Contextualizing my international Leftypol brothers:
Lula lost to Flávio Bolsonaro by a 1.8% margin (around 3.5 million votes). Lula will receive around one and a half million votes from the losing parties, while Flávio Bolsonaro will receive two and a half million votes from the parties that lost (this is not certain, just speculation). Around 44 million Brazilians did not vote or cast a blank ballot, so the electoral race for Lula is about winning over these voters in order to win the election.
Flávio Bolsonaro has strong connections with Brazilian evangelical churches, which are a plague that is spreading throughout Brazil's peripheral neighborhoods. Slowly, the number of Brazilian evangelicals has been increasing since the 2000s, along with all that bullshit about the virtue of money and that Americanized mega churches crap.
Besides Flávio Bolsonaro strong connections with evangelical churches, he also has strong support from the Brazilian Army (which has a wet dream of carrying out another coup in Brazil) and foreign support from the United States. So Flávio Bolsonaro's propaganda basically boils down to "stop communism" and "Brazil is going to become Venezuela." This is very appealing to the population (especially those in rural areas), since the great majority are conservative and support traditional values.
The left in Brazil has made some advances. We managed to elect a few left wing deputies and senators, but the majority are more radical than what we had in the past. Candidates such as Jones Manoel, who is a communist, and Giovana Mondardo, who is from the Brazilian Communist Party, won (whether they really are "pure communists" in the eyes of some people is another matter), but it had been a VERY long time since Brazil had elected people who openly call themselves communists to important political positions.
Now, the Lula government, besides going after the votes of non voters, is also running a massive campaign on social media. Basically, Lula is meeting with young figures from the left that win the elections (most generation Z) at the Planalto to discuss new methods of attracting votes through social media. There are already hundreds of profiles on platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, and Kwai posting anti-Bolsonaro propaganda aimed at boomers. On top of that, Lula is calling on his supporters to take to the streets during this electoral race, and his supporters are encouraging graffiti, wheatpasting around cities and busy areas with posters defaming Flávio Bolsonaro.
Flávio Bolsonaro continues with the same strategy that allowed him to pull ahead of Lula.
>>2927550The history of northeastern Brazil is kind of complicated but VERY interesting, so I'll try to summarize it for you:
Northeastern Brazil was deliberately kept poor by the governments of the 1930s and 1940s, essentially being treated as a rural region for growing sugar cane and other crops. So, as a political project, the people were kept in hunger and misery for generations by latifundiary's, which resulted in a rural exodus of northeasterners to large cities such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Lula himself went through this. Based on this history and his strong cultural connection with the Northeast, Lula managed to create a very strong electoral base there. Lula and the PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores - Workers' Party) are part of the popular imagination of the average northeast citzen, representing a hardworking, honest man who came from the same shitty hole as them and became president. In addition, Lula implemented various industrialization and education policies in the Northeast, which only made him even more popular there.
The right wing secured 22 seats in the Senate, while the left won 8. We elected 124 left wing federal deputies, 12 being far-left.
The Senate has 81 seats and the Chamber of Deputies has 513 seats. The rest are either center or right wing.
So even if Lula wins, it will be a very difficult term to negotiate with Congress, especially since he is a social democrat.
Basically, that's it.