If it were not for the northeast, Jair Bolsonaro would be president of Brazil. Ten of the thirteen states that delivered victory to Lula in the October 2022 elections make up this enormous region – three times larger than Spain – historically poor but already in visible convergence with the rich south.
With 50 million inhabitants and 39 million votes, 70% corresponding to the Workers’ Party (PT), the northeast of Brazil is an interesting case to study, an exception in times of rise of the right in Latin America. Even more so because, after Lula’s fall in the national polls, this region is the main obstacle to the return to power of the post-Bolsonarist right, already led by the ultra-conservative governor of São Paulo, Tarcísio de Freitas, after his disqualification for alleged coup by former president Jair Bolsonaro.
“The right has a more simplistic, more direct message than the left but I don’t see a major change against Lula here,” said Denildo Costa, a young historian at the Casa de Carnaval in Recife, where a series of puppets commemorates the carnival tradition of the subversive maracatu, from when slaves dressed up as Portuguese kings. Despite losing much of its support in the rest of the country during the advance of the right, the PT still governs in three northeastern states.
It is true that, in the latest polls, Lula’s popularity in the northeast has fallen from 52% to 43% – a fairly normal decline in the second year of a Brazilian president. But the president’s positive assessment here is still twelve points above the southeast – Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte – and even more with respect to the deep Bolsonarist south.
Of course, conservative commentators in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro do not forgive the northeasterners for their attachment to the veteran leader of the left. “Lula’s popularity, more than ever, is anchored in inland wastelands where a horde of miserable people is carefully manipulated by his welfare programs (…) most of them in the northeast,” Merval Pereira, the star columnist, wrote. from the newspaper O Globo, in Rio, last month.
It is not new to talk about the northeast in these terms. “There is an imaginary of the northeast – in reality, a prejudice – that endures; that the northeasterner votes with his belly and the rest votes with his head; that it is a rural and retrograde region and that we live in wastelands lost in the interior,” he said the historian Durval Muniz de Albuquerque, author of the reference book The Invention of Nordeste and professor at the Federal University of Natal.
“But the truth is that we already have three of the largest metropolises in the country – Fortaleza, Recife and Salvador -, 70% of the population lives in cities and has the same information as those in Sao Paulo.”
Since the beginning of the 20th century, the northeast has been perceived in a schizophrenic way under the insecure perspective of the elites of the southeast. It is portrayed as the essence of authentic Brazil – mestizo and with strong Afro-Brazilian features, carnivalesque, rural, folkloric and with the best cuisine. Gilberto Freyre, the great anthropologist of the first half of the 20th century, who was born and died in Recife, created the archetype of bom mestiço here to differentiate Brazil from the segregationist eugenics then fashionable in the United States.
Cities like Recife, Natal, Fortaleza and Salvador have given birth to the icons of Brazilian culture: novelists like Jorge Amado – with the very northeastern humor of Doña Flor and her two husbands, set in Salvador de Bahia -, or Rachel de Queiroz, with their denunciations of the poverty of the interior. The fishing samba of Dorival Caymmi, the extraordinary forró accordion of Luiz Gonzaga, or the tropical psychedelia of Caetano Veloso. They are all canonized references throughout the country.
But, at the same time, the region is perceived from the south as a burden on modernity, lacking entrepreneurial awareness, easy to seduce with public subsidies and demagogic speeches.
Such is the resentment in the conservative south towards the northeast that in the middle of last year the ¡Wall Now! movement emerged, led by the conservative governor of Minas Gerais, Romeo Zema, another candidate for the post-Bolsonaro presidency. Zema declared a war between regions and proposed “raising a wall” between the northeast and the south.
It would not be a wall, like Trump’s, to stop immigrants. The six or seven million northeasterners who fled poverty half a century or more ago are already settled, forever, in the periphery and favelas of southern cities, labor for the wealthy neighborhoods.
Zema’s rhetorical wall serves, instead, to push the right’s most powerful territorial message: that Brazil is divided between the fiscal conservatives, the working people and the entrepreneurs of the south – of course white – and the supposedly subsidized northeast. . It is true that the rich south and southeast contribute more to the Brazilian federal state. But, the most indebted states are those of the southeast – Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais – whose debt is ten times greater than all the northeastern states.
The more the southeastern right expresses its contempt for the northeast, the more strongly the northeasterners identify with Lula, a native of the town of Caetés, in the interior of Pernambuco, four hours by road from Recife.
“There is solidarity with Lula even in the middle class here because, even as president, he suffers the same prejudices as all northeasterners,” says Muniz de Albuquerque.
In a small restaurant serving northeastern cuisine – couscous, dried meat, boiled cassava – in Paraíba, the screens project Bolsonarista singers of sertanejo, Brazilian country, celebrities from the conservative interior of the south and west. But in the northeast the music sounds different: “Are you pro Lula? Me too!” said the waiter, shaking hands.
The Northeast still has an illiteracy rate of 12% – compared to 3% in southern Brazil – but in many ways political consciousness here seems more sophisticated. It is forged in a past of rebellions of slaves, indigenous people and poor whites, like Canudos at the end of the 19th century, of bandits-heroes like Lampaiao, and a resistant popular culture and social fabric. This creates a connection with the reality of the social changes promoted by the PT that serves to avoid the siren song of the cultural wars and conspiracy theories of Bolsonaro social networks.
Although conservative evangelism is growing here as in the rest of Brazil, in the northeast it has counterweights: Afro candomblé, brought by the three million slaves who worked on the sugar cane plantations, and a Catholic syncretism. While Bolsonaristas in Sao Paulo and Santa Catarina praise the generals of the dictatorship, an avenue in Recife is named after the mythical archbishop of liberation theology, the socialist Helder Pessoa Cámara.
In Natal, a sculpture of the Afro-Brazilian sea goddess, Yemanjá, challenges an oversized statue of liberty in front of the Havan department store, owned by Bolsonaro billionaire Luciano Hang.
Beyond its history, the durability of Lula and the PT in this region – burdened for centuries by slavery, extreme poverty, droughts and famines – has a quite obvious explanation. The PT governments from 2003 to 2012 reduced the number of poor from 21 million to twelve million with repeated increases in the minimum wage and a well-designed anti-poverty subsidy program called Bolsa Familia. With Lula (2003-2010) and Dilma Rousseff (2011-2015) in the presidential palace in Brasilia, essential public works were carried out – such as the transfer of the San Francisco River to drought areas – that no previous government had proposed.
Earlier this month, Lula visited the arid interior sertão to inaugurate an aqueduct that brings water from San Francisco to 68 municipalities. He also attended the inauguration of a new railway that will connect the state of Ceará with Piauí.
After the return of hunger during the pandemic poorly managed by the Bolsonaro government, food insecurity that reached 70 million in 2022 – a third of the Brazilian population – has dropped to 20 million in Lula’s first year. This is due to job creation, constant increases in the minimum wage, subsidies and pensions, above inflation. The northeast is the most benefited region. The economic growth of the Northeast in the years 2003 to 2012 exceeded that of the Brazilian average by more than one point.
Anyone who comes to the northeast with any knowledge of its past is amazed. In 1965, hunger and disease were epidemic in Recife and it was calculated that in the Casa Amarela neighborhood, for every two children born, one would have died a year. “The northeast is the most underdeveloped region in the Western Hemisphere,” Eduardo Galeano was horrified when he visited the region in the late 1960s. It is “a gigantic concentration camp for thirty million people.” Destroyed by the social and environmental brutality of the sugar plantations, famines devastated the region and Galeano warns that the lack of iron in the diet “causes anemia and instinct pushes children to eat dirt.”
Half a century later, the contrast is total. A middle class is seen enjoying the popular steakhouses and the brand new shopping centers. Bolsa familia benefited the northeast more than any other region, but the children of those subsidized have already gone to public university, with heavy investments by the PT governments. “Youth is already qualified in the Northeast; people from the south say that the vote in the 2022 elections was illiterate people who received Bolsa Familia but if you looked at the public that attended Lula’s rallies in the medium-sized cities of the Northeast, they were not not the women who received Bolsa Familia but the young people,” explains Tânia Bacelar, an economist at the Federal University of Pernambuco.
But even here in friendly lands, the risks for Lula and the PT are growing. With a very narrow fiscal margin for the public investments and spending necessary for development, it is impossible to achieve the accelerated pace of social transformation of 15 years ago. If food price increases continue, the government may lose further support. ‘The majority of people here earn less than two minimum wages – about 500 euros per month – so prices, especially of food, are very important,’ said Muniz de Albuquerque.
The other factor is organized crime, which is becoming the most important political issue in all of Latin America. Northeast has replaced Rio de Janeiro as the region with the most homicides. From February to October 2023, the homicide rate in the thirteen northeastern states reached a terrifying 23.4 per 100,000 inhabitants compared to 14 in all of Brazil, an already high figure (in Spain it is 0.63). 45 people die in crimes of violence every day in the region, more than 50% of all homicides recorded throughout Brazil. It remains to be seen if the “iron fist” message of Bolsonaro and Freitas, which has seduced millions of voters in the large cities of the south, ends up convincing the northeasterners as well.
