A Sheet He heard again, three months later, from the undecided voters he interviewed in March to find out how they evaluate the presidential race so far. The campaign has not officially started yet, but the pre-campaign has already produced new frustrations, useful vote calculations and expectations that the debates will help separate promise from viability.
Among five interviewees heard again, indecision changed form. There are those who say they would annul their vote if the election were held today, those who support (PT) in defense of democracy, those who consider voting for the PT member against their will and those who see the senator (-RJ) as the most viable alternative to defeat the current government.
“I think that, in the end, I will end up voting for Lula, but with a little revolt because of education,” says retired teacher Almir Barros Costa, 72, from Salvador. He claims he would annul the vote if the election were held today. He rejects (Novo) and (PSD) and does not see in Flávio the moderation he expected.
Almir returned to teaching in the state network of Bahia and places education at the center of his evaluation. He reports full classrooms, difficulty in commanding respect, an open court and structural problems at the school. “The country’s education is bankrupt,” he says. The criticism falls on local governments and Lula, but it is not enough, for now, to lead him to vote for the right.
In São Paulo, Sandra Roque, 50, also returned to where she started. A commercial supervisor, she came to lean towards Zema when the former governor of Minas Gerais opposed the (Supreme Federal Court), but says she was disappointed by what she considers to be a lack of firmness: “he’s a piece of cake”. Days after the Minas Gerais native had harshly criticized Flávio due to the leaked audios in the case, the two met again and toasted, in a relationship that could be considered unstable.
Regarding (PL’s) son, Sandra says she doesn’t know to what extent she can trust “a roller coaster”.
The supervisor follows radio, TV and talk shows, but claims that no name gave her clarity. He rejects Caiado (), knows little about (Mission) and says that, if the election were held tomorrow, he would cancel it. “I’m not going to be the firefighter or the one who’s going to throw gasoline,” he says.
Surveyor Nissen Cabral Jr., 65, from Dourados (MS), says he can vote for Lula, but not because he adheres to the government. The choice, he says, involves defending democracy, the Constitution, the Supreme Court and freedom of the press. “I’m going to define my vote in the first national debate”, he says.
Nissen has reservations about the government’s fiscal policy and is uncomfortable with what he sees as a “package of kindness” in an election year. A self-employed professional who works in land regularization, he claims to have felt a drop in demand for his services in recent months. Even so, he sees Lula as the only name, among those who have appeared so far, capable of sustaining the democratic order.
In Amazonas, Rui Leno Macedo de Moraes, 37, chief of the Baré ethnic group, made the opposite move. In March, he said he refused the categories imposed by polarization. Now the positioning is different. “I would vote for Flávio, straight in the first round, to increase the chance of winning”, he states. The decision does not come from enthusiasm, but from the perception that federal public policies do not reach the indigenous base it represents.
Rui claims to like Renan Santos’s forcefulness and sees administrative experience in Zema, but considers that both have little electoral strength. He also approves of Flávio’s efforts to strengthen the fight against and , a theme that he associates with the advancement of factions in the region where he lives.
“I have so much going on in my life that I didn’t have the mind to think about politics”, says Ednilza Jacinto de Oliveira, 53, a kitchen assistant in Peruíbe, on the coast of São Paulo. She left the rent, started living in the house of the elderly woman she cares for and continues to look for steady work. Receives Bolsa Família and defends the continuity of the program, as long as there is control and qualification for the market.
If the dispute ends up between Lula and Flávio, Ednilza says she doesn’t have “high expectations”. He claims to know little about Bolsonaro’s son and considers a possible vote for him to be a “shot in the dark”. Among the names outside the polarization, he mentions the writer Augusto Cury (Avante), whom he says he likes as a reader.
Cartoonist André Guedes, 45, says he is not yet ready to endorse Renan Santos, despite identifying with his ideas. Wait for the debates to measure the “maturity” of the pre-candidate.
The case of Banco Master “is the only thing that unites left and right in Brazil”, he says. The Rio native claims to be far from the names in Rio, a state in unprecedented institutional crisis with the dismantling of the Palácio das Laranjeiras succession line.
“I’ve kind of given up here. It seems like it’s the cesspool of everything bad that happens in politics.”
For businessman Renato Lucas da Silva, 60, the closeness of Flávio and Daniel Vorcaro reinforced his resistance to the senator, who he already viewed with reservations because of the case of the splits.
“This Vorcaro was that evil thing. He attracts all evil people to him”, he says.
Today, he states that he would vote for Zema if the election were held tomorrow, but he conditions this support on Novo’s behavior. For him, the party needs to prove that it will not repeat practices that it associates with traditional acronyms, such as alliances of convenience and concessions to allies under suspicion.
