Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro speaks during an event for his re-election campaign in Sao Jose dos Campos, Brazil, on August 18. CARLA CARNIEL (REUTERS)
A few weeks before the presidential elections, the Bolsonarist extreme right feels more nervous every day since the different polls continue to give the candidate Lula up to 12 points difference with chances of winning in the first round.
And now the battle is centered above all on the hunt for religious votes since Brazil is the country with the largest number of Catholics in the world and together with the Evangelicals it is almost 100% Christian.
While Lula today has 52% of the Catholic vote and Bolsonaro with 27%, and vice versa, among the evangelicals the rightist appears with 50% against 32% for Lula.
Hence, those responsible for the president's campaign are focusing on bringing him closer to the Catholic world, at the same time that they are taking advantage of certain slips in Lula's language to fiercely attack him on social networks.
Lula is a Catholic and Bolsonaro already was, but he ended up rebaptizing himself as an evangelical.
This time however he tries to use his first faith to get closer to the Catholics.
So in recent days he attended with his wife Michelle, a fervent evangelical, a Catholic mass in which he received communion.
He was wearing a bulletproof vest and both he and his wife seemed in trouble for following the Catholic rite.
His advisors are now preparing other popular Catholic meetings for him, such as a visit to the sanctuary of Our Lady of Aparecida, the largest and most popular center of devotion for Brazilian Catholics from the richest to the poorest.
And along with that visit, they try to get him to attend a mass at the Christ of Corcovado in Rio, one of the places visited by world tourism, which would be a true media spectacle.
At the same time, Lula seeks meetings with the part of the evangelicals who affirm that they have not yet decided who to vote for.
Hence, her advisers are concerned with some of his slips of language typical of the former unionist but that at this moment are taken advantage of by the Bolsonaristas who are furiously present and aggressive on social networks and who end up misrepresenting said slips.
It was like this when Lula defended women's freedom in matters of abortion, a subject still taboo in Brazil even for Catholics.
Lula ended up retracting it and explained that she tried to say that it was not a religious issue but a public health one.
Referring to the issue of defending gender differences, which is very much alive today in Brazil, Lula let it slip to say that for defending what is politically correct, "Brazil is boring as hell."
And the last slip that is having a lot of repercussion and could make him lose votes from the women who today vote in their vast majority for him has been on the issue of family violence, since in Brazil the number of women killed by hands of their husbands.
Referring to husbands, Lula said: “The man's hand was not made to hit the woman.
If he wants to do it, he should do it somewhere else, not in his house or in Brazil because we are not going to accept it”.
Bolsonaro's hosts to try to win votes from women are hunting for certain phrases by Lula with a macho tone, such as when some of his followers reproached him for having chosen a woman as his successor, his former minister Dilma Rousseff.
Lula replied: "She is more of a man than all of us together."
As happened in 2018, the campaign will focus on social networks where facts are manipulated or falsified and which today are more followed than ever in electoral debates.
For this reason, Bolsonaro's team is searching for Lula's sayings and videos that could compromise him, such as the accusations of corruption in his past governments, to once again make all of this a dirty campaign.
At the same time, Bolsonaro does not present a program that could excite, nor does he have anything to offer as an achievement of his four years in government, considered inside and outside Brazil as a total failure, both economic and foreign policy, and that leaves 30 million Brazilians suffering from hunger or as it is euphemistically said with "food deficiency".
All this coupled with the sword of Damocles on the possibility that Bolsonaro, if he loses the elections, tempts an authoritarian coup supported by a part of the military and the various police forces that support him, while boasting that the people "is his army " and for this reason he wants it as armed as possible, facilitating to the extreme the purchase of weapons for everyone and even freeing imported weapons from taxes. His motto is that "the armed people will never be defeated."
Meanwhile, this duel between Bolsonaro and Lula is creating great concern among psychologists and psychiatrists who note the serious increase in serious depression within families and even among friends of a life that is divided as in a war between Lulistas and Bolsonaristas.
According to psychology experts, this war is dividing families and especially young people and is causing not only serious mental problems but also heart problems with an increase in heart attacks, as reported by Folha de Sao Paulo.
Hence, there is a feeling that this year's presidential elections are considered the most dramatic and enigmatic since the dictatorship until today and that they are followed with alarm inside and outside the country, especially in light of what is happening this time in the countries of the rest of Latin America where, on the contrary, there is a certain disenchantment with the right while new leaders of the left emerge.
It is something that is having repercussions in Brazil where the right fears that with Lula's victory, Brazil would return, according to Bolsonaro, to once again embrace the countries of the extreme left of the continent, something that he continues to see as the kingdom of the devil.
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