The left and right even agreed on one thing when they rushed to social media to thunder about the event called by the deputy (PL-SP) in Brasília, on Sunday (25): it is God in control.
Whether He was for or against the protesters will depend on which side you are on in this ideological tug-of-war.
Among the group that dislikes the former president (PL), irony and criticism abounded. A joke that was successful on the internet, for example, says that it is impossible for an atheist not to convert after what would be irrefutable proof of divine power.
Parliamentarians in the field, in general, adopted a demanding tone. The deputy (PSOL-SP) said that Nikolas ignored “the sky conditions”, including the presence of children on a day of such meteorological adversity. “Between protecting his supporters from a storm or losing his political timing, Nikolas chose to put people at risk in the name of personal and electoral gains.”
The leader of the Chamber, , also accused his colleague of irresponsibility.
The Bolsonaro troops adopted different strategies to comment on the climate accident, which quickly became another chapter of polarization in the country.
The effort has been to neutralize any negative symbolic reading. The federal deputy (-RJ) was at the protest at the moment the lightning struck, when “the ground shook, a noise, an incredible sound”, as he described it.
The episode, in his analysis, was proof that God is good all the time if you are fighting for the right cause. To illustrate his point, he asked everyone to “take a peek at what happens” when lightning strikes something.
Crivella then showed a video in which a man laments the death of 66 heifers who were victims of one of these electrical discharges. The deputy anticipated the question that he considered inevitable: “People say: hey, if you are from God, why did lightning strike at the demonstration?”
He responded by recalling biblical passages that tell how Jesus calmed a storm while crossing the Sea of Galilee. Between “high waves” and “strong winds”, when his disciples “thought they were going to die”, the Christian messiah knew that everything would work out. “God protected us as he protected Jesus in the storm,” said the deputy, who is the nephew of Bishop Edir Macedo.
The senator (Republicanos-DF) was another who turned to the Bible to justify Sunday’s climate chaos. “As the word in Ezekiel says: ‘I will bring down; there will be showers of blessings'”, he wrote on a social network. “This mob is the answer that we will no longer accept the yoke of those who try to steal the innocence of our children and destroy our values.”
Senate colleague, Magno Malta (PL-ES) took another discursive line. He shared an animation that reenacted, with high drama, what happened at Sunday’s event. “The lightning wasn’t the worst thing that happened there”, says the film’s narrator.
At one point, while protesters in the background fight for their lives, tables with people dressed in a red PT shirt toast with champagne. The idea is to portray the left as insensitive to a potentially fatal scenario. “Commemoration is not about ideology, it is about character.”
The Baptist pastor, with a doctorate in religious sciences, says that using faith for political purposes generates important symbolic capital. “It is not without reason that Nikolas, strategically, stated throughout the entire route of his march that it was an action of God, an expression of the divine will.”
The lightning incident, however, caused what Terra calls “a true theological tilt”, since similar events are usually interpreted, in religious imagination, as divine punishment. “In the Bible there are narratives in which God punishes with rain and lightning.”
See an excerpt from the book of Samuel, from the Old Testament, which talks about how “the Lord thundered with great thunder upon the Philistines, and so terrified them that they were defeated before Israel.”
To maintain the coherence of the speech, according to Terra, some of the supporters adjusted the narrative using the old idea of spiritual battle. “In other words, evil powers would have used nature to retaliate against God’s servants who were fighting against evil.”
By interpreting the tragedy as God’s punishment, seriously or mockingly, the left sought to question the actions of opponents, says the pastor.
For him, both sides take risks by using the name of God to legitimize interests. “It goes beyond the reasonable line to assert that God punished the protesters. Making this type of superficial association is opening the door to absurdity, as it would allow all tragedies that affect political opponents to be treated as divine judgment.”
