Lula beckons to evangelicals with “miracle” speech and “Faith in Brazil” campaign

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) started to adopt a more moderate speech and with more nods to the evangelical public this week after successive opinion polls indicated a drop in his and the government’s popularity, especially among members of this social segment.

The change in speeches, which already spoke of family on previous occasions, intensified this Thursday (4) during the inauguration of a water project in Pernambuco, and occurs on the eve of the launch of a regionalized campaign to showcase the government’s deliveries in the states.

Called “Faith in Brazil”, the initiative will include campaigns related to projects carried out by the government across the country. The campaign should be launched next week according to newspaper reports The globe It is Estadão. A People’s Gazette contacted the Department of Social Communication (Secom) to confirm the details and is awaiting a response.

In speeches in which he has adopted this new tone, Lula uses words such as “miracle” and “faith”, mentions of God and the memory of his humble family. In the Pernambuco act, for example, the president related the transposition of the São Francisco River to the “work of God”.

“I will tell you miracles that are happening here and now. The first can only have happened because it is the work of God: we are experiencing what we are here today. Because no one believed that it was possible to transpose the São Francisco,” he said in reference to the work that is part of the river transposition system.

At another point, Lula attributed his victory in the 2022 presidential election to an “act of faith” and “believing that a miracle was about to happen” in the country. “If you didn’t believe, didn’t have faith, you would never have voted for president of the Republic for a person from Pernambuco who doesn’t have a university degree, who only has a primary diploma,” he said.

The lack of a university degree is a constant reference in speeches that Lula always makes a point of remembering. He also highlighted, also a constant in speeches, that people are not poor because they want to be, a portion of the population that says it is their government focus.

“We didn’t choose to be poor, we don’t want to be poor, we don’t want to eat badly, we don’t want to work badly, we don’t want to earn badly, we don’t want to dress badly, we don’t want to study badly. We were born to want all the good things that God taught us to produce”, he pointed out.

“Faith in Brazil” against polarization, says Pimenta

The speeches in reference to religion are the hook for the “Faith in Brazil” campaign, which will be broadcast during visits by the president and his ministers to each state. According to Secom minister, Paulo Pimenta, the idea is to segment and regionalize the message, adapting it to the language of each location.

“The idea is that during this delivery phase, each state has its own language,” Pimenta told the newspaper The globehighlighting the importance of relating the deliveries of each folder with the new slogan.

Still according to the minister, the government’s communication strategy is not necessarily being changed, but a second phase that follows “Brazil is back” based on the motto “Union and Reconstruction”, adopted at the beginning of the new administration.

Pimenta stated that, at the end of 2023, the government saw that society was still very polarized even with the Christmas campaign in reference to family unity. And this led to a new phase of institutional communication.

“We observed at the beginning of this year that there is a high level of positive expectation, confidence, but that people also want to see a concrete result, government deliveries. This ‘Faith in Brazil’ movement means faith in trust and hope that we are on the right path, coordinating the entire government in which ministries and bodies can work more intensely at the forefront to deliver and show what is being done” , added the minister to GloboNews.

The expectation is that the new campaign will reinforce the delivery of programs already started, mainly in the areas of education and infrastructure, but also of the government’s flagship programs, such as Bolsa Família, Minha Casa Minha Vida and Farmácia Popular, among others.

The regionalization strategy will begin next week, coinciding with Lula’s visit to Rio de Janeiro to inaugurate a college for students who won prizes in mathematics Olympiads. Radios, TV stations and local websites will be the first to broadcast the government’s campaigns.