Evangelicals resist Lula

Lula had never made such a great effort to win the vote of the powerful evangelical churches until his third term as president, as he demonstrated throughout the electoral campaign.

So far, however, they are giving him bigger headaches than the military whom the president knows would have preferred Bolsonaro.

With the ex-president of the extreme right, the military would have privileges in the Government.

In the last electoral campaign, Lula moved like never before to attract the millions of evangelicals, a third of the population in Brazil, who always resisted him, to the point that he came to surprise the Catholics, who were always his best electorate. in the religious field.

And he did it even with some grumbling from the most radical wing of his party, the PT.

Lula hoped after his approach to the evangelical churches that once elected he could count on them.

She immediately began to touch on a subject that was always very sensitive to them: the tax cut, something that Bolsonaro did not stop doing from day one.

The difficulties of the new president with the evangelicals began immediately when the founder of the powerful Universal Church, the bishop, Edir Macedo, asked his millions of followers in a video: "I forgive you, Lula, for all the evil you did to the country ”.

The president of the PT, Gleisi Hoffmann, did not make herself begged and replied that the one who should ask God for forgiveness was he with the propagation of her lies.

The truth is that the illusion this time of Lula himself of having managed, during his campaign, to soften the evangelicals who would end up by his side, was immediately revealed as a mirage.

Evangelicals accounted for a third of the electorate and all the efforts made by Lula to convince them that he would treat them better than Bolsonaro were of little use.

As Luísa Marzullo writes today in the newspaper

: "The recent calls from the PT to the political wing of Universal were not enough for Lula's government to approach the church."

And this was already quite clear during the campaign during which the Universal Church was hard on Lula directly.

Already chosen, the weekly of said Universal Church, with 1.7 million copies and which is the one that creates opinion among the millions of the faithful, wrote: “Lula is not a novelty as the PT is not.

We already know the way of governing of him who bankrupted the country and was responsible for the biggest corruption scandal known ”.

But perhaps what should have hurt Lula the most is that said weekly affirmed that the new president "is not interested in the poor", when precisely this his third term is overwhelmed in the fight against poverty and inflation.

The Universal Church, perhaps because it wants the new government to favor it even more, has loaded its inks in its accusations against Lula and it did so a few weeks before the election when it was asked on the front page of the magazine Folha Universal: "

Lula He has a reputation as a thief.

He implied to his readers that the left should not return to power.

Lula is doing better with the military, although they have hinted that they would have preferred him not to return to power.

Lula is being a good strategist in his relations with the Army forces and from the beginning he opened a dialogue precisely with the most conservative and right-wing military, which is giving him results.

He has stolen from Bolsonaro the strategy of intensifying his agendas in military acts and has wanted to know right away what interested the high command of the Army the most.

To do this, he has commissioned the vice president, the moderate Geraldo Alckmin, to learn closely what is most urgent for the three Army corps.

In addition to Alckmin, several ministers are already in contact with the high military to find out what they would like from Lula's new term.

This Thursday, Lula had lunch with admirals of the Armed Forces for three hours and assured them that he is going to invest, for example, in frigate and submarine programs and in uranium enrichment research.

Lula knows very well that one of the dreams of the Army is that Brazil can belong to the range of countries that have the atomic bomb as a symbol of power.

For this reason, he is making efforts to participate and even direct the negotiations to stop the war between Russia and Ukraine, something that he will address soon in his already announced visit to China, although said mediation is proving more difficult for him than he himself imagined.

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