A kitchen assistant from Peruíbe stopped following politics because she felt saturated with information and has not yet decided whether she will vote again for (PL’s) family.
An evangelical chief from the Baré ethnic group in the Middle Rio Negro sees resources slip away from his people, management after management, and refuses the categories that politics tries to impose on him.
A commercial supervisor from São Paulo observed () becoming the president’s vice president (PT) and concluded that politicians unite while dividing their voters.
A cartoonist from Rio de Janeiro feels “cancelled” by all sides after supporting Bolsonaro in 2018 and refusing to take sides in 2022.
These are some of the people who Sheet listened to understand what Brazilians think who have not yet decided who they will vote for in the next presidential elections.
The most recent round shows that 3% of voters do not know who to vote for in a first round scenario with Lula, the senator (PL) and the governor of Paraná, Ratinho Junior (PSD), among others. The portion is equivalent to 4.7 million people, according to the latest estimates from the (Superior Electoral Court).
That’s more people than the difference that gave Lula victory in the last election. In 2022, the PT member won the second round with 50.9% of valid votes, against 49.1% for Bolsonaro. Lula got 60.3 million votes against 58.2 million for the then president, a difference of 2.13 million.
In the March survey, Lula and Flávio appear technically tied in second round simulations.
Those interviewed see more similarities between Lula and the imprisoned and ineligible former president’s clan than differences. They describe both sides as lacking concrete proposals. They narrate the feeling that public policies achieve little, no matter the management.
“Year in and year out, it’s always the same promises and nothing changes,” says commercial service leader Magali Barros.
The undecided also make an equivalence between Lula’s arrest and Jair’s, despite the different contexts: Lula spent 580 days in Curitiba between 2018 and 2019 due to a Lava Jato conviction, later annulled by the ; Bolsonaro is serving his sentence after being found guilty of the 2022 coup plot.
“Four of our former presidents were arrested. What morality do we have? If the pyramid at the top is corrupt, then it is the system”, says chief Baré Rui Leno Macedo de Moraes.
The 2022 second round, between Lula and Bolsonaro, was the fiercest in the country’s history. It was also the first time that Brazil saw a former president running against the then head of the Executive.
“It wasn’t the election of rejection, it was the election of consolidated evaluations of the administrations that both made, naturally opposing evaluations”, says political scientist Antônio Lavareda.
Some of those consulted by Sheet they even voted for the PT member or the retired captain, but they point out different reasons that they say will prevent the repetition of the position.
The PT is simultaneously the most loved and most hated party in the country. It reached 30% of Brazilians’ party preference, but accumulated unparalleled rejection on the right.
For Lavareda, Lula’s time on the public scene explains part of the phenomenon. “Lula has been a candidate for seven elections. Before that, he was the protagonist in at least two more. Someone who doesn’t like Lula and sees him at the ballot box again becomes angrier,” he says.
The legacy of the Bolsonaro clan faces a different problem. Flávio inherited his father’s brand, but not the conditions that elected Jair in 2018. The senator carries his surname and also the weight of his own scandals.
“Maybe this outsider is no longer Flávio Bolsonaro, who is a guy who gets involved in ‘rachadinha'”, says political scientist João Feres Júnior, professor at Uerj (State University of Rio de Janeiro).
The undecided people are mostly women and live in the interior, data from Datafolha shows. “Women think more and take longer to consolidate their vote, a little less affected by emotional factors”, says Lavareda.
Next, the profiles of the ears Sheetwhich will be monitored until the election.
Ednilza Jacinto de Oliveira, 53, arrived in Peruíbe, on the south coast of São Paulo, a few months ago, coming from Cubatão. He works as a kitchen assistant, doesn’t have a television at home and gets information through social media. She was now more engaged — she participated in a women’s association in Cubatão, followed campaigns. But “life situations” and the volume of information were moving politics away from everyday life. “Too fast, too much information, so I don’t follow.”
In the Single Registry, it says that Bolsa Família helps, but is not enough: it believes that Brazilians deserve real training for the job market.
He says he would vote for Jair Bolsonaro, who he “already knows”. He doesn’t know about his son Flávio: he’s never seen projects. In Lula, he recognizes specific improvements, but thinks that “it could have improved a lot for many people”. “I need to make a decision by then. There’s little time left, right?”
Businessman Renato Lucas da Silva, 60, has been manufacturing plastic packaging in a small company in São José dos Campos (interior of SP) for more than two decades. He defines his political history as a sequence of bets and disappointments. He believed in Fernando Henrique Cardoso (PSDB) when the Real Plan tamed inflation — and saw the same president “lose his hand” in the exchange rate crisis that followed.
He bet on José Serra (PSDB) for advances in the area of generic medicines and saw his candidate fail at the polls. He voted for Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 and was disappointed with the government’s stance on the pandemic. He saw João Doria face Bolsonaro and bet on the Butantan vaccine — and disappear from politics soon after.
For a long time I flipped through all the subscription news channels until I realized I was “going crazy”. It stopped. Today he watches from afar. “I have no inclination to vote for anyone who is derived from Lula, nor Bolsonaro. Adding the two, for me, zero tendency.”
Resident of Rio de Janeiro, André Guedes, 45, came to indecision due to regret. Political cartoonist who makes a living from his own YouTube channel, he creates the scripts, drawings and all the characters’ voices himself.
In 2018, he says he “fallen into the nonsense” of voting for Jair Bolsonaro and, three to four months after the start of the government, he was already a critic. He lost followers, was canceled by the Bolsonarist militancy and, in 2022, refused to take sides.
“For the people who criticize me, I’m to blame for Bolsonaro and I’m to blame for Lula too,” he said. Today he follows the MBL with sympathy, but without support. He has reservations about what he calls “right-wing sealing”.
Sandra Roque, 50, has worked with franchises in São Paulo for over 25 years. She is divorced, mother of two already graduated children — one from the convinced right, the other more open to the left. Politics divides the table at home.
“I’m proud to be Brazilian. I’m not proud of Brazilian politicians,” she says.
The trajectory of former governor Geraldo Alckmin (PSB) is one that most disconcerted her: she saw him as a serious politician until the moment he became Lula’s deputy. “He joined the PT, I said oops, the guy can’t open his mouth. He really is a jerk.”
What was left was the feeling that polarization did not come from people, but was imposed on them. “It was the politicians who divided us, who put it in our heads that one is crazy and the other is a little crazier. But we are good people.”
Rui Leno Macedo de Moraes, 37, is a chief of the Baré ethnic group in Barcelos, on the Middle Rio Negro, in Amazonas, and vice-president of the Xoromawe Association, which represents around 1,800 Baré, Yanomami and Baniwa families. Grandson of an extractivist, he started working at the age of 9.
Public policies, in his assessment, achieve little — on both sides. When they don’t come from the government, he looks for other ways. “If we can’t do it via the government, we will do it via the private sector, via NGOs, via the movement itself.” Refuses polarization. “I’m the one who wants to be in the middle, I want to join Lula, I want to join Bolsonaro, let’s eat everyone together here and that’s it.”
He voted for Bolsonaro in 2018 and 2022. In previous years, he was divided between PT and PSDB candidates.
Psychologist Agda Abreu, 42, lives in Senhor do Bonfim, in the semi-arid region of Bahia, where she works in her office, in schools and administers psychotests. She grew up in Salvador, the daughter of a federal civil servant, and moved to the interior shortly after graduating.
It was in mental health care in the public network that he started voting for the left. “I was always on the left side, but I wasn’t for the party, I was very much for the candidate.” She doesn’t evaluate Lula’s third term well, and the polarization bothers her on both sides. “I find all of this very sickening. I see two candidates with glaring emotional problems and a herd is following them, thinking it is the only right thing, without critically evaluating it.”
He says that it was in the interior that he realized the power of politics. “Things here are much more inflamed,” he says.
Having lived in the center of São Paulo for 30 years, Magali Barros, 51, has lived in the city under mayors from different political spectrums. “Year in and year out, it’s always the same promises, always the same things and nothing changes,” says she, who is a customer service leader at a pet products company.
He works on a 6×1 scale, enters in the afternoon and leaves around midnight.
Magali voted for Lula in his first term and thought it was “perfect”. In the second, he saw the same man “become corrupted”. He voted for Bolsonaro and finds the 27 years in prison for the coup plot excessive — “it was unfair to him”, he says. Sympathy for the former president coexists with rejection for his son. “I’ve never been like him. He really wants to look like his father. But it has nothing to do with it.”
In the family, half are PTs and try to convince them; she resists.
Retired professor Almir Barros Costa, 72, remembers each political disappointment with precision: Collor, FHC, Temer. From the first, there is the frustration of those who believed in a president who sold himself as educated and prepared. “Good ideas, but at the end of all that cake with that minister Zélia [Cardoso de Mello, da pasta da Economia, que anunciou o confisco da poupança em 1990]”, these.
FHC doesn’t forget one sentence: “He called retirees bums.” Michel Temer was left with the “central model” which, in his opinion, never really changed.
He voted for Ciro Gomes (PDT) in 2018. He has no sympathy for the Bolsonaro family. In Lula, he sees little concrete change in management. The retiree wants radical change in the system. So far, no one has appeared to embody her.
José Marques, 65, farmer in Bocaiuva, in the north of Minas Gerais, needs to improvise when the field does not yield. He tried app deliveries, but gave up — there were 150 deliveries a day, all at his expense, with no room for unforeseen events. “Your car can’t break down,” he said.
An evangelical, he has reservations about discussing politics in the church, where positions tend to the right, according to him. “There’s always someone who doesn’t understand anything and wants to argue with me.” The wait for an alternative has been going on for decades.
He shared with the report a video in which a podcast presenter discussed what the “system” would be — a network of influences between politicians, communication companies and large banks, according to the program.
“I always hear that ‘this is the system’, that ‘no one changes the system’, but can someone explain to me what this system is?”
Nissen Cabral Jr., 65, deals daily with land conflicts in Dourados (MS), where he lives and works in surveying and agrarian law. He follows politics on radio and TV because he distrusts social media.
The region where he lives is conservative. “The colonel chooses for you”, he summarizes. The family is divided — some think “on the extreme side”, he says — and he avoids the subject so as not to strain relationships.
He admires Fernando Henrique Cardoso (PSDB) and evaluates Lula positively, but disapproves of the president’s recent statements which, in his opinion, harm Brazil’s image abroad. He wants a new candidate — a diplomat, someone with “polished rhetoric” and a clean record, capable of building a coalition.
“My atomic bomb is my vote.”
Adriano Alves and Caio Reis collaborated
