The first round of voting in Brazil’s presidential elections was looming and Jair Messias Bolsonaro, the polarising incumbent, had a message for his followers.
“Vote this Sunday wearing the yellow shirt,” the 67-year-old president declared ahead of the voting in this month’s elections. “Vote with the yellow shirt!”
If you were to do it in another country, the idea of turning the national football team shirt as a political weapon is absurd. But this is Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and this is a World Cup year; normal rules do not apply.
As Sunday’s runoff vote between Bolsonaro — the right-wing leader whose policies include threatening to disregard election results, pushing for more liberal gun laws, opening up indigenous land to mining and a gung-ho handling of the COVID-19 pandemic — and the left-leaning Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva looms closer, the president’s followers will don the most famous jersey in world football to show their support. They did the same in 2018, a few months after that year’s World Cup in Russia.
Neymar Jr, Brazil’s talisman, is probably the most high-profile Bolsominion – the name given to Bolsonaro’s devotees. However, those who disagree with his agenda are opposed to the weaponisation de la Selecao shirt has prompted anguish.
Bolsonaro, Neymar (with subtitles in English). 🇧🇷🇺🇸
Compartilhem esse vídeo, é muito importante. pic.twitter.com/HomkPvQDas
— Tradutor de Direita (@TradutordoBR) October 23, 2022
“Our failure was in letting it get kidnapped,” Walter Casagrande Jr, who played in the 1986 World Cup and is now a prominent TV pundit, tells The Athletic. “We messed up. Nobody took a stand. There’s no way of going out with the yellow shirt because this absurd colour division exists. At this moment, there’s no way of wearing it.”
How has Brazil managed to transform what should have been their ultimate symbol for national unity into the next front in an increasingly toxic political culture warfare, weeks before they are expected to win the tournament?
Football, as Jorge Chaloub, a political sciences professor at Rio de Janeiro State University, points out, “is one of the key strands in Brazilian identity”. It is true that the politicization of the Brazilian national soccer team jersey is not new.
Chaloub traced the trend back to 2013, when protests started out as anger at public transport’s failures, but morphed into something more fundamental.
“Studies on the 2013 protests point clearly to the use of national symbols by many protestors — ideas like, ‘my flag will not be red’ and ‘my party is Brazil’,” Chaloub says. “You have this language which is supposedly patriotic, which starts to bind the flag to the right. The Selecao shirt became part of it.”
Jair Bolsonaro presents Donald Trump a Brazil shirt in 2019. (Photo: Chris Kleponis – Pool/Getty Images).
Protestors donned the shirt again when they took to the streets after the launch of ‘Operation Car Wash’, the world’s largest government corruption investigation which led to the arrests of key politicians. This was, however, more a defiance act, and meant to express national pride. As Juca Kfouri, the country’s most respected football writer of the past 40 years, rationalised: “The Brazil shirt is in people’s wardrobes.”
It took the 2016 impeachment of Lula’s successor, President Dilma Rousseff, as well as Lula’s own imprisonment a year later, to make the national jersey a totem for Brazil’s right wing. “Before then, it was used by the left and the right,” Chaloub says. “But in 2016, the Brazil shirt became a symbol of the right.”
For Bolsonaro, co-opting Brazil’s yellow shirt is simply the natural next step in a career in which he has consistently used football for his own ends. He has worn many shirts over his career, including those from Palmeiras to Flamengo and the United States. LazioThis is a selection of fake tops that may appeal to Brazilians who are unable to afford an official club shirt.
Vendo um bom e velho futebol de domingo ao lado do PR @jairbolsonaro
Que jogo, meus amigas! E meu fogão ainda ganhou de virada!
Será que temos um Presidente pé quente? pic.twitter.com/AhHDfifT3d— MarioFrias (@mfriasoficial) June 19, 2022
“Bolsonaro explicitly uses football as a political instrument,” Chaloub analyses. “There was a report recently saying that Bolsonaro has worn 86 different football shirts and he’s been in office for about 1,300 days. It’s an identity. It is relatable to people.
“But this Bolsonaro tactic feels insincere when you see that he’s worn shirts from all the Rio clubs. His image portrays someone who is comfortable saying the same thing today as tomorrow. He sells it as impulsiveness.”
Bolsonaro also has close relationships with many senior Brazilian football executives. Bolsonaro nominated Rodolfo Landim, Flamengo president, to the presidency of Petrobras the state-owned oil firm Petrobras. Landim was curiously rebuffed the offer after Fluminense defeated Flamengo in Rio’s state championship final. Bolsonaro has also been in good terms with Leila Pereira, president of Palmeiras.
It is with Brazil’s players, however, that Bolsonaro’s most significant relationships lie. Lucas Moura, Daniel Alves and Romario, who was re-elected as a senator for Rio de Janeiro under the same party as Bolsonaro’s Partido Liberal, have all publicly declared their support for him. Thiago Silvia used Bolsonaro’s slogans on a social media post, while Ronaldinho and Rivaldo’s backing for him in 2018 led to Barcelona watering down their ambassadorial roles.
However, Neymar’s support is what matters most. Just days before the first round, Neymar posted a video of him on YouTube. TikTok dancing in a chair to a ‘Vote Bolsonaro’ song. In recent weeks, he began flooding his Instagram accounts with pro-Bolsonaro photos. One of these was a video showing an evangelical pastor saying that he was ordered to read out statements from Brazilian electoral authorities. This was later labelled misinformation by Instagram.
@neymarjr 22
To seal his endorsement of Bolsonaro, Neymar last week appeared as a special guest on the president’s live stream, speaking about wearing the yellow shirt and Palmeiras’ upcoming fixtures. Neymar answered that he would dedicate the celebration to Bolsonaro after achieving his first goal at this year’s World Cup. “The president will have already been re-elected,” Neymar said. “We will meet again with the trophy in our hands.”
Bolsonaro losing to Lula will require bridges to be rebuilt given the challenger. Recently, Neymar claimed that he supports BolsonaroIn return for tax-debt exoneration
Not everyone in the Brazil camp — around 80 percent are said to not be eligible to vote — is comfortable with the politicisation of their World Cup campaign.
Tite has already declared that if Brazil wins in Qatar, Tite will be the national coach They will not travel to BrasiliaTo visit the presidential palace would be a departure from what has occurred every time Brazil have been world champions. He, and a million others, also signed an open letter defending Brazil’s voting system and democracy in August.
Tite, however, is an outlier where football is concerned – a point not lost on illustrious figures in Brazil’s past who became crusaders for political reform.
Casagrande, who helped to lead the Democracia Corinthiana movement at his old club Corinthians in the early 1980s — an act of democratic defiance against the country’s ruling military dictatorship — is especially downbeat.
“After that period [of Democracia Corinthiana], no other team has taken that kind of stance or been part of a movement of that kind,” he says. “No other players have been as strongly engaged with sociopolitical matters as we were. What is football’s legacy? There wasn’t one. The legacy is historical.
“Footballers are too comfortable and prefer not to involve themselves with anything, even when they want to. In Brazil, it’s very difficult. It’s very unlikely for there to be five or six players who are politically engaged.”
Supporters of Jair Bolsonaro gather at an election rally. Many are wearing Brazil shirts (Photo by Buda Mendes/Getty Images).
Neymar, for one, would doubtless argue that Casagrande’s problem stems from footballers not being engaged in a way of which he approves. Either way, it is hard to imagine the World Cup not being hijacked by Brazil’s politicians, given the febrile state of a country plagued by political murders and the ongoing crisis of Amazon deforestation.
Victory in Qatar in December could remedy a growing disconnect between the national team and the country’s citizens — a problem Neymar himself admitted earlier this year — or it could simply empower BolsonarismoAssuming that the reigning president wins on Sunday.
Seasoned observers don’t believe so. “If Bolsonaro is elected, we are heading for an authoritarian pathway,” says Chaloub. “So, in this scenario, the World Cup would have one meaning. There will be another meaning if Lula is elected. The Brazil shirt might be reclaimed by people on the left. But it seems likely that the far right will continue to do what they are doing.”
(Top photo: Instagram/@ronaldinho)
