On Oct. 25, Brazilians made history by resisting hopelessness and achieving, for the first time since the return to democracy in 1985, a comeback in the runoff of a presidential election. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won reelection by more than 4 million votes after losing the first round to opponent Flávio Bolsonaro by over 2 million votes.
Lula, a former metalworker and union leader who co-founded the left-wing Workers’ Party, was seeking his fourth term as president. Flávio, by contrast, was the candidate of the far-right Liberal Party and was running as the successor to his father, former president Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump ally who was convicted and imprisoned for attempting a coup d’état.
The first round suggested that Flávio and his party were on track to gain an enormous amount of power. The party won more seats in Congress than any other — nearly a quarter of the lower house and more than a third of the Senate — which, together with other right-wing parties, gave the right a majority in both houses.
Two days after the vote, Flávio said he would use that majority to “change the Constitution” and “re-democratize” the country. Asked what he meant, he proposed limiting the powers of Supreme Court justices, lowering the age of criminal responsibility and ending presidential reelection, and he left open the possibility of extending the presidential term from four to five years.
“I really think the desperation and fear after the first round changed everything. There was a need to act with more urgency, and this desire to organize.”
In addition, whoever won in October would be able to appoint up to four of the 11 justices of the federal Supreme Court, the same court that convicted Jair Bolsonaro. A Flávio victory would have given the far right control over all three branches of government, amid the advance of the far right in Latin America and the United States.
As a result, after the first-round results came in on the night of Oct. 4, the mood among Lula’s supporters was one of deep discouragement and fear. But this fear quickly turned into forms of popular organizing that were diverse, complementary and consistently nonviolent — and they changed the course of the race. The mobilizations included a large-scale effort by politicians, activists, content creators and ordinary supporters to organize and amplify pro-Lula content on social media, and an equally massive occupation of the country’s streets in peaceful demonstrations.
Students took center stage in the street mobilizations, with thousands turning out for protests such as one led by the National Union of Students, or UNE, at the Candelária church in Rio de Janeiro, and one led by UNE and the University of Brasília’s student council on the Esplanade of Ministries in Brasília. People in the streets and on social media acted together and complemented each other.
Beyond protests and online activism, people organized to make sure that those who had not voted in the first round would go to the polls, including elderly people and those who live far from their polling places. They also got off the internet and talked in person with undecided voters who had not yet made up their minds, a process that had a name: vira voto, or flip the vote.
For Gabriel Rochlin, a director, actor and teacher who took part in a vira voto group in Rio de Janeiro, this was a way to get out of the social media bubble. “The work of vira voto has a lot to do with breaking through the algorithm,” he said. “The street has this real quality of not having an algorithm that separates people: you’re going to meet people you would never meet on your feed.” He saw the fear engendered by the first round as the turning point: “I really think the desperation and fear after the first round changed everything. There was a need to act with more urgency, and this desire to organize.”
Given the collective feeling of fear and hopelessness after the first round of voting, the first challenge was to shift the mood of the left. It was on Oct. 5, the day after the results, that popular mobilization began in earnest.
“When we got hit with the news that Flávio had more votes, there was a kind of desperation,” said Nayara Ruiz, a social media strategist with 280,000 followers on Instagram. “A huge shock, a feeling of fear, and a replay in our heads of 2018 [when Jair Bolsonaro was elected].” At first, Ruiz recorded a video about that fear. “And while I was editing it, I started to feel really bad. And I said: I’m not going to post this video, this is not the path I need to take.” She came across a news story about how online fandoms dedicated to Brazilian and international musical artists like Taylor Swift, BTS and Anitta were putting their networks at the service of Lula’s campaign. “The moment I saw that, I said: ‘That’s it, I have to talk about this, about esperançar.’”
“Esperançar,” was a term used by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire to mean “hope in action,” as opposed to “esperar,” which in Portuguese means both to hope and to wait.
Ruiz then recorded a video talking about the fandoms and about esperançar, and why it matters for organizing. She explained that esperançar demands three things: seeing a possible future, understanding that there is a path to that future, and feeling that you can do something to make that path a reality. She wanted to show that there was a path to defeat Flávio if people came together.
The video was viewed 5 million times, the most of any she had posted, and brought her 40,000 new followers, Ruiz said. It was one of many videos and posts in the days after the first-round vote that spoke to people’s discouragement and helped turn it into a willingness to act.
Social media activism may have been one of the left’s most innovative strategies in this campaign. A WhatsApp channel called Exército do Lula, or Lula’s Army, was created by André Janones, a federal congressman from the state of Minas Gerais. What set it apart was its scale and its structure. It quickly grew from 50,000 to more than 10 million followers in less than three weeks, in a country where WhatsApp had been the far right’s most effective tool since Jair Bolsonaro’s 2018 campaign.
“We learned together, we mobilized together, we practiced esperançar together, we believed together, and Lula’s Army was a place that brought all of that together.”
The channel’s growth came as the Lula campaign charged that Meta, which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, had limited the reach of Lula’s posts and favored Flávio’s. (Leaked communications from inside Meta supported this, and Meta acknowledged “technical problems” with the Lula campaign’s paid promotions, but denied any bias.) For Lula’s Army, the WhatsApp channel had the advantage of delivering messages directly to its followers without an algorithm throttling their reach.
Rather than relying on a few official accounts to broadcast the Lula campaign’s message, it turned millions of ordinary supporters into active participants. It also gamified the organizing for the second round. Because voting is compulsory in Brazil, the goal was less to get out the vote than to reduce abstention and win over undecided voters. Through frequent audio messages, videos and texts, Janones handed out missions to participants, calling on them to share content, boost posts, promote hashtags, invite new members and amplify messages supporting the campaign. Everyone was given a rank and could advance up the ladder by completing these tasks. Janones “promoted” Ruiz from soldier to captain of the Army in a lighthearted video because of the explainer videos she made about the channel.
She believes one of the initiative’s contributions was fostering a kind of political digital literacy among supporters. Janones taught the channel’s followers how platform algorithms work, so that messages from Lula and critical information about Flávio would rank higher on social media. Until then, the far right had dominated social media, partly because of the high engagement its posts generated. Participants in Lula’s Army came to understand that part of that engagement came precisely from their reacting to far-right content that bothered them.
How a strong messaging strategy helped defeat Brazil’s BolsonaroJanones’ strategic directive to Lula’s supporters was that they should stop interacting with opponents’ posts and concentrate their collective strength on producing and circulating their own content. To that end, participants were instructed to watch videos to the end, and to like, comment on, save and share posts, using the platforms’ different features to expand their reach.
“Maybe Lula wouldn’t have won without this, without the Army, without this feeling that swept over people, without the sense that we weren’t fighting alone,” Ruiz said. “We learned together, we mobilized together, we practiced esperançar together, we believed together, and Lula’s Army was a place that brought all of that together.”
Ruiz credits Janones with turning that collective energy into a coordinated effort. “Janones calls himself a general, but I also see him very much as a conductor who led an orchestra that was disorganized, who tuned the instruments and managed to set the rhythm and organize the whole mobilization that took place and that is now being replicated around the world,” Ruiz said.
Social media also played an important role in spreading the word about and organizing the occupation of the streets during the weeks before the runoff. In the three weeks between Oct. 4 and Oct. 25, massive peaceful protests brought together hundreds of thousands of demonstrators across the country. These protests featured politicians, renowned Brazilian musicians like Chico Buarque, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, and grassroots artistic groups. Together, the iconic faces and grassroots artists helped bring in a very broad diversity of people.
“As we saw the big street protests, the power we had, not only inside the university but also in the streets, on social media too, it started creating a movement of hope.”
University students played a fundamental role in this occupation of the streets. They were the ones who kicked things off on Oct. 5, and throughout the three weeks between the first and second round of voting, they were a major force calling people to the protests, often organizing through their own social media.
The first street protest of the runoff campaign took place in Niterói in the state of Rio de Janeiro on Oct. 5, organized by students from Fluminense Federal University. Those students set an example, according to Gabriel Shpielman, a mathematics student and activist with the Rebellious Youth Union. “I think if that hadn’t happened on the first day, it would have been totally different,” he said.
Student mobilization quickly spread to other universities, including the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, or PUC-Rio, which also began organizing the day after the first round. Shpielman and a classmate created an Instagram profile and called on students at the university to attend an assembly, from which the PUC-Rio Antifascista movement was born. Around 200 students packed the auditorium, heard from a representative of the National Union of Students and decided to go together to the protest in downtown Rio the following day.
According to Shpielman, this helped “put people in the position of seeing themselves building the comeback.” For him, it was in this experience with their collective strength that fear gave way to organizing: “At first it reflected despair, but as we saw the big street protests, the power we had, not only inside the university but also in the streets, on social media too, it started creating a movement of hope.”
The call for student protest started by word of mouth, in classrooms and WhatsApp groups, and gained reach through PUC-Rio Antifascista’s Instagram account. The account shared collaborative posts — Instagram posts that appear on several accounts at once — with other accounts, like Protesto Estudantil (a page run by high school students from Colégio Pedro II), the PUC-Rio Graduate Students’ Association, and with public figures such as Dani Balbi, Anielle Franco, Wagner Moura and Chico Buarque.
Shpielman called the process cyclical: The more visibility PUC-Rio Antifascista gained, the more partnerships it secured, and those partnerships increased its visibility. The page has now reached over 30,000 followers. Even so, for him, social media was at the service of the streets. “What really turned the election around were the streets, the protests,” he said. “Social media reflected that mobilization. It’s so much better to see a protest with a million people than a page with 10 million people.”
Another point of concern in the first round was the abstention rate, which was the highest since 1998: Over 21 percent of eligible voters, or 33.4 million people, simply didn’t vote. In light of this, much of civil society’s mobilization sought to make sure people went to vote. This took place through crowdfunding drives to arrange transportation for those living far from their polling places, ride-sharing initiatives, providing information for undecided voters in the streets and vira voto campaigns.
Diego Zuculin is one of the founders of Casa Marighella, a cultural and artistic production company and organization in São Paulo that put all of its work on hold to get out the vote. After the first-round results, “everyone looked at each other and said: ‘Wow, we’re screwed. What are we going to do?’,” Zuculin said. The next morning, the team decided “almost everything could be postponed in the face of the end of democracy.”
The first idea was simple: He would offer his own car to neighbors whose grandparents had no way to get to the polls, and a friend would offer his motorcycle. They soon realized that many people were probably thinking the same thing and decided to create a platform connecting those who could offer rides on election day with those who needed them. That’s how Carona Solidária, or Solidarity Ride, was born.
The team developed the first version of the platform in-house in two or three days. As word spread, partner collectives, artists, tech people and lawyers joined to help with legal issues and with outreach. The platform circulated on Instagram and WhatsApp, and in a second phase, the group reached out to journalists and pages in Brazil’s North region, where there were still few ride offers.
“The heart of vira voto is its humanity. It’s a place for building bonds, for looking people in the eye.”
“We had an idea, we put it to work, then it went to social media and it spread across all of Brazil,” Zuculin said. A total of 22,000 rides were offered, in every state and the Federal District, and the real reach was even greater. “Some people told us: ‘I registered two people, but I took two, and on the way back I took three more, and then five more.’ One person posted a video saying they drove 13 people, another 15, and only registered one or two.”
He also says that the reasons users gave when requesting a ride — such as a distant polling place, no nearby buses, advanced age or having to work on election day — could serve as a basis for public policy. In the second round, abstention fell to 19.22 percent, the lowest for a runoff since 2006, the result of an effort of which, Zuculin acknowledges, Carona Solidária was only one part.
Complementing these efforts, numerous vira voto campaigns took place across the country, in which people organized in groups to go out on the streets and talk to voters, especially those who were undecided or planning to abstain. Lula himself issued this call in a video posted on Oct. 7: “Come on, everyone, to the streets, let’s talk to people.”
In Rio de Janeiro, the local WhatsApp group that Gabriel Rochlin belonged to started with fewer than 10 people and ended with 60. Over two and a half weeks, according to the group’s own count, they flipped 181 votes. “Thinking of vira voto as collective action gives you a much greater sense of accomplishment,” he said. The group set up at Largo do Machado square and in front of the Catete Palace because, according to Rochlin, Workers’ Party congressman-elect Marcelo Freixo had indicated that there were many undecided voters there. WhatsApp was used to organize the actions and to make sure volunteers were always together and in safe places, given the risk of violence.
In their conversations, they used QR codes linking to informational materials, such as videos from Revelando, an investigative documentary series launched in September by the Brazilian podcast Calma Urgente in which well-known Brazilian figures voiced criticisms of Flávio. They also encouraged people to search Google for information about Flávio, something that Lula’s Army also urged voters to do. More than the information, however, Rochlin believes that “the heart of vira voto is its humanity. It’s a place for building bonds, for looking people in the eye.”
Oct. 25, the day of the runoff vote, went down in history. Brazilians achieved the unprecedented: They overturned the first-round result, elected Lula and halted the far right’s advance in just three weeks. The internet was flooded with powerful images — streets completely packed with peaceful demonstrations by Lula voters, the elderly voting, people journeying long distances to cast their votes, and entire Indigenous communities traveling to reach their polling places.
Ultimately, the movement to reelect Lula succeeded through a diverse range of civil resistance tactics. Right away, Lula supporters saw that to contain the far right’s advance, it was necessary to occupy the streets, deluge social media and create support structures so that people would vote and could reach the polls. They also saw the importance of mass participation: People from a broad range of social groups — of different ages, genders, social classes and regions of Brazil — acted together. In “Why Civil Resistance Works,” Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan identify mass participation like this as one of the key factors explaining why civil resistance is more likely to succeed than armed struggle.
But one insight runs through all these actions: People need esperançar, the capacity to transform fear into action. Millions organized and, following Paulo Freire’s advice, resisted when it felt hopeless. The far right, which has been advancing in many parts of the world, constantly uses hopelessness as a tool. Brazil’s civil mobilizations shows that esperançar is political, capable of acting as an engine of organization, social action and transformation.
A movement built on esperançar — collective active hope — beat Meta’s algorithms, took to the streets, and turned out millions of votes against the far right.
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