Opinion – Vinicius Torres Freire: Voters are more determined and have changed a lot since Lula 1

Lula da Silva (PT) was arrested in April 2018. In June, he led Datafolha, with 30% of the votes for president. In second place was “Nobody”, with 21%: that is, the sum of nulls, whites and undecideds. Jair Bolsonaro (PL), then PSL, had 17%.

In the other scenario of the poll, Fernando Haddad was the PT candidate, with 4%. “Nobody” led, with 33%. Bolsonaro was next, with 19%.

It was a bizarre and dismal election. It seems understandable that by the middle of the year, “Nobody” had so many votes, that they would end up having another fate when the country entered a terminal outbreak.

But there were other elections in which there were as many or more null, white and undecided votes in the middle of the year. In the 2022 campaign, the level of electoral abstinence and indecision is the lowest in redemocratization.

Obviously the vote could change until October, but more people took sides earlier. It is one more piece of data to think about what can change the fate of the election, as is the case with the female vote, the greater rejection of Bolsonaro by the poor and blacks or the weight that electoral fraud can have.

It seems obvious, but we still forget how voters have changed since Lula 1. There are continuities, from socioeconomic, political or other experiences. But masses of citizens start to vote or fail to vote, under very different conditions of public debate.

Of the people who are now old enough to vote, almost 40% could not do so or were not even born in 2002, when Lula 1 won. Almost a quarter of the electorate was under 16 when Lula left power in 2010. have a different memory of the “good PT years”. Evangelicals were 15% of the population in 2000, they are over 30% now.

In 2006, the number of cell phones was equivalent to 53% of the population _this does not mean that this was the proportion of Brazilians with cell phones: someone had more than one, someone else had none. In 2018, it was equivalent to 109%; now at 120%.

The number of accounts on social networks rose from 86 million in 2014 to 130 million in 2018 and 171 million in 2022 (data from various sources compiled on the Datareportal website, to be taken with grains of salt).

Lula has 56% against Bolsonaro’s 20% among families earning up to two minimum wages; loses or draws in other income brackets. It’s a “class” election or a poverty revolt, but it’s not a very different story, at least since 2006. Bolsonaro, for the rest, still has 20% of the poor in the worst crisis of the Republic.

As is well known, 36% of men and 21% of women vote for Bolsonaro. It is an expressive difference, even greater than in Lula’s vote in 2002 and 2006, also voted more by men.

“Nobody” (null, white, undecided) had 11% of the votes in this week’s Datafolha, as few as in the June or July elections of Lula 1 (2002) and Dilma 1 (2010).

In the June election of Dilma 2 (2014), “Nobody” had 30%, ahead of Aécio Neves (PSDB). It was a tight and troubled election by the aftermath of 2013 and on the eve of the Great Recession. In FHC’s elections, whites, nulls and undecideds were around 20% in the middle of the year, when the dispute with Lula was tied.

Election is more than “the economy, stupid!”. Voters seem somewhat more determined because the candidates are better known and because of the hateful, “cultural” and economic conflict, which will tear the country as far as the eye can see.

Machismo and other inhumanities affect the vote, as well as the return of the religious question. Various reactionary classes have organized themselves politically, the volatile turmoil of digital politics dominates public conversation, there is almost a generational shift from 2002 to 2022. Election and voting can be more complicated than it looks.