Bolsonaro rises in the polls. He is, in fact, winning over the electorate. I don’t believe it’s an illusion, as the opposition tries to make us believe. It cannot be forgotten that he had a significant vote in 2018, and that means nothing. So it’s not uncommon for him to regain a portion of his electorate as certain policies advance. Of course, Auxílio Brasil would reverse votes. The same can be said of the timid drop in inflation. Obviously the opposition must accuse Auxílio as an electoral measure, or vote buying. It should also explain that the President does not have a well-defined economic policy for the country and, although inflation falls, the analysis must be deeper. That although inflation falls, employment does not grow, but deteriorates. That’s what the opposition is for.

Bolsonaro’s rise in the polls is due, I believe, to the reconquest of part of the electorate already inclined to vote for the right, prone to swallowing one candidate in opposition to another. A group of people that Bolsonaro lost along the way, may, of course, come back. And your campaign will likely aim for that.

His campaign got him on podcasts. A podcast is an informal conversation, where there is no debate, unless artificially. It is an environment in which it can be said that a 100-year secrecy is enacted because you cannot let your privacy be wide open, because “it’s a problem at home”, without being questioned. Bolsonaro’s marital problem has nothing to do with the censorship he has made of acts that may be corrupt, and which are in the public interest. He himself says that secrecy is to benefit his private life, not the opposition. And, I repeat, it is not even questioned. That is, a podcast it serves, for the politician, to produce content to be disseminated by their own militants.

On a podcast, he says what he wants. And the presenter, by and large, is not there to put the guest on the wall, or to make them uncomfortable. On the contrary, the format requires that both have a conversation as usual, and therein lies the entertainment. There is no debate. Televised park bench conversation. He feels free to say the same things he says on Thursday’s lives. Nothing of relevance to the country: agricultural policy, industrial policy, tax reform, expansion of poverty, precariousness of employment… these matters are not discussed. The same happens with Lula, in the podcasts in which he participates.

For both, Lula and Bolsonaro, it seems that the strategy will be not to participate in debates. It really doesn’t pay off. For both of them, that would only mean producing derogatory material for rival militants to disseminate on the internet.

In this way, it deviates from the main one. Or rather, the main subject becomes marginal. Bolsonaro went to the United States and there he said that the American government should work in his favor, as he better represents American interests in Brazil. All eyes turn to a President when he seems to be the target of distrust of his own institutions, except those of the people themselves.