Hope & Dirty Tricks: How Lula Beat Flavio Bolsonaro

0:02 Hey, everybody. Robert here. And this is It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart. And it sure looked like things in Brazil were about to fall apart a week or two ago. But then Lula won the second round of the presidential election in a real shocker of a vote. Now, we've talked about this on this week's E.D., But immediately after the vote, I started chatting with some Brazilian folks that I had knew and had met online, people who had been both just kind of grassroots activists, you know, part of the effort to get Lula reelected in the second round of voting, and folks who had had, you know, positions of somewhat, you know, a little more influence in the media and whatnot, all to talk about, like,

0:44 what had happened and how it had worked. And obviously, I didn't feel like I was the best person to put together a comprehensive article about that. And so that's why I was really grateful to run into Caio Almendra. Caio is a former opinion editor for The Intercept Brazil. He's a writer at Superstructure with Julian Field. He's one of the hosts of the Vera Casacas podcast and an Alameda Institute researcher. He's a really cool guy, and he wrote this article, which I am going to read to you.

1:10 This is Caio's article about what happened in Brazil and about his own experiences. I'm reading it because English is his second language, and we figured this would be a better way to reach more Americans with what had happened. Because The strategies with which Lula won the second round of voting are really important for people to understand in, like, 21st century politics. This is not going to be just relevant to Brazil and Brazilians. Anyway, here's Caio Almendra. On the night of October 5th, 2026, the Brazilian left received horrendous news. Bolsonarismo had won the elections, increasing its bench in the Chamber of Deputies by 23 and in the Senate by 14. There's a real risk that they might

1:50 get the majority needed to amend the Constitution or even to impeach Supreme Court justices. With so much power in Congress and the prospect of controlling a 9 out of 11 supermajority on the Supreme Court, nothing seemed capable of stopping the implementation of the most radical parts of Flavio's authoritarian agenda. Because Flavio Bolsonaro's platform called for billions of dollars in budget cuts, which would inevitably gut public education, pensions, and public health care, because his father had attempted a coup and his platform included granting amnesty to him and all the insurrectionists, as well as impeaching all the Supreme Court justices who voted for his arrest and firing the federal police officers involved, because he spouted the worst rhetoric

2:30 of penal populism, advocating for chemical castration, lowering the age of criminal responsibility, and legalizing the death penalty. And because of Flavio's countless ties to organized crime, specifically the militia's, a type of mafia that keeps favelas in a permanent dystopia and their residents under the thumb of local petty dictators.

2:49 The future felt terrifyingly bleak. Lula, despite leading in the polls, had performed poorly. Flavio Bolsonaro, the PL candidate, looked as though he had almost won in the first round. The votes were still being counted, and Lula was recovering part of the vote share. In every bar and venue where the left, myself included, had gathered, people watched the election results.

3:11 In Prasa, El Salvador, dubbed Rio's Little Havana because of the left's overwhelming influence in the neighborhood, not unlike New York City's commie corridor, the atmosphere felt like a funeral. Hundreds of people had gathered to watch the results, but with every vote tally update, the mood grew heavier. To make matters worse, so many people had gathered there that the street beer vendors ran out of ice. It was going to be a night of terrible news, solaced only by warm beer. Many were tracking the count on the electoral court's mobile app, Whispers like, did you see what's happening in Minas? were constant. Nicolas Feria, a far-right influencer, something like a less overtly white supremacist, more transphobic Nick Fuentes,

3:49 had swept 3 million votes, dragging 20 deputies into Congress along with him. The left hadn't won a single Senate race in the Southeast, and Rio de Janeiro would once again be governed by an unknown, backed by the militias. Not far away, a lone, drunk Bolsonarista was shouting, It's Lula! It's Lula! It's Lula back in prison! My friends living abroad kept asking me through WhatsApp, What now? Hunger all over again? Videos of people eating cow carcasses? Those videos showing the misery and starvation under Jair Bolsonaro's government hit the Brazilian diaspora in Europe, the US, and Australia particularly hard.

4:23 My uncle in Texas texted me, and I tried to comfort him. As a progressive living in Texas, he's usually the pessimistic one. But that day, the pessimism was palpable, almost like a haze that smelled of warm beer. The left had grown slightly in size, but the far-right's crushing victory over the center-right meant that no one could help thinking the worst. People spoke of a defeat that would affect 220 million Brazilian citizens for at least a decade.

4:48 A group of law students from the Universidade Federal Fluminense, a public university in the small city of Niterói, sort of a New Jersey to Rio de Janeiro, grabbed all the banners and stickers they had and started a march against Flavio's fascism and in defense of Lula's government. They probably had no idea what this would lead to, or how that small gesture was the rolling of a snowball down a massive mountain. The first-round campaign was remarkably listless in Brazil, a rarity, especially in a presidential election year with Lula on the ballot. Lula's third term was similarly lackluster.

5:19 The main hallmarks of his third administration were reviving programs abolished by Jair Bolsonaro and prosecuting the January 8th insurrectionists who refused to accept Jair's defeat. On the eve of the first round, the campaign team, sensing trouble ahead, took bold and hugely popular measures. The first was banning sports betting platforms, bets, in Brazil. Brazil is the world's largest market for online betting, despite being the 10th largest economy globally.

5:43 Gambling addiction affects 11 million Brazilians. These betting apps were originally legalized under Michel Timmer, who took office after an unsubstantiated impeachment against Dilma Rousseff, Lula's successor. The ban had 3-to-1 approval in Brazil. Had it gone into effect, it would have meant that, on average, every Brazilian would now have 40 reals more in their pocket, the equivalent of a meal at a good restaurant. However, it came too late, just days before the first round. Still, it was enough to spark enthusiasm among the activist base, focused on the lives of the poorest, as he was during his first and second terms. The main issue was pessimism. The vast majority of the Brazilian left went to sleep on Sunday,

6:23 October 5th, believing Lula's victory was now mathematically impossible. All other candidates besides Lula and Flavio were right-wing, with one even to the right of Flavio. The radical socialist left received 200,000 votes, a tiny fraction of the 2 million votes Lula needed to turn around. Robert again here, and we'll continue with the story, but first, we've got a break for some ads. And we're back, and I'm going to continue with Kayo's article. Early in the week, however, things began to shift. Every optimistic content creator, including the writer of this episode, started going viral on social media.

7:09 On the Monday after the election, Philippe Abbal, Gabriel Devan, and the author of this article recorded an episode of the Virakasas, the Turncoats podcast, titled Bora, or Let's Go! The tone was straightforward. We are three white, sechette, left-wing guys, the stereotypical Brooklyn podcast, and we simply do not have the right to give anything less than everything we've got to win this second round. Nobody gets to stop. We'll do whatever it takes, and this talk about it being mathematically impossible to win is pure nonsense. I went as far as making a bold prediction. History is in our hands, and Brazil's second round could be the first domino to fall in a wave of far-right defeats across the Americas.

7:47 The U.S.

7:47 Midterms would be the second. Two days later, I would repeat that exact phrase on Fear and Loathing in Brasilia, Brazil's biggest left-wing podcast, only for the host to reply, despondently, I hope so, Caio, but it looks tough. The same day, I repeated the line as a guest on an episode of Chapo Trap House and was met with a swarm of foreign doomers on social media. As if local pessimism wasn't enough, the second round was now importing doom and gloom straight from the U.S. into my life. We didn't expect the positive response that the episode of Virakashikas would bring.

8:18 On top of becoming one of the most viewed episodes of the podcast, it was one of the most commented on. Dozens of people wrote to us saying they had regained their hope and proudly sharing the votes that they had managed to flip. It was a tiny fraction, of course. Lula needed two million votes, but it was a great indicator of what was to come. Record high abstention rates were good news. Another reason for hope was the public's low awareness of who Flavio really was, compounded by the complete absence of debates in the first round. Flavio hadn't attended a single one, and the only collective memory people had of him debating was his infamous 2016 collapse on live TV. This created a strong expectation that in the

8:53 second round, Lula, a seasoned debater since 1989, would easily dominate the debates and swing a massive number of votes. Despite his strong showing in the first round of voting, Flavio was an exceptionally weak candidate. In the 2016 mayoral election, Flavio finished in fourth place, after he fainted and soiled himself during a live debate. Within the Bolsonaro family, he was the closest to organized crime and major corruption scandals.

9:17 Thanks to a miracle of media spin, the largest recent corruption case in Brazil's history, the Banco Master Ponzi scheme, had been framed as ambidextrous, meaning it supposedly involved both the left and the right. It was a blatant lie. Leaked audio recordings proved an intimate friendship between Flavio and banker Daniel Vorcaro. Vorcaro had donated money to Jair Bolsonaro's biopic starring Jim Caviezel, a project developed by Flavio. Forcaro was affiliated with the Lagoina Church, a recent megachurch that experienced meteoric growth and was deeply tied to the PL right-wing party. Flavio was a silent partner in a betting platform linked to Forcaro. They even shared a business partner, Willard Tamaz. By the way, if you found it strange

9:58 that the same group owned a church... a betting company, and a bank, all classic vehicles for money laundering, well, your suspicions might be spot on. Allegations that this whole rapidly growing complex was a money laundering scheme for organized crime are well-founded. Willer Tomas, for instance, was the largest bettor on the Blaze platform, accounting for 50% of the company's profits by spending 6.6 billion rials, roughly $ 1. 2 billion.

10:23 There's no way he is not a hidden partner of Blaze, and that's a money laundering scheme. Even so, the mainstream media blackout on the topic shielded Flavio. Only the small alternative media ecosystem was talking about it. To make matters worse, Flavio's presumed future economy minister was appearing in the media to lay out her platform. She proposed ending Bolsa Familia, the income transfer program that lifted millions out of poverty during Lula's first terms in office. She backed blocking the reduction of the workweek from 44 to 40 hours, a campaign that had originally gone viral on TikTok, led by a black gay TikToker who had just been elected federal deputy, in a campaign which Lula had embraced earlier this year.

11:02 Added to that were wage freezes and billions of reals in budget cuts, echoing Millet and Doge, which the left quickly realized would come straight out of healthcare and education. And she was not the only person in Flavio's circle damaging his image. Flavio himself was not a particularly religious person until he needed to consolidate support among evangelicals to gain leverage within the Bolsignorista coalition and secure his nomination as the candidate. To that end, the pastor Flavio aligned with was especially radical. As a result, the pastor had taken deeply anti-Catholic stances, such as demanding that Brazil strip Our Lady of Aparecida, one of the few Black saints, of her status as the patron saint of the nation.

11:40 Despite evangelical influence on the right, the majority of Brazil remains Catholic. Furthermore, the Afro-religious minority also reveres Our Lady of Aparecida, syncretized with the Orisha Oshun. Still, fear only gets you so far. The Democrats spent all of 2024 trying to fearmonger liberals into organizing, and it fell flat.

12:00 Fear simply isn't enough. The 17th century Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza pointed out that if fear is anxiety about a future bad outcome, and hope is that exact same anxiety about a good outcome, and given that all anxiety hinges on uncertainty, fear and hope are just two sides of the very same coin. On Wednesday, October 7th, barely two days after those UFF students spontaneously marched in a super rare first-round demonstration... Students from all over the state of Rio took over the streets at a massive rally. The shift from sheer dread into rising hope was officially underway.

12:33 By Thursday, everyone was talking about how huge the student march had been. That same day, Lula gathered influencers and newly elected young leaders to recalibrate the online campaign. Despite a few bumps along the way, like tanky YouTuber-turned-Congressman Yones Manuel calling out Lula's campaign for being totally lost... The digital side started getting its act together. Lula switched to posting raw selfie videos, hitting Flavio much harder. The campaign launched an intense calendar of street actions, maybe the most relentless schedule Brazil has ever seen. Which brings us to the bizarre story of André Yanones. Yanones came from a poor background, working as a bus conductor to put himself

13:10 through law school. While in college, he joined Lula's Workers' Party, PT. Working as a lawyer in a tiny town, he took on healthcare access cases, suing the state and health insurance companies to secure surgeries, medical tests, and other procedures. By constantly pushing the state for improvements to the public healthcare system, he earned the nickname the People's Inspector. In 2012, he left the PT to join the far-right PSC, which at the time was the political home of Carlos Bolsonaro. He chalked it up to ideological differences, which might just be code for, I'm an evangelical, I can't sit in a party rooted in Catholic left and Marxism. That said, a good amount of opportunism goes a long way in explaining

13:47 this change, too. In 2018, he supported the truck driver strikes. This was an ambiguous event in Brazil. Formerly, it was a mobilization against President Michel Timmer, who had taken office following the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, Lula's successor. However, midway through to the end of the strike, individual truck drivers started returning to work, making its nature as a lockout look glaringly obvious. Employer strikes organized by a trucking company owners are not only illegal under Brazilian law, but they also carry a tragic history in Latin America. They were weaponized to overthrow Salvador Allende in Chile and Joao Gaulert in Brazil. In 2018, Yonones was elected federal deputy under

14:25 the Avante, a party so centrist that its name literally means forward. In 2022, he announced his presidential run, but on the eve of the campaign, he declared his endorsement of Lula during a livestream. From that moment on, he would become one of Lula's most loyal fedain. Throughout this whole chaotic political process, Yonones' charisma and his knack for understanding the Brazilian internet were his greatest asset. Today, he is a member of Brazil's True Green Party, allied with the socialist left of PSOL, and home to Marina Silva, Lula's Minister of the Environment, who brought Amazon deforestation down to near zero. Back in 2022, Yanonism's influence was real, but it got somewhat exaggerated thanks to the viral spread

15:04 of the cultural Yanonism meme, originally coined on Twitter by environmentalist Mauricio Angelo. Cultural Yanonism was essentially dirty political warfare, the kind of mudslinging the left usually had moral scruples about engaging in. Llanones was the only one who exposed Bolsonaro's ties to Freemasonry, and therefore Satanism, setting off alarms across his evangelical base. He was the only one driving the narrative that Bolsonaro was a cannibal, and he was the only one who turned a video viral in which Bolsonaro, right in the middle of a xenophobic rant, claimed a 14-year-old Venezuelan girl had flirted with him, fueling accusations of pedophilia against the president. Basically, Llanones invented Dark Woke. The U.S.

15:44 copied him. Lula's margin of victory in 2022 was so razor-thin that many ended up hailing Yanonism as the desperate playbook the left required to pull off a win. With Lula's base feeling lost, terrified, and clinging to tiny glimmers of hope, Yanonis became an undisputed leader. The sentiment was, we may not understand what he's doing, and we might even disagree, we might not even like him, but we trust that he wants Lula elected and that he understands online political warfare better than any of us, so I'm going to obey whatever Yanonis asks. Yunan has set up a broadcast group on WhatsApp, a channel where only he had posting rights, dubbed Lula's Army. Through written posts and quick videos, he handed out daily marching orders to everyone

16:24 in the channel. Almost every single day, part of the job was scaling up the group's footprint, pushing for nonstop member milestones. In one clip, he claimed that if they hit 10 million members before Election Day, Lula was guaranteed to win. It was like handing out water in a desert. The channel exploded in size, entering the second round runoff with 11 million subscribers. And we'll talk about what came after that, but first, I've got to run to ads one last time. And we're back, and I'm going to continue with Kaio's piece. The tasks assigned in the channel, the Lula's Army channel, were not focused on gaming the algorithm like a digital marketing agency would. but on torpedoing all of Flavio Bolsonaro's efforts on the internet. The primary

17:13 rule was, do not engage, block on site, for every politician, influencer, viral content, or hashtag coming from the far right. While Bolsonarismo relied on the highly effective tactic of message redundancy, where multiple different figures post content in various formats to push the exact same political agenda, Unonism's tactic was the exact opposite, everyone sharing the exact same piece of content.

17:35 This flooded the zone. More than a strategy to convince people on social media, it was a strategy to disrupt the normal functioning of social platforms, which, as reported, heavily favored the far right. News that Meta directly interfered in the election, boosting views on Flavio's content while suppressing Lula's, remains an international scandal. In addition to gamification, Yonones heavily relied on strategies driven by curiosity and psychological teasers. At times, the tactic was simply to spread the phrase, who is Marina Flavio Bolsonaro? without even explaining to his own followers what the message was actually about. The result was intense public curiosity about a story that was yet to break.

18:11 In this specific case, Mariano was the pseudonym of a Ukrainian refugee who was sexually trafficked by Daniel Varcaro. All this made it completely impossible for Flavio Bolsonaro to land a single viral narrative during the entire second round campaign. If the internet serves as infrastructure for the far right, Unones used his army to blow up that bridge. His persona, naturally, spawned endless memes, his trademark habit starting every video screaming, Folks!

18:36 Urgent!

18:37 And closing out calls from mass sharing with, Bless this out! became running gags across every bar, embraced by people who, even as they poked fun at him, executed his orders religiously. At the same time, the channel drove grassroots ground-game persuasion tactics— Reach out to three Bolsonaro voters today and send them this breaking story on Flavio's latest corruption scandal, or find an older Lula supporter who skipped the first round and talk to them about what this election means for the next generation. Exotic vote-flipping tactics also turned into memes. Gay men exposing the marriages of closeted Bolsonaristas. People taking their Bolsonarista families on weekend trips during the election, saying, I

19:13 might not vote, but I'm taking away 10 of their votes. And people hiding the photo IDs required to vote, all racked up quick likes. Throughout this entire process, fear was slowly flipped to its other side, hope. Knowing it became overconfident, the first-round defeat had been far too brutal for that.

19:29 Yet the rallies grew progressively larger and more joyful, eventually becoming the largest wave of demonstrations in the country's history, surpassing the far-right mobilizations for Dilma's impeachment in 2016, the free bus fare protests in 2013, and the marches for re-democratization in the 1980s. The direct coordination between Yanonis and Lula, who were hosting livestreams together constant, helped the calls for demonstrations go viral. So, did Yanonis single-handedly save the campaign? Again, he might be riding on more credit than he actually deserves, simply because he was such prime meme material. Erica Hilton, a socialist trans woman representative who racked up 1.6 million votes, dwarfing Eunonis' 78,000, built a similar network that grew to

20:11 2 million strong. If Eunonis hadn't been in the picture, hers might easily have scaled to 11 million, or maybe even higher. What Eunonis did can't be reduced to some master strategy hatched by a solitary genius, who was an unlikely figure who stepped into the void left by a crumbling campaign, channeling the raw fear and hope energy of millions of people. This isn't a great man theory of history, it's a story of how intense popular energy takes wild, unpredictable turns when there's no traditional structure around to channel it.

20:39 A sense of moral duty to prevent Bolsonaro's victory, coupled with the collective gratification of building a win through popular mobilization against the Bolsonarismo, that has plagued the country since 2016, completely exploded. For a decade, the Brazilian left watched, stunned and helpless, the effects of thousands of underground Bolsonarista WhatsApp groups.

20:57 One day, your neighbor would tell you that a satanic ritual had been performed at the presidential palace. Suddenly, your aunt would start talking about the government wanting to rewrite the Bible to remove homophobic passages. Another day, your grandfather would swear that the government had handed out dick-shaped baby models at public nurseries. Stratospheric corruption figures were thrown around out of nowhere. Being in a space free from all that, free from fear, standing together and fighting for a social transformation everyone believed in became addictive and contagious. Images of massive marches comforted tired hearts. None of this was a cure for fear. Throughout this whole process, inside every single

21:32 one of us, there was a lingering dread that Flavia would be elected, slash billions in social spending, persecute political opponents, and execute the Doge Melee agenda. The left knew that Trump's second administration was stronger, more absurd, and far more terrible than the first. We saw the cuts in pediatric cancer research and the money flowing to ICE raids. However, if fear and hope are strictly speaking the same thing, We must understand that both can be paralyzing, freezing us in place. Yet, there is a virtuous cycle that turns action in the present, rather than anxieties about the future, into a collective effort, transforming the fear-hope coin into a potent force for mobilization. Sometimes, you just need a peculiar

22:12 guy to step up and fill the political vacuum of a lost, headless campaign by shouting, Urgent! Blast this out! Now!

22:19 All right.

22:22 Yeah, that's what we've got for you today. If you're wanting to look into the author of this episode, Kaio Almendra, you can find him on BlueSky at Kaio Almendra, C-A-I-O-A-L-M-E-N-D-R-A dot BlueSky dot social.

22:36 Yeah.

22:37 Thanks again. And we'll be back tomorrow.

22:43 It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions.

23:00 Thanks for listening.