Political ads on TV ramp up tussle for a handful of votes in Brazil

Brazil’s 2022 campaign officially started last week, when electoral law allowed candidates to explicitly start soliciting votes. However, a major part of the election season only begins on Friday, August 26, as candidates will be able to air political ads on TV and radio.

Legislation requires television stations to provide free airtime to candidates of all parties during a campaign. The amount of airtime is divided proportionally according to their party’s benches in Congress. Candidates in larger coalitions get more time, while some campaigns are restricted to ads that last just a few seconds. Literally.

In the 2018 elections, Jair Bolsonaro had one of the shortest airtimes of all candidates, owing to him running in a coalition with only two small parties. In each segment that aired twice daily for 12 minutes and 30 seconds each, Mr. Bolsonaro’s campaign had a mere 8 seconds. Former São Paulo Governor Geraldo Alckmin, meanwhile, was entitled to over a third of the show, with 5 minutes and 32 seconds at his disposal.

Despite this disparity in airtime, Mr. Bolsonaro went on to win the election, while Mr. Alckmin got under 5 percent of the vote. It was the worst performance ever recorded by a candidate of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party, which for two decades was the leading national force right of center. (Mr. Alckmin has since migrated to the center-left Brazilian Socialist Party and will be on this year’s ballot as Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s vice-presidential nominee.)

With a strong grassroots campaign running via WhatsApp — which included a strategy to firehose lies about his rivals into public discourse —, Mr. Bolsonaro was able to become nationally famous without ads on TV. 

This has led some to believe that official electoral ads are no...