A rain of false information and others not so much, but equally provocative fall in these hours on the overwhelmed brazilian electorate on the way to the elections on Sunday and with a crucial stopover in the debate between the two candidates on Friday.
This universe of madness ranges from President Jair Bolsonaro once again warning against the electronic voting system to the appearance of supposed rogue companies that claim to be partners with private banks. These companies warn people on their cell phones that, at the request of the PT, the payment of social aid has been suspended until the winner is determined.
People get angry and run over the banks by phone and networks, which deny the alarming news as best they can.
The Supreme Court approved in these hours agreed on a plan to combat false news whose dissemination it increased no less than 1,600% since the municipal ones two years ago. But it’s not clear what he could do to stop them. Meanwhile, everything is a great mess that contaminates even the denunciations of what is wanted to be combated.
Lawyer Randolfe Rodríguez, one of the two coordinators of the former PT president’s campaign, warned that starting this Wednesday there will be a fake news explosion.
“They are going to mobilize two billion messages that will be sent from platforms abroad,” he said without clarifying sources or officials. Lula, for his part, added concern by suggesting that the internet should be regulated because “there is a lot of evil, a lot of lies” on the networks, which immediately forced him to clarify that it will not go against freedom of the press in a future government.
“Use everything you have at hand”
“There is anxiety and bumps because both sides are nervous, they don’t know what will happen on sunday and they are not going to give in when there are hours left for the definition”, says a diplomat based in Brasilia who does not make distinctions in the behavior of one and the other.
“They’re going to use whatever they have on hand.”, He says. He adds that the worst thing is the risk that the eventual losers believe they were abused.
These last few days have been relatively positive for the PT, which improved at the expense of the mistakes made by Bolsonarism. First, with the case of the president with Venezuelan adolescents, an episode that earned him to be treated as a pedophile in the networks.
The president had said that he was riding a motorcycle in Rio and saw some very young girls dressed as if they were partying, suggesting that they were prostituting themselves. The scandal arose when he said that “painted a climate”, a street expression that alludes to Levante.
For two days he was on the defensive, giving precarious explanations, accompanied by his wife and Juan Guaidó’s ambassador here, remarking that what he wanted to denounce was the misfortune of those girls due to the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro. “I am not a pedophile”he repeated.
The second episode was the very resounding one of former congressman Roberto Jefferson, an ally of the president, who attacked the police with bullets and grenades when they went to arrest him for contempt. He again he was on the defensive.
In the universe of voters, these blows would have reduced the voting intentions of the head of state by one point from 48 to 47% and added another to Lula from 52 to 53%, according to the firm PoderData. But there is a lot of divergence in the percentages and, in addition, the universe to conquer in São Paulo and Minas Gerais, the largest states in the country, where the campaign has been concentrated, shrank.
For some specialists, there are now only 7.5% of voters who did not vote, who did and can change their decision or who are in the micro-segment of the undecided. Are 8.5 million people according to the specialized company Analítica Consultora.
They are a drop in a sea of 156 million eligible to vote (subtract the 32 million who decided to stay home on October 2). It is not, however, a minor goal for Bolsonaro that he needs six million new supporters to turn the polls of the first date and achieve re-election.
The debate
So the ruler’s main bet is the last debate on Friday night in Rio de Janeiro, which is billed as a battle of boxers in a ring with no rules. For this reason, its usefulness is not clear.
“Unless something special happens, those clashes they consolidate voters but do not add new ones”, tells her to Clarion a source from the Supreme Court, a power that is again in dispute with Bolsonaro.
“For Lula it is a problem, he does not feel comfortable at these intersections. He feels that he cannot argue with such a man. In the last meeting two Sundays ago, he attended willing to advance some information about his cabinet, it is what he arranged in training, but he got angry and didn’t say anything”, reveals, in turn, a leader of the opposition conglomerate.
In an attempt to dismember his rival, the PT people went to court to punish him for the Venezuelan issue, but that effort did not advance.
Bolsonaro also seeks to prosecute everything. He has just accused radio stations throughout Brazil of spread more advertisements for Lula da Silva than their own.
Judge Alexandre de Moraes, a former target of presidential criticism, and in charge of the Superior Electoral Court that received the complaint, demanded urgent evidence that he received precariously in the last few hours.
What they are looking for is “to discredit the opponent’s campaign,” he explains to the newspaper Economic value the lawyer specialized in electoral law Renan Albernaz. His colleagues agree.
But there is a dose of gravity in that claim. The party of Bolsonaro did not do it, but the Ministry of Communications, that is, at the highest government level. In the text sent to the court of Moraes, which on Sunday will be the one who endorses the winner of the election, it is argued that “the denounced fact can establish the illegitimacy of the (electoral) process if it is not corrected.”
They look like arguments. The controversial president resumed this week his statements against the electoral system, that is, its legitimacy. “We fought for a long time for a transparent electoral model, but we had no strength to reform it.”
He alludes to the constitutional reform project that he promoted in 2021 to abolish electronic ballot boxes and restore voting through paper ballots like the ones used in Argentina.
He argues that he was the victim of fraud when, he says, he won the presidency in the first round four years ago, but he was forced to run a ballot with Fernando Haddad, the PT candidate at the time, whom he widely defeated.
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