The relationship between evangelicals and government (PT) has been living up to the maxim that there is nothing bad that it cannot get worse.
made on February 10 and 11 attests to the resilient dissatisfaction of this religious bloc with the petista administration. For 48%, Lula has been doing bad or bad job. Among Catholics, the other great Brazilian religious bloc, rejection reaches 36%.
The general average of dissatisfied in the population is 41%, according to the survey conducted with 2,007 interviewed in 113 municipalities and with a margin of general error of 2 percentage points – in religious cut, it is 3 percentage points between Catholics and 6 points between Evangelicals.
Today, only 2 in 3 evangelicals perceive the government as good or great, and 28% classify it as regular.
The scenario was no longer any brigadeiro sky at the beginning of the term. In March 2023, 35% of believers disapproved of Lulista management, ten points more than in the Catholic niche. The painting embittered even more, leaving petistas with several possible answers to interrogation “Where did I go wrong?”
It is good to remember that the government with the government is not an evangelical prerogative. Women, voters who earn up to two minimum wages and black or brown people, Lula’s electoral trenches, are much closer now.
Disapproval numbers in the female portion, for example, jumped from 26% at the beginning of 2023 to 39% now.
For these are precisely the most common profiles in churches, with their battalions of. And they feel the cost of transport and the increase in food price every day, to cite two factors that soured their opinion about the president.
Added to this one foot behind with Lula cultivated by years of intense antipetist campaign in temples, plus the fake news skills of it. It is as if evangelicals felt that the PT gives reasons to confirm what they already felt in the air, what a good thing would not leave. When our daily bread failed to give today, ready. Fulfilled prophecy.
The PT tries to do the homework, still without many fruits the spoon. Lula endorsed, and his party launched in the election of 2024 to “” manual to guide the communication of militants and candidates with the segment.
Advice that should sound unnecessary of such obvious, as not treating every believer as a synonym for fundamentalist, are valuable in the face of the persistence of stereotypical views on such a plural group – to remember the Baptists, with pastors as divergent as the progressives and, deputy of the PSOL, and the conservatives and, pastor of the church of Michelle Bolsonaro.
Aposes are heard to “go back to the foundations” as a way of occupying peripheries (and the churches pulling in them) co-opted by conservatism. Right. But how? Ignoring expensive issues to progressives, such as abortion and LGBTQIA+rights?
Asking related causes to return to the end of the row of priorities, and push with the belly historical principles of the left? But insisting on them now is a shot in the foot? Better lose the rings than run out of your fingers if so much popular dissatisfaction ends in a far right curd? There are no satisfactory answers to these dilemmas. Hence a certain cockroach in dealing with evangelicals.
The moral agenda, however, is not the only electrode to measure contradiction with the petista government. Ana Carolina Evangelista, political scientist and executive director of Iser (Institute of Studies of Religion), is right in pointing out the impact of a dislocated economy on the life of the middle.
The pocket opposition has already been touched that the lack of picanha on the table is an even more powerful weapon, reinforces evangelist.
“Lula has important communication bottlenecks with this field, and this is not new,” he says. But their relationship of leaps and bounds with the faithful is not only related to errors in this area, according to the political scientist. “He deals with an evangelical field permeated by leaders who were politically radicalized significantly if we compare with 2010, when he left his second term.”
Evangelist says: “This more evangelical Brazil, since then, is part of a more conservative Brazil, and this is happening strongly from the evangelical segment, for reasons that go through theological fundamentalisms, institutional organization and ideological radicalization.”
The recent research reveals that government disapproval increased among women, black and brown, in the lower classes. “At the base of the Brazilian pyramid, therefore. And evangelicals are mostly there. Life has not improved, and overall evaluation reflects that.”
No wonder the opposition is replenishing its arsenal. “It’s no longer about the moral threat that the left or this government would represent, it’s about economics. Less ‘unisex bathroom’ and more pix, bus price and basic basket value.”
The fact that evangelicals are so raw with Planalto Palace for Evangelist, says a lot about “how politics has used religion to inflate Lula’s negative image.” But not only. “It is also about a government that is not delivering results from its economic and social policies to those who needed him to deliver.”
