January 17, 2022
12:01
Bruno Pacheco – Cenarium Magazine
MANAUS – In the election period, when pre-candidates and political candidates start their respective campaigns to get elected, it is common negative advertisements that attack opponents. For experts and political analysts, the use of this type of tool at this time of year exposes the lack of proposals of the candidates for public office elected by the people.
The sociologist, lawyer and political scientist Carlos Santiago explains the change in political marketing, especially after the advent of the new electoral rules. “Before, there were 90 days of political campaigning. Today, there are only 40 days. Before the modification of the legislation, political marketing, the electoral strategy followed a very traditional recipe”, the specialist commented to CENARIUM.
The recipe followed by political marketing began, according to Santiago, with the construction of the political character/candidate with his professional qualifications, experience, family, studies, and his social contributions.
“Then, I would put in the candidate’s hands, and on his lips, the proposals to solve society’s problems. Once presented to the population, the candidate begins to propose solutions to solve the serious social problems in several areas, in education, health, safety, and urban mobility. In the third stage of the traditional political marketing model, it was the deconstruction of the opponents’ image, criticizing, showing incoherence, denouncing irregularities, seeking the deconstruction of the image”, said the political scientist.
In the pre-campaign, according to Carlos Santiago, politicians start moving to expose contradictions, irregularities, and deconstruct any positive image of their possible opponents. “The deconstruction, the criticism against the opponents have always existed within the electoral strategies, of political marketing. As the campaign was long, 90 days, this phase was left for the end, at that moment of the dispute, of the closing of the campaigns, as the debates began. Now, the politicians who are pre-candidates or candidates for major positions are already using the strategy of deconstructing the image of their opponents right now”, he reinforced.
Experience
The same is reinforced by the diplomat, also a sociologist and former mayor of Manaus, Arthur Virgílio Neto. “A public person needs to be experienced, to have sensibility with the social problems of a people who are starving. He needs to present realistic proposals in the direction of employment and income. He needs to be respected by his people and his country. It is mandatory that he knows how to defend the MFTz, and that he has the political credentials to be heard and taken seriously. It is one thing to say and prove what you say. It is another to be part of the sameness and accommodation. Those who are not prepared live off petty petitions, schemes, and misplaced attacks”, Arthur Neto exemplifies.
Jabuticaba
The professor and political scientist Paulo Kramer affirms that the “pre-campaign” is a “Brazilian jabuticaba”, referring to the fruit native to Brazil that exists in almost every territory in the country. For him, pre-campaign is “an invention of the Electoral Justice Department”, which “legislates crazily without having been elected to do so.
“The ABC of social networks teaches that they lend themselves much more to negative messages than to positive messages. The digital ‘punching’ gets the attention of Internet users, and it is this type of polemic that moves cyberspace. If the attack is massive, intense, and the ‘target’ does not defend itself in time, it will be ‘stamped’, making it more difficult to ‘un-stamp’ it”, said the specialist.
Kramer reaffirms that the pre-campaign is a term of the calendar dictated by the Electoral Justice, which ‘legislates’ illegitimately, because, according to him, it has not received a popular mandate to do so. The political scientist also criticizes the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), Regional Electoral Court (TRE) and the Electoral Public Ministry (MPE).
“The TSE, the TREs, and the Electoral Public Ministry invent so many difficulties for the free expression of the candidate and his competition that I suspect they don’t like elections and, if they could, they would ban them forever, substituting democracy by a dictatorship of jurists, a trend that has been insistently manifesting itself in other segments of Brazilian politics”, he stressed.