ASurrounded by red paintbrushes and a bucket of glue, activists marched through the streets of Parrot Hill affixing emergency warnings to the walls of what has become the front line in the fight for Brazil’s future.
A poster reads, “Bolsonaro hates the poor.” “Bolsonaro speaks nothing but lies. He’s the father of lies,” another explained to residents of one of Belo Horizonte’s biggest slums: “Are you really going to vote for him?”
Nil César, one of the fly-post campaigners, said the president’s disdain for the weak and dramatic relaxation of gun laws meant that his pre-election operations were literally a matter of life and death for society’s disenfranchised youth.
“I’m afraid this blood will be spilled … and the problem is that the blood will be black, favela blood,” the 46-year-old activist said as his team plastered the red brick homes of Parrot Hill with their advertisements. “We’re trying to keep us alive”
Belo Horizonte is the capital of Minas Gerais, the second most populous and fourth largest state in Brazil. And as the South American nation prepares to hold its most important election in decades on Sunday, the southeast region has become ground zero for scrap between incumbent far-right Jair Bolsonaro and his left-wing rival, former president Luiz Inácio Lula. da Silva.
No president has come to power without prevailing in Minas Gerais since Getúlio Vargas won in 1950, and observers expect this year to be the same.
“Minas will determine which direction Brazil takes,” said Felipe Nunes, a political scientist at the state federal university.
Nunes, who runs polling firm Quaest, has made it clear that in the final first round of the election, where Lula won by 6 million votes, leftists will prevail in Brazil’s northeast, while Bolsonaro will prevail in the midwest, south and southeast. states of Rio and São Paulo.
“So there’s only one place where we still don’t know who’s going to win, and that’s Minas Gerais,” Nunes said of the lead state whose demographic diversity makes the first round result almost perfectly reflect the national result.
In Minas, Lula beat Bolsonaro 48.29% to 43.6%, while nationwide the score was 48.43% to 43.2%.
“Minas has always shown the way to Brazil. Minas is a mini-Brazil,” said Reginaldo Lopes, Lula’s regional campaign chief, who predicts his leader, who ruled the country from 2003 to 2011, will win there by more than 900,000 votes.
Noting the vital importance of the state’s 16 million voters, both campaigns were intimidating Minas and roaming thousands of miles in a vast, mountainous state about 2.5 times the size of England.
One scorching morning last week, Lula flew to Teófilo Otoni, a commercial hub in the state’s impoverished north-east, to be greeted by a hero.
“Brazil’s best president ever,” yelled Bruno Gomes Pereira, 30, as the 76-year-old politician stepped into the loving, sweat-drenched crowd around him.
“He brought us water. He brought us electricity. He gave people dignity – and he will win!” Coming from the Jequitinhonha Valley, one of the most deprived areas of Minas, Gomes shouted to see his leader.
Accompanying Lula were two women who were at the center of the attempt to attract non-leftist voters: former centre-left minister Marina Silva and centre-right senator Simone Tebet, who supported Lula after she finished third in the first round of the election.
Tebet, who gave some clues as future president himself, told the Guardian that Bolsonaro’s relentless attacks on Brazilian institutions mean that the 2022 vote is a referendum for his country’s young democracy. “We are not choosing between two democratic candidates here. There is only one democrat, and without democracy we will lose our rights,” he warned.
“We will dismiss this inhuman president who does not like Brazilian families and is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people for delaying the purchase of Covid-19 vaccines,” Tebet said.
As Lula and his allies paraded through town in an open-back truck, Tebet denounced Bolsonaro’s handling of a coronavirus emergency that has killed nearly 700,000 citizens. “Minas Gerais, I’m here because I love democracy, I love Brazil and I love the Brazilian people,” he said. “I support Lula so that Brazil can once again be a generous and inclusive country for its 210 million Brazilians.”
The crowd at Teófilo Otoni roared in approval—but it was the president’s photogenic evangelical wife, Michelle Bolsonaro, who wowed the crowd in the heavily pro-Bolsonaro city of Governador Valadares, 85 miles to the south.
She told thousands of Bolsonarists who gathered to see her in yellow jerseys symbolizing her husband’s nationalist movement, “The Bible is so wonderful that it says the wise lean to the right and the fools to the left.”
“I’m not saying that – it was God,” added Brazil’s first lady, who is trying to win back millions of female voters alienated by Bolsonaro’s misogynistic and violent rhetoric that made headlines this week. Bomb and gun attack on police by a close Bolsonaro ally.
“Don’t look at my husband, look at me,” said Michelle Bolsonaro at a rally in Rio. “I am a servant of the Lord.”
Among the congregation in Valadares, 38-year-old administrative assistant Paulo Rogério Silva Moreira claimed that Bolsonaro was the only one who could prevent Lula, which Brazil calls Venezuela or Nicaragua, from becoming an authoritarian basket under the corrupt Workers’ Party (PT).
“I voted for Lula in 2002 and 2006 – and because of her I voted for Dilma. [Rousseff] In 2010 and 2014 – but I was deceived by this dark party,” Moreira said.
Dhennis Wheberth, a Baptist preacher, dismissed media criticism of Bolsonaro’s response to Covid and his portrayal of him as “an executioner, a scavenger, and a genocidal vagrant.”
“He is an honest conservative who loves and protects the homeland, family and God,” Wheberth said in an interview with a pro-Bolsonaro group called “Headquarters Bolsonaro” at the Valadares base. On the table in front of him was a copy of the Bible from the Book of Ezekiel. “The day of the Lord is near; “A cloudy day will be a day of judgment for the nations.”
The group’s chairman, Adolfo Pinto Magalhães, a conservative historian, said he believes the support of multimillionaire businessman Romeu Zema, the recently re-elected governor of Minas Gerais, will help Bolsonaro pass Lula and win a second four-year term in Minas. “There won’t be a big swing… It will be very close,” Magalhães said, predicting Bolsonaro’s 51%-49.5% victory.
Polls show that the election is more likely to go the other way, with Lula now four to eight points ahead.
“If Bolsonaro manages to turn the situation around in Minas, he could turn the national race around,” Nunes said. “[But] I don’t think he will – the best Bolsonaro can achieve is a draw in Minas… and that tells you a lot about how I feel about the election in general. It will be a tight race, but he will remain Lula’s favourite.”
At Parrot Hill, a favela Lula toured 20 years before the historic 2002 election, locals said they would celebrate Bolsonaro’s final fall with fireworks and barbecues.
“This is not a choice between left and right. “Dictatorship against democracy,” said Júlio Fessô, a 47-year-old community activist, who has produced silk-screened T-shirts with the slogan “We are Lula because Lula is us” in recent weeks.
As Fessô and his fly-posting companions made their way through the hillside community, several locals invited them to stick Lula posters in their homes.
Fessô said he believes many of his neighbors will support Lula, who was born into rural poverty in Brazil’s drought-stricken north-east when 156 million citizens turn to the polls on Sunday.
“Favela is with Lula because Lula is one of us,” he said, predicting that the working class would rid Brazil of its authoritarian leader.
But even here there were hints of Bolsonaro’s difficult political reach, particularly among evangelical voters who favored the right-wing over Lula.
A yellow and green Brazilian flag showing support for Bolsonaro was hung next to the altar of a local place of worship of the International Church of God’s Grace, whose leader, RR Soares, was one of the few powerful television writers to support Bolsonaro in his fight against “gender ideology.” .
Even higher up in Belvedere, one of Belo Horizonte’s wealthiest neighborhoods, luxury apartments and millionaire mansions were adorned with the same flag. “If 70% of the people here vote for Lula, there will be 70% Bolsonaro,” Fessô said of the wealthy neighbors of his favela, whom he suspects wants one of three things for Brazil’s poor: “Prison, slavery… or death.”
These mercenary elites helped Bolsonaro beat Lula at Belo Horizonte in the first round of the election, receiving 46.6% of the vote against Lula’s 42.5%.
Cristiano Silveira, a local PT congressman, said the fake news was somewhat responsible for Bolsonaro’s persistent hold on voters. “But the overwhelming majority identify with everything this guy is, which is even more disturbing.
“Look at the image the world has of us and what we’ve become,” Silveira complained, arguing that the only way to be sure of change is if people go out and vote.
“It’s a matter of civilization or barbarism… This election will decide what Brazil becomes from this point on,” he said, sending a message to state voters who now have the fate of one of the world’s largest democracies. their hands. “If you don’t vote, Lula won’t come back.”
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