This 39-year-old baker has given himself a mission: to make his city, Nova Santa Rosa, “the most bolsonarist in Brazil in the second round” of the presidential election on October 30.
During the first round, this small town of around 8,000 inhabitants of Parana (south) just missed the boat.
She finished in second position, with 82% of the vote for the outgoing president, capped at the post by Nova Padua (84%), from the neighboring state of Rio Grande do Sul.
Nova Santa Rosa is far from being a simple Bolsonarist island in this rural region with fields of corn and soybeans as far as the eye can see, inhabited for the most part by a white population of fervent Christians descendants of European colonizers, who came mainly from Germany. and from Italy.
The neighboring towns of Quatro Pontes (80%) and Mercedes (78%) came third and fifth respectively in the national ranking of far-right voting champions.
“Bolsonaro has rekindled our flame for Brazil,” says Gilberto Klais, who is president of the local traders’ association.
Sign of this patriotic awakening: an impressive quantity of Brazilian flags hanging from the windows.
And Bolsonaro’s portraits on yellow and green backgrounds are everywhere, on posters, banners or stickers on cars.
Finding the slightest trace of support for his opponent in the second round, the left-wing ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, is mission impossible.
– “One of us” –
This border region of Paraguay is close to the spectacular Iguaçu Falls, a hotspot for tourism in Brazil, but it lives above all from agribusiness and its exports to Asia.
“Bolsonaro has restored investor confidence, he advocates a strong economy,” said Gilberto Klais, who recognizes himself perfectly in the motto “God, family and homeland” of the outgoing president’s campaign. “It’s one of ours,” he sums up.
Another slogan, “Brazil above all, God above all”, repeated by Jair Bolsonaro at the end of almost all his speeches, is displayed in large on the tanker truck of a farm.
The owner’s son, Ricardo Lorenzatto, 35, has also given himself a mission: to change the minds of at least 200 of the approximately 800 voters in Nova Santa Rosa who voted for Lula in the first round.
The Head of State “has promised to visit the city that will have voted the most for him in the second round. Just thinking about it, my heart is pounding,” says this blue-eyed agricultural engineer.
His main feat: the organization of a procession of cars “over 4 km” to support Jair Bolsonaro on the occasion of the national holiday of September 7, with a large mobilization on WhatsApp groups.
This pure and hard Bolsonarist believes that Lula represents “a danger for the future” of his children. He fears “that natives will invade” his family’s lands and “force him to share the cattle”.
– “Perversion morale” –
In Mercedes, another city in Parana which aspires to the title of champion of the Bolsonarist vote, there are a dozen churches for barely 6,000 inhabitants.
“I wouldn’t feel safe if Lula were elected,” says Clarice Radoll, a sixty-year-old who plastered a giant portrait of Jair Bolsonaro on the wall of her house at the entrance to the city.
This fervent evangelical, who carries her one-year-old grandson in her arms, especially fears the “moral perversion” that a return of the left to power would represent for her.
André Fiedler, a breeder of chickens for export to Mercedes, has a more pragmatic vision: “We must not be hypocritical, agribusiness has not been neglected under the presidency of Lula” (2003-2010).
This engineer by training alludes in particular to the boom in raw materials which boosted Brazilian growth in the 2000s.
But according to him, the Bolsonaro government has made it possible to “open up new markets” for Brazilian farmers.
“Some say that Bolsonaro harms the image of Brazil, but it’s just a commercial game”, he insists, lambasting “the protectionism of France, Germany and the United States”, while sweeping criticism of increasing deforestation in the Amazon.
