The son of a night watchman and a stay-at-home mother, Douglas Oliveira was 16 and living in a modest house in Brazil’s northeast when he cast his first ballot, helping Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva win a second presidential term.
Two decades later, that same young man who would go fishing to help put food on the family table now enjoys a comfortable life as a software developer, and fervently wants to stop the president from securing a record fourth term.
Oliveira’s political turn points to a risk facing the leftist leader as he scraps for every vote heading into the October 4 first round. Lula, as he’s universally known, and his Workers’ Party have long dominated the region home to more than a quarter of Brazilian voters. In 2006, he won a whopping 77 percent of valid votes in the northeast. The region handed Lula roughly 69 percent four years ago, proving decisive in a narrow victory that returned him to the presidency.
But cracks are emerging now, despite his deep roots in the northeast and the undeniable gains residents have seen on his watch. Lula has 57 percent of voting intentions in the region in a run-off scenario, according to a Quaest survey published last week. That figure may rise as a share of valid votes, but with polls showing him locked in a tie with right-wing challenger Flávio Bolsonaro, even a marginal erosion of support in Lula’s biggest political stronghold could cost him re-election.
“They’ve been saying for 12 years that they’re going to lift the country out of poverty,” Oliveira said. “Where I lived, people stayed poor. The people who made it out of poverty were the ones who decided to stop waiting for the government to help them.”
The paradox for Lula is that the success of his own policies has changed the expectations of Brazil’s poorest region. And although he remains revered in some quarters for lifting millions of people out of poverty, Lula and the left have struggled to meet the modern demands of the same Brazilians they once helped.
Oliveira is now focused on the rising cost of living, and credits his upward mobility to years of hard work rather than Lula’s social policies, he said in an interview from his city of Recife.
Lula has nevertheless leaned on past strategies in the race’s final stages. He boosted payments under Brazil’s flagship welfare programme, Bolsa Familia, and last week banned online gambling as part of an effort to tackle high levels of household indebtedness.
That may help him in the northeast, a region home to more Bolsa Familia recipients than any other and one of the country’s largest shares of borrowers classified by the Central Bank as dangerously indebted.
But even if Lula wins, his slippage in the region points to broader challenges ahead for the Brazilian left once the 80-year-old president inevitably leaves the political stage.
“The Workers’ Party gradually stopped having answers to today’s problems,” said Priscila Lapa, who holds a doctorate in political science from the Federal University of Pernambuco, the state where Recife is located. It “failed to realise that the agenda itself was changing.”
State capitals
As president in the early 2000s, Lula focused on income redistribution with particular emphasis on the northeast. Bolsa Familia, a cash-transfer programme, slashed poverty while economic growth surged on a global commodity boom and access to higher education and housing expanded rapidly.
“It was a whole set of policies that created this perception of mobility, of moving up in life, for a segment of the electorate and for a region that had never experienced anything like it before,” Lapa said.
Still, that very agenda is now falling out of sync with some voters. Issues like affordability and public security are fueling discontent and putting dents in Lula’s legend-like status, even after years of success. Criminal gangs that formed in faraway places like Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo have spread nationwide, and all of Brazil’s most violent cities are now in the northeast.
“When a homemaker goes to the supermarket at the end of the month, she finds that, even though she theoretically has more money in her pocket, she takes home less food,” Rogério Marinho, Bolsonaro’s campaign manager, said at an event in August. “That makes voters feel deceived every month, and it reminds them that the person who deceived them was Lula.”
Nowhere in the northeast has the attrition been greater than in state capitals, according to a study by Simone Piletti Viscarra, a political science professor at the Federal University of the São Francisco Valley, and Gustavo Paravizo, a researcher at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora.
They found the Workers’ Party’s average share of the presidential run-off votes in those cities fell 13.5 percentage points between 2006 and 2022, to 57.2 percent.
“Once the basic economic problem is more or less solved – people are able to eat and they can buy what they need – they start thinking about other, non-material issues, about the values they want to preserve,” Viscarra said.
Outside the northeast’s major cities, however, the decline in support for the Workers’ Party has been far smaller. In the region’s rural interior, its share of votes in presidential run-offs dipped by just 3.7 percentage points over 16 years, to 71.6 percent in 2022.
The explanation is simple, Viscarra said. Those residents rely more on federal government social programmes that flourished under the Workers’ Party.
But threats loom there too, particularly from an expanding agricultural frontier that carries potential to upend Brazilian politics even in the northeast’s most remote corners.
The city of Luís Eduardo Magalhães, located in the western extreme of Bahía state, illustrates the shift. Founded just over two decades ago, it has become a major producer of goods like soybeans, cotton and corn. The more the city has developed, the more it’s shifted toward the conservative leanings of Brazil’s powerful agribusiness sector.
“Luís Eduardo Magalhães is a new city that has grown tremendously, with a lot of entrepreneurs,” said João Roma, who was a minister under Flávio Bolsonaro’s father, former president Jair Bolsonaro, and who now heads his Liberal Party in Bahía. “These people have fewer ties to the central government.”
Different idea
Between Lula and his protégé Dilma Rousseff, who served as president from 2011 to 2016, the Workers’ Party has been in power most of the past quarter-century. Years of wear and tear on Lula and the organisation he helped found in 1980 explain only part of its waning support in the northeast.
For some Lula allies, the party is a victim of its own success.
“Lula prioritised investment in the northeast,” said Edinho Silva, the Workers’ Party’s president and Lula’s campaign coordinator. “There emerged a middle class that hadn’t existed before, and segments of that middle class ended up adopting more conservative views. That helps explain the changing profile of the electorate.”
Lula’s campaign subtly acknowledges another challenge: a growing share of the population is too young to remember how the region transformed socially and economically during his early years in office.
Instead, they came of age when Lula and his party were ensnared in sprawling corruption investigations like Operação Lava Jato (“Operation Car Wash”), which probed kick-backs from contracts involving state-controlled oil giant Petroleo Brasileiro SA, or Petrobras.
The leftist president himself was imprisoned on corruption charges for roughly 19 months starting in 2018. His convictions were later overturned.
Back in Recife, Oliveira’s evolution exemplifies a predicament for a party that helped reshape the northeast: many of the voters whose lives changed during the Lula era have changed with it. On top of that, when the leftist leader is no longer on the ballot, the question will be whether the bond he built with the region can survive without him.
Latin America’s most prominent leftist is highly unlikely to seek office again after this year. But he lacks a successor capable of inheriting his current political base. Lula himself has publicly acknowledged that his party has drifted away from its humble origins, creating an opening for the right.
Rousseff, who now heads the New Development Bank, was impeached in 2016. Fernando Haddad, who served as Lula’s finance minister and has been tipped as a possible heir, hasn’t won an election since becoming Sao Paulo mayor in 2012.
“The Workers’ Party needs to choose someone and start charting the path,” Viscarra said.
by Daniel Carvalho, Bloomberg
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