That () needs, many people agree. The president is just not completely convinced about the best approach to this.
Having completed half of his third term, Lula made some gestures towards the segment that has been giving him consistently bad reviews. Even so, assistants point out that he has difficulty recognizing the scale of the problem and does not really like the idea of formulating a specific message for the group.
Since the president says he is convinced that he is capable of speaking to all Brazilians, regardless of religion. It is up to their supporters to try to open direct channels with this Christian bloc, which has already given the majority of votes to the PT member in the past.
Lula avoided setting evangelical agendas as much as possible during a race of high religious caliber, with () kissing hands to pastors. His team organized two meetings, one in the first round and another in the second, with progressive leaders friendly to the PT, but with little capillarity in the temples.
Some scenes from the 2000s, when he presided over the country for eight years, may seem unusual today. The pastor appeared in his electoral propaganda in 2002, Senator Magno Malta (PL-ES) extolled a “victorious story” of life, Bishop Edir Macedo was committed to the election of his protégé.
The Bolsonaro years, with an intense anti-PT crusade in the churches, helped to calcify a grudge against Lula among the faithful. Surveys indicate that, even outside the aggressive context of the election, this portion remains refractory to the PT member.
The government’s positive assessment did not worsen. In March 2023, 28% of evangelicals said the government was great or good. Now it’s 26%.
The problem for Lula occurs at the other end. The percentage of believers who classify the management as bad or terrible went from 35%, at the beginning of the term, to 43%. The margin of error for this religious group varied from four to five percentage points in the surveys.
“There is a deep-rooted distrust among evangelicals, fueled by the way many churches have mobilized narratives of fear about the left,” says lawyer and sociologist Juliana Maia Victoriano, who researches religion and social movements.
But it is necessary to reverse a certain paralysis that hinders the expansion of a “debate directly with the evangelical base”. This bench, she points out, is not a mirror of this population stratum, which is much blacker, poorer and more feminine than the congressmen who represent it in Brasília.
“Recognizing this plurality is essential for the government to be able to create spaces for dialogue in local contexts, without being exclusively focused on a strategy that dialogues with parliamentarians”, says Victoriano. “Obviously, they have votes that can harm the government’s agenda. But, as these disputes also happen at the base, the government gains bargaining power.”
“The articulation with parliamentarians from the bench has advanced”, says pastor Luis Sabanay, from the PT’s Nucleus of Evangelicals. Not that heaven is a brigadeiro. “Conservative sectors still resist, influenced by polarizing speeches.”
The second year of Lula 3 marked a route adjustment. In the internal assessment, the left’s communication difficulties with the churches are notorious. On the one hand, the obstacle is attributed to a right-wing fake news factory against the PT. On the other hand, he admits that the left lost its ties with a periphery that ended up forging deep community ties with evangelical denominations.
It could be worse. Lulista assistants celebrate their rapprochement with federal deputy Otoni de Paula (MDB-RJ), a former Bolsonaro supporter who two years ago said he would welcome PT militants “by the bullet”.
In October, he led , which sanctioned the creation of National Gospel Music Day on the day. Otoni is now trying in 2025. Planalto is rooting for this outcome.
The deputy maintains a generic criticism of the left, but today he says that it is not his place to “swear Lula”.
For Otoni’s opponents, there is a blatant physiological disposition in his behavior. Lula’s advisors are relieved to see the rebuilding of bridges between the faithful and the government.
“The difficulty was greater”, summarizes the Baptist Jorge Messias (Attorney General of the Union), rare on the Esplanada. “If we did something artificial, we would have had more obvious advances, but that’s not what we believe in. A natural, spontaneous relationship takes longer, but has longer-lasting results.”
In 2023, members of the first echelon organized meetings, coordinated by Messias, to present research that sought to track the government’s challenges in this field.
The issues mapped are old ones known to the left: a barrier to moral issues and the resistance of evangelicals to identity politics, for example. Now, the government is more restricted to “occasional actions”, in the words of a Lula advisor.
In the first half of the year, there was an advertising campaign to extol government achievements. In the municipal election, the PT launched , to improve dialogue with believers.
Sabanay, the pastor linked to the acronym, cites Believe, a program that provides lines of credit for those who want to undertake “and which had the participation of more than 70 churches”, in addition to symbolic attitudes, such as recognizing the days of Gospel Music and Evangelical Pastor and Pastor.
He remains in the Executive in front of a PEC that expands the tax immunity of churches, presented by the federal deputy (Republicanos-RJ), nephew of Edir Macedo.
The direction of this relationship for the next two years is still uncertain. “We are not going to be guided by the logic of political instrumentalization of anyone’s faith”, says Messias. “The government’s motivation is not to remove Bolsonaro from the pulpit and place Lula. The objective has always been to have Jesus in the pulpit.”
