For Botafogo de Ribeirão Preto, the club in the city where the author of these lines spends most of his time, a home victory, or even a draw, with the very modest Capivariano was enough to qualify for the quarter-finals of the Paulistãothe State Championship on which the team bets a lot of its prestige and finances.
In the end, even though they played with one more man for almost half the game, they lost due to a goal in the last minute.
What does this irrelevant sports news have to do with current political and social issues in Brazil, the usual theme of these texts? This: on the Monday after the terrible elimination, more people than ever were walking through the streets of the city with the Botafogo shirt proudly worn.
We know that Corinthians broke attendance records in 2007, the only year in which they were present in the 2nd Division. Or that 60,000 Bahia fans invaded Fonte Nova, the club’s stadium, when Salvador’s shield fell to third. Etc. Etc.
In football, club loyalty is truly unconditional, although not always healthy, because it often results in tribalism and sectarianism, whether in Brazil or elsewhere on the planet.
In politics, the phenomenon was much less present in the last decades of the last century and the first decades of the current one in Brazil and other parts of the planet because, in those days, it was thought that democracies were supposedly maturing (after all, from a distance, it seems that they were rotting…).
Over the last few years, with the resurgence of populism, politics has moved closer to passion, rather than reason, and to the tribalism and sectarianism of football.
“You could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and you wouldn’t lose votes,” said Donald Trump, the most globally relevant example of the resurgence of populism, in January 2016.
In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro may be imprisoned and ineligible, but Bolsonarism is still alive, as the polls prove, with the first-born Flávio Bolsonaro increasingly solidified in second place, behind Lula da Silva who, in turn, knew what unconditional club loyalty was when, every morning of the 581 days in which he was in a cell in Curitiba, he was woken up by supporters shouting “good morning President Lula”.
It has already been written here, regarding the October elections, that Brazil is divided into three thirds: two calcified around Lulism and Bolsonarism, which support Lula or Bolsonaro, or whoever they nominate, even if the leaders kill someone on Avenida Paulista. And another, independent, indecisive, fickle, pending – and decisive.
In fact, in the Portuguese presidential elections, mathematics consolidated the transatlantic thesis: António José Seguro added the outstanding third to his (66% of the votes), isolating André Ventura’s third (33%).
In politics, there are more and more tribal and sectarian “fans”, who, like in football, are born, live and die for the same club, even if it loses at the last minute playing with someone else. And this is, from the point of view of the evolution of democracies, an own goal.
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