Three weeks ago, Brazilians looked like they were about to hand a victory back to the Bolsonaro family and to global right-wing authoritarianism. But on Sunday, Lula defeated Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of the jailed former president, and won a fourth term — making history as the first presidential candidate in Brazil to win a runoff after losing the first round.
Anat and I were grateful to have Pedro Telles, director of D-Hub (Democracy Hub), join us this week to explain the extraordinary organizing effort behind this turnaround, what’s next for Brazil, and what we in the U.S. can learn. Pedro has been in the middle of Brazil’s fight for democracy for years, and Anat got to meet him when she worked on the 2022 election there.
Lula’s win has personal significance for both Anat and me. Lula was a metalworker who became head of his union, led a massive strike, then organized the labor movement to form the Workers’ Party, whose red hat Anat is wearing here. One of the most emotional moments of my career was 24 years ago, when Lula came to the AFL-CIO after winning his first election to be celebrated as a working person who had risen to lead his country.
Some highlights of what we learned:
It all happened in three weeks, and most of what worked didn’t come from the official campaign. Lula’s campaign wasn’t well set up for volunteers. But Congressman André Janones turned a WhatsApp channel called “Lula’s Army” into a command center with nearly 11 million members who were given clear daily “missions” — share this, show up here, bring your family. People who felt defeated after the first round, or who wanted to help but didn’t know how, finally had direction. Pedro’s advice for U.S. activists in our final stretch is to focus on similar efforts with networks of established content creators.
Lula governed like a democratic populist. In those three weeks, he managed to push through some incredibly popular policies, like reducing the six-day work week to five days without cutting wages and banning online betting platforms.
Turnout efforts went after specific voters. Voting is compulsory in Brazil, but the penalty is only about a dollar. The effort targeted three groups: voters over 70, for whom voting is optional and half of whom stayed home last time; recipients of social programs; and women. Lula himself told people to bring their grandmothers.
Meta put its thumb on the scale, and got caught. When progressive creators reported being shadowbanned on Meta’s platforms, Pedro’s big-tech accountability group, Ctrl+Z, collected more than a thousand cases in a few days, turning scattered anecdotes into a story. Then it emerged that Meta’s AI would make posters for Flávio, and even for a fictional dog running for president — but not Lula. That became international news, and Lula’s campaign is now taking legal action. For the Zuckerbergs and Musks of the world, fascism has become part of the business model, and it’s past time our press connected those dots.
The hard part is just starting. Lula will face the most right-wing Congress in Brazil’s history, and fights over the Supreme Court are coming. The left will have to confront many challenges in the years ahead: filling the power vacuum after Lula leaves; making sure the infrastructure built in the runoff doesn’t fade away, as similar efforts have before; and building a vision for the future, not just pointing to past accomplishments (as Pedro said Lula’s campaign did too much).
Right-wing organizing in evangelical churches threatens democracy in both the U.S. and Brazil. The far right has spent years embedding itself in those communities in Brazil, with real ties to CPAC and the Trump movement. I’ve written about this dynamic in the U.S., where the Republican Party has become the party of white Christian nationalism.
