On Sunday, Brazil’s incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won the presidential runoff election, making him the President of the South American country for the fourth time. The leftist leader who finished second in the first round of presidential elections on October 4 with 45.16% of the vote, while Flávio Bolsonaro was the clear winner with 47.03% of voters choosing him.
But little over 20 days later, the 80-year-old was able to flip the script and retain his post, against all odds. Lula’s win was decisive, with more than 64 million votes compared to just under 60 million for Bolsonaro, a margin of nearly 4%.
According to the Associated Press, analysts credit this turnaround to the additional 14.1 million voters who showed up for the second-round election, including those who voted for other candidates in the first round.
Many also pointed out how one man, lawmaker André Janones, turned the tables for Lula. Janones is said to be the brain behind Lula’s digital campaign, which mounted a fierce and persistent social media operation that mobilized many of those previously uncommitted voters.
Janones’ key tool was a channel called “Lula’s Army,” which gathered almost 11 million people and mobilized them to campaign via social media for the incumbent.
Janones, who serves as a Federal Deputy for the state of Minas Gerais, is widely recognized as the digital “General” behind the massive social media and mobilization campaigns for Lula.
According to BBC Brazil, his round-the-clock digital mobilization, which utilized viral videos, hashtags, and a 24-hour livestream on the eve of the runoff, helped counter the strong digital presence of Bolsonaro.
The campaign clicked and on October 20, Lula reached 200 million interactions on social media since Oct. 5 whereas Bolsonaro had 54 million, according to Projeto Brief data agency in a study conducted for local newspaper Estadao.
According to data from analytics company Bites, between the campaign’s launch on August 16 and up to the first round, Lula and Bolsonaro had more or less the same number of interactions. But since the beginning of the second round, the incumbent’s profiles received around 111 million interactions against ’s 31 million.
Janones “basically embraced the right’s style of aggressive politics, very intense, constant messaging,” Oliver Stuenkel, a professor of International Relations at Fundação Getulio Vargas in São Paulo, told AP.
“The defeat in the first round jolted the Lula campaign into action. The strategy during the first round was lackluster and saw a lot of infighting,” Stuenkel said.
