which is investigating the case of , targeted the senator (-BA), leader of the government in the Senate, last Thursday (18), with the investigation starting just a week before. A , and Wagner became one of the targets of the investigation that was already underway into the bank.
The following day, Friday (19), and while the country was discussing the team’s performance, Wagner suffered the first impacts of suspicions of undue advantages.
Monitoring numbers from more than 100,000 public support groups between June 18 and 21 show Wagner with 8% of mentions defending him, among messages with sentiment, against 92% of negative mentions.
Despite a very high level of rejection, it is possible to note that the subject was a relevant topic only for users who are more politically engaged. When we look at all messages about politics and , the World Cup represented 43% of all messages, compared to 57% about politics in WhatsApp groups. Between the two topics, football alone occupied almost half of the public conversation space in a period of acute political crisis.
The dynamics become clearer hour by hour. On Friday, the day of the game against Haiti, at 6pm, before the opening whistle, the World Cup already occupied 65% of the attention and politics dropped to 35%. At 10pm, with the game underway, the World Cup rose to 79% and politics fell to 22% — contrary to what usually happens in political crises, in which messages on the topic gain ground over other topics even on Friday nights.
Wagner’s crisis, which should have been at its peak that Friday, simply had no space to circulate. Football flattened the space that politics normally occupies during the hours when the ball was rolling. This event confirms the hypothesis. The World Cup does not momentarily shift attention away from politics, as a friendly game would do during a normal period.
Football captures structural attention during the World Cup and chronically reduces the size of the stage where entire politics operates. This happens because the interval between games that capture attention is short. With the competition running since June 11th and games practically every day, the lifespan of any political agenda is shortening. Wagner was hit precisely when the window for political attention was at its narrowest point of the year.
However, this reduction in space does not completely explain why Wagner suffered less than . Jaques Wagner is not a candidate for president and is not a well-known figure in the national dispute, like Flávio. And the operation against him, although real, was not accompanied by a trigger of material concreteness like the audio that exposed Flávio. Hearing the interlocutor speak is different from news about operations. This is because the PT senator does not have this material element that naturally reduces the potential for the crisis to go viral.
This point is important because the right demonstrated in the Vorcaro case a much superior capacity for mobilization in a network. The monitoring data shows that the Bolsonarist militancy attacks Wagner with strong intensity in most of the confrontational messages, while the PT militancy, in the opposite direction, abandons its own defense of Wagner in most of the incidents.
Under normal conditions, outside the World Cup cycle, this asymmetry of mobilization could drive Wagner’s crisis much more strongly than it is reaching. Under normal conditions, the right has the capacity to transform this political fact into a dominant agenda. What the Cup does is limit the terrain where this capacity is exercised.
It is also worth noting that, throughout the weekend, President Lula was not consistently associated with the Wagner crisis. Only on the first day of the crisis was there a clear mobilization that sought to associate the PT and the Lula government with Banco Master, but this lost strength the following day, with the Brazil game. His approval remained stable at 21% over the four days. This demonstrates that, during this window of opportunity, the right was unable to create a narrative that structurally associates President Lula with the Banco Master crisis.
Monitoring messages in public groups measures how activists mobilize discourse and how narratives are worked on. The conclusion is that the World Cup did not necessarily save Wagner or the PT. The senator continues to receive very high rejection and deteriorate over the days. What the World Cup did was reduce the stage, shorten the useful life of the agenda and neutralize the mobilization advantage that the right would have in a normal period. When the World Cup ends, on July 19, the political space will reopen. It is enough to understand whether this crisis will be able to be reheated in a way that will generate real political costs or whether new issues will capture voter attention.
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