The hotly-contested presidential election in Brazil between incumbent Jair Bolsonaro and former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has taken an unexpected and nasty turn—even by the low standards that have been set in the past year of campaigning. In the final weeks ahead of an Oct. 30 runoff vote, Lula da Silva’s campaign has dug up videos that use Bolsonaro’s own words against him, with insinuations of cannibalism, pedophilia and devil worship.
The tone shifted so quickly that the campaign of President Jair Bolsonaro, who won office four years ago with an aggressive digital assault on rivals, was put on the defensive, losing precious time for his strategy to come from behind and win reelection.
Two senior aides to Bolsonaro avowed that his campaign was caught off-guard by the attacks from the leftist challenger Lula da Silva and allies, who seized on both old videos and recent slip-ups to leave the right-wing incumbent scrambling. The Bolsonaro campaign was surprised by the effectiveness of the strategy.
“It did us a lot of damage,” one of the campaign aides said on condition of anonymity.
In one line of attack, Lula allies dug up a 2016 interview in which Bolsonaro said he was willing to eat human flesh in an unspecified indigenous ritual. In another, they circulated old images of Bolsonaro speaking at Masonic lodges, considered pagan temples by some of his evangelical Christian allies.
In the most explosive attack yet, Lula’s campaign made an attack ad from Bolsonaro’s anecdote on a Friday podcast about visiting the home of adolescent Venezuelan migrant girls who he suggested were preparing to prostitute themselves.
Bolsonaro has denied any association with cannibalism or pagan rituals and branded the insinuations of pedophilia as slanderous lies. But the subjects have dominated campaign coverage and online conversations for days.
“Bolsonaro has become a victim of his own weaponized communications strategy that muddies public debate with sarcasm, mockery and humiliation aimed at dividing Brazilian society,” said Fabio Malini, a professor of new media at the Federal University of Espirito Santo.
It remains to be seen if this new development will have a determining effect on the outcome of the elections.
