The president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, this week in Brasilia. ADRIANO MACHADO (REUTERS)
The second round of the Brazilian elections has begun with a religious war in which Bolsonaro accuses Lula on the networks of having a pact with the devil while he is accused of flirting with Freemasonry.
All this to dispute the religious vote that could decide the final result.
The two contenders for the head of state have not waited a single day to engage in a fight in order to discredit each other before the large Christian electorate, which is the one that can decide the final result of the elections.
This Tuesday, the feast of Saint Francis of Assisi, Lula took the opportunity to flatter Catholics by posting a prayer on Twitter in which he collects the saint's words: "Where there is doubt, put faith", and appeared in a video with a group of Franciscan friars, while his wife, Janja, held a statue of the saint in her hands.
The candidate of the left confessed to the religious: “I take my religious faith very seriously.
For me, faith is something very sacred.
I take my spirituality very seriously.”
Lula had just been accused on Bolsonarist social networks of having made a pact with the devil and that, if elected, he would close evangelical churches and persecute Catholics, as his friend Daniel Ortega is doing in Nicaragua.
In turn, on Lulista networks, a video has just been dusted off in which Bolsonaro, years ago, speaks in a Freemasonry store, something that scares evangelicals.
The powerful pastor Silas Malafaia immediately came out in defense of Bolsonaro to try to stop a possible rejection by the evangelicals of the president, who is Catholic, but who also had himself baptized again by an evangelical pastor in Israel.
The pastor recalled that Bolsonaro "is the president of all" and that for him attending the Evangelical Church, the Catholic Church, other religions or Freemasonry is his business.
“They are not going to manipulate evangelicals.
Why do these same people refuse to present a video in which Lula appears in a satanic ritual?
The war is open without anyone being able to know if all these accusations and videos are true or staged.
What matters is to demonize, yes, some faithful or others to win the votes of believers, since in Brazil, they make up 90% or more of the population.
On the part of the evangelicals, Bolsonaro's wife, Michelle, a fervent and mystical evangelical who, after having appeared these years rather relegated to the background, has now fully appeared in public on her knees as if possessed by God and that he has fully entered the electoral campaign.
This week, he publicly affirmed that the elections are "a fight of God against darkness" and associated Lula as someone who is "against the word of God", at the same time that he asked attention to his evangelical co-religionists who suffer "a blindness spiritual".
Bolsonaro in turn echoed him with a series of religious references and attributed his election to a "design of God."
And referring to Lula, he affirmed that “the place of a thief is jail”.
Everything is going to serve these weeks of campaign to try to win what they call the "Christian vote", which is totally majority and that it is true that it can condition the result of the contest.
It is known that Catholics overwhelmingly vote for Lula while 80% of evangelicals are fanatical followers of Bolsonaro, who are instructed in the temples in open hatred against what they call the "communists" or the "kingdom of evil".
For the root Bolsonarists, the Catholics have taken over Brazil in which a real battle is being waged between good and evil, between God and the devil.
In this fight to win the religious vote, it already seems clear that anything can go and that a dirty battle of
fake news
will intensify on social networks, in which the Bolsonaristas are masters and who were the ones who decided Bolsonaro's victory in 2018.
The newspaper
O Globo
has highlighted on its front page that a "holy war" has begun in the second round.
A war in which they mutually exchange false news that go "from Satanism to the stigma of Freemasonry in search of the Christian vote".
Everything except worrying about the real, bloody issues that strangle millions of poor people while trying to hypnotize them with the mirage of religion and fears of demons.
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