President Jair Bolsonaro and the president of the PL, Valdemar da Costa Neto, met in the early afternoon of this Tuesday (7) at the Planalto Palace to discuss a reorganization of the reelection campaign at a time when polls point to the possibility of former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) winning in the first round. The information was confirmed by the campaign’s summit.
One of the main focuses is communication. The command’s assessment is that there is a lot of noise in this area and that it is necessary to equate what the government says with what the campaign says. For this reason, former Communications Secretary Fábio Wajngarten should be part of the campaign. The information was confirmed to CNN by Senator Flávio Bolsonaro (PL-RJ), but interlocutors from Wajngarten say they still have nothing settled.
The campaign faces internal differences that the summit tries to equalize. Basically, there is a group that defends professionalization, a thesis led by Valdemar, by the Minister of the Civil House, Ciro Nogueira (PP-PI), and by Senator Flávio Bolsonaro. They believe that the 2022 campaign should be different from that of 2018. Mainly because there are four years of government to be sold to the electorate.
But there are those who argue that the strategy should be more intuitive and with a lot of focus on social networks, like the successful campaign four years ago. They believe that Bolsonaro should not give in to political marketing. Who leads this thought is Carlos Bolsonaro (Republicans).
Between these two theses, there are other problems to be solved. For example, organizing the different communication focuses that do not dialogue with each other. Campaign members cited the CNN that the communication of Palácio do Planalto is different from that of the ministries, which in turn do not communicate with those responsible for marketing the PP and PL. And on top of that, this entire organizational chart does not have an organic structure with Bolsonaro’s own personal strategy, who usually speaks on the spur of the moment.
In this sense, in a recent meeting in Planalto, it was evaluated that the communication strategy of the campaign and the government had failed in all the recent crises: the murder of Genivaldo de Jesus by agents of the Federal Highway Police (PRF), the deaths by the floods in Pernambuco, the disappearance of a journalist and an indigenist in the Amazon – still unresolved – and the meeting between Bolsonaro and Joe Biden, scheduled to take place this Thursday (8). The reading was that in all these cases the government lost in terms of communication.
But the adjustments don’t stop there. In the meeting with Bolsonaro, Valdemar discussed some results of qualitative research internal to the PL that point out that Bolsonaro loses support when the electoral discourse is focused on the attack on the electronic ballot box and the electoral process. Surveys show that this demonstrates the president’s electoral fragility and ends up driving away potential votes.
The PL’s internal polls also showed that Auxílio Brasil is Bolsonaro’s main achievement in the polls, followed by the transposition of the São Francisco River.
But they detected a problem there: a good part of the interviewees consider them accomplishments of the ex-president Lula. The surveys also show the need to increase the presence of First Lady Michelle Bolsonaro to enter more into the campaign to try to reverse votes in the range where Bolsonaro has the most difficulties: the female vote.
The military is also expected to win a seat on the campaign committee. Valdemar defends that the likely candidate for vice, General Braga Neto, integrates the collegiate. So far, he has not joined the group, having designated an advisor to participate in the meetings.
Source: CNN Brasil
