did not “shed a tear for the victims.”

“You were a denialist; you didn’t believe in science, you didn’t believe in medicine. You believed in your lie. If anyone is possessed by the devil, it is this Bolsonaro.”

But the president had already nodded to evangelicals three days before the campaign’s official start. On August 13, he participated with thousands of people in Rio de Janeiro in a new “March for Jesus”, as he had already done weeks before in other Brazilian cities, to secure the support of the influential evangelical electorate given the presidential elections of October 2.

Accompanied by First Lady Michelle Bolsonaro, the head of state asked that the country not experience “the pains of communism” and 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, respects his police and military, the Brazilian family, and owes loyalty to the people,” he said.

Thus, although Lula affirmed yesterday in an act in São Paulo that religion “is in fashion” and that “the churches do not have to have a political party,” Folha de S.Paulo emphasizes that “the religious segment became a target of the dispute between campaigns”.

According to the São Paulo newspaper, the allies of the PT candidate have seen an advance of Bolsonaro among evangelicals, a group in which the president already had an advantage and primarily supported the incumbent in 2018.

This population segment worries the PT, as it comprises a low-income segment that benefits from social programs such as Brazil Aid (Auxílio Brasil). And Lula focuses his discourse on the poorest population. Thus, while the former president is trying to contain Bolsonaro’s advance, the current president is striving to maintain and expand his dominance among evangelicals, reports Folha.

Although the latest polls place Lula as the favorite, they also show Bolsonaro’s predominance among evangelicals. The PT leader has a 15 percentage point lead over the incumbent, according to the latest Datafolha poll released on Thursday.

According to the poll, Lula has 47% of voting intentions, while the leader of the Brazilian ultra-right has 32%.

With the advantage held by the PT candidate, 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% of Bolsonaro, considering the valid votes (without blank and invalid votes).

On October 30, the leftist would allegedly beat the current president by 54% against 37% in an eventual runoff.

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 voting intention in the last month, while the petista fluctuated negatively from 33% to 32%.

Among Catholics, the variation between the last two rounds was not significant. Lula continues to lead with almost twice as much voting intention (52%) as his main rival, which fluctuated positively, from 25% to 27%. In Brazil, 50% of the electorate declares itself Catholic and 27% Evangelical, according to Datafolha.

Another poll, prepared by Ipec for TV Globo, reveals that Bolsonaro has 47% voting intentions among evangelicals, while Lula has 29%. A relationship reversed among Catholics, where the petista leads with 51% of the preferences against 26% of the current president and candidate for reelection.

“The last official data on the proportion of evangelicals in Brazil is from 2010 when the last census was conducted. At that time, the proportion of evangelicals was 22%. In our last survey, we obtained 28% of voters who declared themselves evangelicals,” Márcia Cavallari Nunes, CEO of the pollster Ipec, told La Tercera.

Folha de S.Paulo journalist Anna Virginia Balloussier points out that this Christian bloc’s entry into Brazilian politics began in the Constituent Assembly, which formulated the 1988 Constitution. There, the first evangelical bench was formed, which gave “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 (USP), who coined the term “neo-Pentecostals” in his master’s thesis in the 1990s.

But today, experts differ on the impact evangelicals can have on the next election’s outcome. “The evangelical vote will indeed have importance in these elections, it always has in fact, but that was more noticeable in local elections, for mayors above all or even governors,” Paulo Afonso Velasco Júnior, a political scientist at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, tells La Tercera.

“Bolsonaro surely has an easier time (capturing the evangelical vote) because his wife plays that role a lot; she is very close to the evangelical churches and is always talking about God. In addition, Bolsonaro’s conservative agenda has a lot of relationship 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 because he is a leftist politician and has a much more progressive agenda that often does not interest evangelicals, but he also knows how to play the game. We can remember that a few months ago, he stated that he supported 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 undesired effects by losing those votes,” he adds.

On the other hand, Rafael Duarte Villa, an analyst at the University of São Paulo, says that it should not be forgotten that Catholics, who make up almost half of the population in Brazil, “vote mostly for Lula in this election, which neutralizes the majority evangelical vote for 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 have the greatest impact on the election, relegating the religious variable somewhat,” he explains to La Tercera.

All in all, Lula is trying to win back 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 choice of Geraldo Alckmin as his vice-presidential candidate, a Catholic of the moderate right who has good relations with conservatives and evangelicals, brings the petista closer to this community.

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

With information from La Tercera