André Janones’ messianic entry into Lula’s campaign says a lot about the historic challenge of the big traditional parties in adapting to the world of social networks. However, Janones, in addition to being an important recruit, is also a new character in the history of digital communication. This one had as protagonists engineers, magicians and delinquents, but never an influencer.
When Robby Mook took over Hillary Clinton’s digital communications in 2016, many still believed that social media could help expand and consolidate democracies, underpinning Obama’s campaigns. His defeat to Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s strategist, revealed to the world the nefarious potential of this new infrastructure. The digital militancy idealized by Carlos Bolsonaro is just the best-known face of dozens of experiments in democratic subversion that fuel religious, ethnic and political violence around the world with the passive complicity of large technological groups.
In 2017, Emmanuel Macron indicated that it was possible to contain Marine Le Pen with republican digital communication and prevent other European countries from following the path of Italy, captured by the 5 Star Movement, created from scratch by a programmer, Gianroberto Casaleggio, and a blogger, Beppe Grillo. The most attentive will remember that Macron’s strategist, Guillaume Liegey, paraded through São Paulo in 2017 as the savior who would take the third way out of paper.
Other moderate politicians, such as Joe Biden, preferred to stay away from social networks, opting to reinforce traditional communication and bet on local radios. In the end, it was the movements more to the left, inspired by Pablo Iglesias’ Spanish Podemos, that tried to develop an alternative model of digital communication. Guilherme Boulos’ municipal campaign in 2020 showed that it was possible to create a progressive universe in Brazilian networks.
Bannon, Mook, Casaleggio, Bolsonaro and Liegey shared the ambition to command the networks from the outside, while Janones is a creation of the interactions of these networks. Unlike all of them, his legitimacy as a political actor derives from the success of his own digital character.
Janones’ first test will define the rest of his career and, possibly, the fate of the election. His mission is to prevent Bolsonaro’s digital militancy from transforming aid benefits into votes for Jair Bolsonaro. With the threat of a coup on the 7th of September, the president tries to structure the campaign between two realities —the struggle for democracy and the real economy— that do not dialogue with the same electorate. It was precisely in this way, positioning herself as the defender of purchasing power against a president obsessed with the “defense of democratic values” in the Ukrainian War, that Le Pen threatened Macron’s re-election in 2022. The coming weeks will tell whether Janones will win. a place in the history of digital communication.
