has been growing and today ties or surpasses in several second round simulations. One hypothesis that has been floated about this rapid growth is that the senator has not yet faced the level of hostility that normally accompanies those leading a presidential race.
To check whether there is indeed a narrative ceasefire against Flávio Bolsonaro, Palver analyzed the sentiment around the senator, the former president and the governor of São Paulo, in more than 100,000 public WhatsApp groups in the last three weeks.
Initially, messages that exclusively mentioned each name were isolated, excluding mentions of more than one figure in the same message. In this section, Flávio presents the best balance of the three. Of the messages with a defined position about the senator, 56% are positive and 44% negative. Jair Bolsonaro appears in an almost perfect balance, with half positive and half negative. Tarcísio de Freitas records 40% positive messages compared to 60% negative.
A subsequent analysis examines the intersection between the three names, that is, when more than one figure is mentioned in the same context. Flávio manages to absorb a significant portion of the support that surrounds his father. Of the total positive mentions of Jair Bolsonaro, almost 12% include his son, while only 1.3% of these messages include Tarcísio, which would be expected given the family ties and the declared pre-candidacy.
But in the opposite direction, the hostility towards the former president does not transfer to the pre-candidate in the same proportion. Around 33% of negative mentions of Flávio are associated with his father, a lower proportion than the 41% observed in the case of Tarcísio. This means that the governor of São Paulo, paradoxically, is more associated with negative mentions of Jair than with his own son.
The main criticisms of Flávio come from groups more to the right, focusing on the “cracks” and the senator’s “silence in relation to the “, but he escapes a significant part of the crossfire that affects the other two.
The main criticisms of Tarcísio come both from groups on the left, who exploit the , and from groups on the right, who accuse him of having distanced himself from Bolsonaro and of “representing the interests of the centrão and Faria Lima” to the detriment of the Bolsonaro base.
Just from the data, it is not possible to infer whether there is a clear strategic guideline in the government camp to spare Flávio Bolsonaro. The newspaper revealed that allies of the Lula government are debating internally whether the time has come to intensify the attacks on the senator, with one wing considering that, while there is a possibility of changing the name of the right-wing candidacy, pulling this trigger now could be a miscalculation.
But it is still possible that there is no objective guideline to spare only Flávio from attacks. It is not possible to rule out the hypothesis that he simply arouses less spontaneous rejection than other figures in the conservative field.
In any case, it is curious that Lula’s main opponent in the polls is today the least attacked proportionally on the networks. If the containment is deliberate, it carries the risk of a double-edged sword: at the same time as it can make Flávio viable until the window of decompatibilization, neutralizing Tarcísio in the process, it opens up space for the senator to grow with ease in the first broader contact with the electorate during the pre-campaign. Only time will tell how much this dynamic can be sustained.
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