Last weekend, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva held on to office, defeating his far-right opponent Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of jailed former president Jair Bolsonaro, in a second-round runoff vote. The 81-year-old leftist firebrand made history by becoming the first presidential candidate to win a runoff despite finishing second in the first round of voting. So, what changed in the three weeks between the first and second rounds? An online tidal wave, that’s what.
Saying social media has irrevocably changed politics and elections might be some easy hack commentary, but here’s the thing: it’s also true. And there might be no country where it’s more true than Brazil — a nation whose citizenry is heavily online and where several of the most popular sitting politicians are also de facto influencers.
For years, the Brazilian right had dominated the online battlefield, with the senior Bolsonaro revolutionizing the political utility of social media when he won the presidency in 2018. However, it appears that the script may have officially flipped. While there were several contributing factors to Lula’s victory — including a change in messaging from his campaign and heightened suspicion about potential corruption tied to Bolsonaro — many analysts cite a WhatsApp channel called Lula’s Army as the key catalyst powering the surprise comeback.
The channel was the brainchild of Congressman André Janones, a popular progressive politician who posts energized rant videos to his more than nine million Instagram followers. He started the channel in April, enlisting 53,000 of his followers as the initial base, but it really started to take off after the first round of voting. It rapidly accumulated new members and even survived two shutdown attempts from a Bolsonaro-linked judge.
Lula’s Army was an apt name, because Janones acted like a five-star general. Through the channel, he and his administrators would send expletive-filled all-caps messages commanding members to do various tasks, like push specific hashtags on X, view and share videos, and spike internet searches for Bolsonaro-related corruption scandals. “At family gatherings and get-togethers with friends, it was not uncommon for people to interrupt conversations to complete their missions,” Brazil expert Anaïs Fléchet told Le Monde.
It worked like gangbusters; the channel was a dynamite recruiting tool and narrative-changing force that was able to win over people who voted for a candidate besides Lula or Bolsonaro in the first round and those who didn’t vote at all. By the time the second round of voting began, the channel had accumulated more than 10 million people ready to help the campaign at a moment’s notice — this included Lula himself, who was gifted his first-ever smartphone so he could join. For comparison, a similar group for Bolsonaro called Flávio Troop had just 2.1 million followers.
Where Brazil goes from here is uncertain: the country is still intensely politically divided; Bolsonaro (like his father before him) refused to acknowledge defeat and fled the country; and the nation’s currency fell off a cliff after Lula won as foreign and domestic investors fretted over the administration’s fiscal management. One thing is for certain, though: social media will continue to drive political change in the country.
In fact, Brazil might be an image of the future for elections in other countries that haven’t utilized these tools in quite the same way. Maybe one day, a mobilizing WhatsApp group with millions of members will be as commonplace here as a lawn sign or a TV advertisement.
