From Brasília
Lula y Neymar they play a separate party in these elections. Six million Brazilians, the highest audience for a podcast since the beginning of the campaign, attended the program during which the candidate of the Workers’ Party (PT) said that the star of the national team supports Jair Bolsonaro as a way to pay the president debt forgiveness with the State that dates back to the criminal maneuvers for the move from the Santos club to Barcelona in Spain.
The player’s backing is not insignificant propaganda capital, and the far right candidate He called his followers again to vote for him in the ballotage on October 30, wearing the team’s number “10” shirt.
The advertising spot broadcast on radio stations throughout the country cites the support sent by the attacker in a video recorded from France where he plays for Paris Saint-Germain, while preparing for the World Cup in Qatar.
Ten days before the ballotage Already a month and a half of the World Cup the move rehearsed by Bolsonaro and Neymar so far has failed to dethrone Lula.
The PT player is still the favorite, although with less advantage, according to the latest Datafolha survey published on Wednesday night.
Lula adds 49 percent of voting intentions against 45 percent of his opponent from the Liberal Party (PL), which is rising in the latest polls.
Commenting on those numbers Lula admitted today that “they are narrowing the gap but we are still going to win the elections, it seems impossible to me that they can overtake us in the little over a week that remains”.
Vote bought?
“I am not upset with Neymarhe has every right to choose whoever he wants to be president,” Lula commented, adjusting the collar of his light blue shirt without a tie and smiling mischievously, during the interview with the popular Flow Podcast.
“I think Neymar is afraid that if I win the elections it will be known how much money Bolsonaro forgave him from income tax, it is obvious that Bolsonaro made an agreement (…) Neymar is also having tax problems there in Spain”.
“But all of this is a problem of the federal collection secretariat and not mine,” Lula continued, in Tuesday’s report, implying that his government will not be an accomplice, like the current one, of the millionaire evasion in addition to possible money laundering through front companies.
The player’s problems have been dragging on for almost a decade when he was transferred from Santos to Barcelona, for a sum much higher than that indicated in the contract. The declared amount was 57 million euros when the real value would have been 83 million, according to estimates by Catalan prosecutors.
Vote like a blanco
The famous Mano Brown, Lula’s voter, and an expression of cultural resistance in the favelas, apparently liked Neymar’s support for the ex-military man’s re-election little or not at all. In a show offered two weeks ago, the leader of the band Racionais MCs asked that “blacks” vote without forgetting the racism and social exclusion of which they are victims.
Fan of Santos, Brown was dispatched against ex-santista Neymar, when he regretted that “in Brazil blacks who get rich attack other blacks and they vote against other blacks, that’s the rule.
Bolsonarista
The adhesion of the talented attacker to the extreme right began to be glimpsed in 2019 when his father was received by Bolsonaro and the Minister of Economy, Paulo Guedesto deal with debts with the treasury and fines for late payment.
After that alleged influence peddling by the president, another approach would come. Bolsonaro expressed solidarity with the player whom a young Brazilian woman accused, backed by a video, of statutory rape in a Parisian hotel in mid-2019.
Parties
Later, during the pandemic of the coronavirus that cost the lives of 687 thousand people the player organized marathon parties in a mansion on the coast of Rio de Janeiro from where he joined the government campaign against social isolation.
This political-sports complicity was consolidated in 2021 in one of the crudest phases of the illness, when Brazil organized the Copa América due to the withdrawal of Argentina and Colombia.
Neymar adopted a low profile, oblivious, while several of his teammates expressed concern about the event conceived as an occasion to exacerbate soccer nationalism, in the image of what the dictatorship did with the conquest of the 1970 World Cup.
The green-and-yellow party imagined by Bolsonaro was not such, since Brazil with Neymar would be defeated 0-1 by Argentina, with Lionel Messi, in the final played at the Maracana.
With all this setback, it did not make a dent in a well-designed strategy of associating the crack and the national team shirt with the iconography of neo-fascism.
The “scratch” jacket had already been the preferred clothing in the coup marches of 2015 and 2016 that led to the deposition of President Dilma Rousseff.
Steve Bannon campaigning?
With six presidential campaigns behind him, Lula does not lose his cool in the countdown to a runoff with an uncertain outcome against an adversary capable of resorting to any maneuver to stay (and perpetuate himself?) in power.
The official propaganda It has used soccer and Neymar, but above all fake news and religion, it turned out to be very “effective” and “we were not prepared” to repel it, the former president commented today.
Yesterday the president’s wife, Michelle Bolsonaro, dressed in the yellow shirt asked an audience of evangelicals to vote for her husband to avoid the return of demonic forces.
If in 2018 Bolsonaro’s victory was built with the advice of the North American publicist Steve Bannon, exconsultor de Donald Trump, Based on lies fired en masse by social networks, this technology of deception became more powerful when it was reinforced with State resources and the creation of the “cabinet of hate”, installed in the Planalto under the direction of Carlos Bolsonaro, one of presidential children.
People seem possessed by this discourse, a “rabid right” has emerged, incapable of discerning between what is real and what is fictional, Lula pointed out.
There are even “rumors circulating that Steve Bannon’s people came to Brazil in the last week to help our adversary,” the PT leader concluded on Thursday.