After a lukewarm campaign and defeat in the first round, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva reaches the decisive Sunday with possibilities of victory for a fourth term. The reaction of the candidate of the Workers' Party was driven by a brigade of students in the streets, allied with a digital army that set out to defeat the algorithms of the big technology company Meta on social networks, a battlefield widely favorable to the far-right of Flávio Bolsonaro (Liberal Party).
The terror that a second Bolsonaro mandate would represent mobilized a part of Brazilian society that had remained indifferent to the elections until the vote on October 4. The day after the defeat, a march of two thousand students from the Fluminense Federal University, in Niterói, a city neighboring Rio de Janeiro, marked the beginning of a rebellion that could lead to a comeback in favor of Lula. The risk of losing free public education revived the campaign.
From then on, the broad front that brings together the left, the center and part of the right that fears the destruction of democracy occupied the streets of cities such as Brasilia, São Paulo, Recife, Salvador, Fortaleza, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte and Porto Alegre daily.
The warning signal from the students, alarmed at the possible debacle of public education, was added to other fears reported by the workers, such as, for example, the end of the policy of revaluation of the minimum wage of the Lula Government, which combines the compensation of inflation with the growth rate of the economy and thus guarantees real increases every year. Bolsonaro's son's program does not contemplate this advantage.
The probable damage of a victory of the far right, with cuts in social protection programs implemented by the left, had a forceful symbol in the own hands of Flávio Bolsonaro: the candidate adopted a pair of scissors as the central image of the electoral campaign. He used them for the first time in June of this year, together with Argentine President Javier Milei—the man with the chainsaw—during the Liberal Party convention in São Paulo.
The fear of a second Bolsonaro government was represented, during a student demonstration in Recife, capital of Pernambuco, in a poster with the cover of the book considered the greatest dystopia in Brazilian literature: Não will see country nenhum (You will not see any country), published in 1981 by the writer Ignácio de Loyola Brandão. The novel tells the story of a country without trees—the Amazon and all the forests will have been destroyed—and without democracy.
To help the vanguard brigade of students, Lula also counted on the digital army coordinated by federal deputy André Janones, an ally of the Rede Sustentabilidade party. For the first time in Brazil, the left, despite its complaints about Meta's manipulations, managed to build a support network on the Internet as powerful as the digital hysteria of the far right.
After a traditional style campaign in the first round, the soldiers of the left, as they were called, managed to present a President Lula more connected to social networks and in constant combat against Bolsonarism.
The army command even led President Lula to use a mobile phone for the first time to record videos in selfie mode, which contributed to the street mobilizations of the allied parties. A live format meeting, held on Thursday night, was also important in the final stretch of the electoral race, with the participation of 1.5 million people. “I feel a little uncomfortable with this, but I'm loving it,” Lula said. “They even tell me how cute! Very cute.”
With the old-style campaign that was carried out in the first round, with an institutional tone and marked by excessive confidence in partisan politics, the president of Brazil would probably not arrive with such strength to this D-day of the dispute for his fourth term. The enthusiasm for the new aesthetic was such that Lula, at 80 years old, has now become a mobile phone user.
