The advent of China as Latin America’s main trading partner was the most structuring phenomenon in Brazil in the last ten years. While the states of the Southeast dragged themselves into the stagnation of de-industrialization, the Central-West region went through the most transformative phase in its history. The pandemic era is synonymous with GDP growth, strengthening infrastructure and international insertion.
This great divergence can be identified in the cultural and financial universe. The sertanejo specialized in narrating the rebellion of the Midwest against the coastal elites. Banks have returned to serve the rural sector and celebrate the man of the countryside in their campaigns. Faria Lima flaunts its entrepreneurs, but commodity traders are the ones who run the machine.
The region has already expressed its intention to go beyond the defense of sectoral interests and extend its control over national politics at least since 2016, feeding social networks and organizing the evangelical movement.
Conventional wisdom dictated that the Midwest was economically powerful but electorally harmless because of its small demographics. In the imagination, he still refers to images of extensive soy plains and pastures occasionally occupied by tractors and cowboys.
Historians recalled that their leaders never managed to achieve national prominence. Locked in libraries and busy shining on social media, political scientists treated China as a type-ideal and its global rise as a mythological phenomenon, without ever paying attention to its impact on national political geography.
When Tarcísio de Freitas was launched as a candidate, the opposition caricatured him as a carioca alienated from the state of São Paulo. But Tarcísio does not position himself as the postulant of Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo; he is the candidate for Uberlândia and Cuiabá.
Its political platform is to embody the industrial transition in the interior of São Paulo and to enshrine the testimony of the aristocracies of the coffee industry to the sectors that command agribusiness. Historically known for its strong identity, the state of São Paulo is on the way to being dissolved within a macro-region that begins after Campinas and extends to Barcarena as a homogeneous force, the Mega-Central-West.
Regardless of the fate of the largest state of the federation, the coastal, western and Atlanticist elites must assume their peripheral condition within a Central Brazil linked geoeconomically to Asia. A country where there is neither PT nor Prerrô, nor GloboNews, and where Adson and Alana sing that “a harvester is worth more than a Ferrari” and that “Brazil is no longer the country of Carnival […] Brazil is now the country of agriculture”.
In this climate of cultural revolution, giving decisive space in the campaign to Geraldo Alckmin, Simone Tebet and Helder Barbalho is much more than an electoral strategy. It is a sociological imperative. The first round showed that it is necessary to rule with the Mega-Midwest. Otherwise he will rule you.
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
