Opinion – Vinicius Torres Freire: Lula’s voter 2022 is no longer one of the PT years

The memory of Lula’s eight good years gives enough votes for the PT member to stay in the lead in the polls, by far, even more so because the last eight years were one of impoverishment that is now degrading into misery, despair and destruction. That’s what the commonplace says, in part with reasonable obviousness.

But who actually remembers or is able to remember the Lullian years? Remember what terms? Why would the past necessarily be more relevant than the promise or excitement of something new? The novelty may even be Lula, but that is not the question.

The electorate is not a stable pool of people with eternal life or unchanging experiences. About 31% of voters who will be able to go to the polls in 2022 were not old enough to vote for Lula 2 in 2006. Almost 23% of the voters in 2022 will not have been of legal age to vote for Dilma Rousseff 1 (2010).

Of course, the younger voters have an idea of ​​Lula, from juvenile or even childhood memories to interpretations that were formed in conversations with family and friends; at work, in some kind of association, in political debate. By the way, this is also the case for the oldest voters, although in another key, based on a more direct experience of life in those years.

Yes, this all still seems so obvious and intuitive. However, the weight of memory is taken for granted, just like that, as well as the contrast between those years of some progress (as were those of FHC) and those of recent horror and destruction. As if, for better or for worse, the electoral possibilities of Lula or others, debates and reinterpretations of the past and an imagination of another future could not be relevant.

It’s like there are no generations. As if the country hadn’t gone through important social changes, which ended up generating voters with other ways of perceiving what will be featured on the political menu in the coming months.

Consider religion, which for various reasons has once again become a central political issue. Shortly before the election of Lula 1, in 2000, evangelicals were 15.4% of the population; in 2010, the end of Lula 2, they were 22.2% (data from the Census). In 2020, they were 31%, according to Datafolha.

This is not to say that those people generically called “evangelicals” line up like cattle to vote for this or that. It just means saying the obvious again and again: that a growing part of the country sees the world with different eyes, with an absorbing faith.

As far as political or social matters are concerned, there were almost no smartphones in 2010. Far fewer people had made it to higher education. The change in work is immense. Does anyone hear talk of trade union centrals? The immense precariat, in turn, does not have a strong organized representation.

The economy and culture of the neo-sertanejo world did not have such strength or social and political representation. Racism, sexism, homophobia and similar violence were not the subject of widespread public debate or open militant hatred as a political tool (yes, the hatred was there, boiling in another way).

Social change does not determine politics, least of all election, of course. They are gears of different sizes, moving at different times, influencing each other in ways that are difficult to discern and even less to predict, to the everlasting misfortune of sociology.

If it just means that the conversation and the possibilities are open, not just for candidacies and programs, open even to marketers that touch sensitive nerves or take advantage of ruinous disorder (Collor, Bolsonaro). The mere inspection of what took place in the year before each election suggests that there may be change, no matter what political accident it may be, but not just.