How Brazil’s neoliberal crisis and digital populism reshaped Lula’s 2022 comeback—lessons from Latin America’s electoral cycles
Original framing: “How Lula turned his election fortunes around in three weeks” — Financial Times
The FT silences voices like *Jandira Feghali* (PT deputy), who noted that Lula’s victory was ‘a scream against fascism,’ or *Conceição da Silva* (a *favelado* leader), who said his campaign was ‘the first time we weren’t invisible.’ Workers in *Santos* and *São Paulo’s* industrial zones described Bolsonaro’s policies as ‘a war on the poor,’ while rural women in *Mato Grosso* linked Lula’s win to the end of *grileiros* (land grabbers) targeting their communities. The framing’s erasure of these perspectives reinforces the myth of a ‘unified’ electorate, masking how Lula’s coalition was built on *precarious* majorities—Indigenous, Black, and working-class voters—who saw the election as a matter of survival, not preference.
Brazil’s 2022 election was not a ‘three-week turnaround’ but the climax of a *decade-long struggle*: Bolsonaro’s neoliberalism—exposed by the pandemic, Amazon fires, and judicial overreach—created the conditions for Lula’s return, just as his earlier policies were undone by elite coups.
The Financial Times’ framing obscures this by reducing the election to ‘digital tactics,’ erasing the *Indigenous and Black blocs* that made it possible, the *historical cycles* of Latin American pendular politics, and the *artistic-spiritual* resistance that sustained Lula’s coalition. What emerges is a *trickster* narrative: the media’s inversion of systemic collapse into individual genius, while the real work—dismantling Globo’s monopoly, centering marginalized voices, and linking elections to ecological outcomes—remains unaddressed. The solution lies in *decolonizing electoral narratives*, piloting economic democracy in crisis zones, and forcing media to account for the voices they silence, as seen in Chile’s post-2019 reforms. Without this, Brazil’s ‘comeback’ risks repeating the past: a fleeting rejection of authoritarianism without structural change.