The polls have slipped again in the elections in Brazil and when half the world had already placed Jair Bolsonaro and his cronies in the scrapyard, it turns out that they are still strong and that they are going to fight thoroughly and, above all, that they have more support from those that the surveys had detected.
The easiest and fastest way is to disparage your followers by saying they voted wrong.
How can they support a president whom some describe as a murderer and whom even a parliamentary commission accused of very serious crimes for his management during the pandemic?
How can they vote for him if, as others observe, he does not stop winking at the Nazis and uses their proclamations, their thuggish ways, their cult of messianic leadership?
Bolsonaro has facilitated the purchase of weapons, has allowed a large part of the Amazon to be destroyed,
relentlessly attacks those who defend the LGTBI collective, it has managed to make a giant like Brazil disappear from the international scene.
How is such nonsense possible?
Well, it turns out that it is.
More than 43% of Brazilians, in this first round, have opted for him to preside over the country.
More than 51 million people have voted for it, it is said quickly and produces concern and also perplexity.
Some data are eloquent.
During the pandemic, nearly 700,000 people died: if Brazil represents 2.7% of the world population, those killed by covid reached more than 10%.
Meanwhile, Bolsonaro despised scientific research, delayed the purchase of vaccines, avoided harsh measures to stop contagion.
About the Amazon: between January and July of this year, the tropical forest lost 3,987 kilometers of vegetation, according to the National Institute for Space Research, which is 10.6% more than during the same period in 2021. It is simply of a few figures.
Some closer, those of the covid, because that nightmare ended up touching the immediate vicinity of almost everyone: a relative, a friend, an acquaintance.
The others, more distant: damage to the environment always seems to happen elsewhere.
Sometimes it is difficult to locate the mechanisms that move people to bet on a specific candidate at the polls.
This time the companies that are dedicated to conducting surveys should not have found the right keys for that vote to emerge, which remained hidden, in the shadows, out of focus.
And it is that when deciding the vote, affections and feelings matter, and emotional gears move that are not always visible: they usually weigh more than arguments and reasons and good intentions.
Fear is one of the most perverse engines, and there are politicians who know how to exploit people's fears very well, and who use messages and masquerades that convey to large layers of the population the feeling of feeling safe.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is going to have a difficult month, even if he comes out ahead.
In a context of so much tension, the most complicated thing is to place the real problems at the center of the debate.
Ghosts are too powerful today.
The challenge is to disarm them.
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