Lula has lost touch with the ‘formerly poor’; they are now voting en masse for Bolsonaro’s right-wing party

It is a bitter pill to swallow at the age of eighty to get the last election campaign of your life wrong. Ahead of the run-off on 25 October, what is causing President Lula da Silva to tremble is the right-wing vote from the formerly poor – that huge section of Brazilian society which, over the last twenty years, has moved from abject poverty to low-income status. The ‘workers’ president’, the legendary founder of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), came second in the first round on 4 October and lost 3.4 million votes compared with the 2022 election, largely because he failed to understand the members of the new social class that his governments had created. He was the architect of their social emancipation, the mastermind behind the miracle of the Brazilian boom of 2003. During his first two terms, from 2002 to 2010, Lula skilfully rode the wave of economic growth made possible by a series of favourable economic conditions fuelled by the surge in prices of export commodities on international markets. He redistributed that wealth, lifted millions of Brazilians out of hunger and abject poverty, built them homes and filled them with household appliances. But twenty years on, he has failed to understand what has become of those people; he did not grasp their aspirations in time, nor was he able to respond to their desires.

Worse still, he gave the impression of scornfully dismissing their dreams, of agreeing with those who in recent months have written them off as ‘pobres de dereita’ – the ‘poor right-wingers’. To the ‘pobres de dereita’, the Lulist left said: where on earth do you think you’re going? You’re nobodies, yet you act like ridiculous CEOs of your own little worlds. As if they were nothing but pathetic dreamers with one foot still in the mud, devoid of class consciousness, drowning in the screen of their Chinese smartphone whilst dreaming of becoming Elon Musk.

They—who make up the so-called ‘Fascia C’ of Brazilian sociological geography, the lower-middle class living on the outskirts, in other words the heartland of the country—voted en masse for Flavio Bolsonaro, the rowdy son of the former gun-toting president Jair, who is currently in prison and ineligible to stand as a candidate in the 2016 Capitol Hill-style storming of Congress.

Bolsonaro is able to deceive them because he knows how to interpret their dreams. And he secured 47 per cent of the total vote, 5 million more votes than his father received in 2022. It is remarkable, but Lula – the trade unionist who made Barack Obama jump in a London corridor (“I envy and love this man; he is the most popular politician on Earth”, Obama said at the 2009 G20 summit) – has miscalculated with the new class that emerged from his economic and social miracle.

The votes Lula failed to secure in the first round came mainly from urban outskirts where people are active on social media. Many of them still voted for him in 2022, but this time they opted for the right-wing ‘gunslinger’ model.

Lula still enjoys the full support of the very poorest (Income Group E: 54.4 per cent for Lula and 39.6 per cent for Bolsonaro, source: Superior Electoral Court/IBGE) and has gained votes amongst the educated, high-income groups. He has secured a landslide of votes from the extremes of the political spectrum. However, he has lost the support of those who benefited from the economic boom during his first two terms (Group C: 53.5 per cent for Bolsonaro and 37.2 per cent for Lula).

That large section of the Brazilian population wants to consume more and better; they want to be able to rely on incomes that may be precarious but are higher. These new Bolsonaro supporters are mostly young people, the children of formerly poor families who want to continue their social climb – and they want it to happen quickly. They are not interested in the welfare promised by the PT because the prospect of working hard only to end up as a department manager in a supermarket or a department store by the age of 50 holds no appeal for them. They do not care much about an eight-hour working day, the prospect of a pension, or the right to a month’s paid holiday. They do not wish to be office workers; they do not wish to live as employees. They dream of making it on their own. It is called ‘uberisation’. They tell you, ‘With my Uber, I can work twenty hours a day if I want to and buy a new car; I’m not interested in a permanent job’ – which, in any case, is never really permanent, not anymore, and has not been for a long time.

They are the expression of a new, aspiring middle class with a culturally evangelical outlook and a very strong inclination towards individual entrepreneurship and the idealisation of the market as a counterweight to the inefficiencies of the state. They want money – lots of money – and they are not daunted by the Wild West of ‘every man for himself’, peddled as the ‘Eldorado of opportunity’ by right-wing demagoguery. Which, incidentally, is the only alternative offered by the Brazilian electoral market to the Partido dos Trabalhadores bandwagon, perceived by neo-Bolsonarists as a Jurassic Park for veteran socialists.

One statistic gives an idea of the climate. Last Thursday, the Brazilian Senate passed a bill proposed by the PT to reduce the working week for many sectors to five days. The change affects thirty million people, yet it has failed to gain traction as an issue in the propaganda war ahead of the second round. Bolsonaro won by a landslide in the agribusiness belt – the land of the large landowners – securing not only the wealthy south-east but also the entire soya frontier. Yet he also secured a huge number of votes in the state of São Paulo, the wealthiest region in the whole of Latin America, which alone generates more wealth than the whole of Argentina. São Paulo has never been a Lula stronghold, but in the previous political era, the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) – the traditional right, the business right, the respectable right – used to win there. Now the state of São Paulo is entirely pro-Bolsonaro. Two million of the 3.4 million votes Lula lost have vanished in the south-east.

Never in Brazilian history has a candidate who took the lead in the first round gone on to lose the run-off. Usually, whoever wins the first round in the state of Minas Gerais goes on to win the presidency. This time, the right wing won in Minas. The PT’s stated strategy is to win over the votes of those who abstained, though it is not entirely clear which ones, as the abstention rate was low. The latest poll gives Bolsonaro a two-point lead.