In Brazil’s social media war, André Janones matches Bolsonaro’s tactics

Since the Supreme Court quashed convictions against former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and made him eligible for office once more, the Brazilian center-right sought to portray itself as a third way between Lula and far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. Polls showed that the duo’s rejection rates eclipsed those of all other candidates — which, in their mind, was proof that voters were eager for a different alternative.

But all would-be third-way candidates polled pedestrian numbers. Some even ranked behind André Janones, a once-unknown member of Congress who gained some level of fame during the 2018 truckers’ strike.

Without any partisan structure behind him, Mr. Janones polled at 2 percent in several surveys — the same as then-São Paulo Governor João Doria, who was running the wealthiest state in the nation and had brought the first Covid vaccines to Brazil. 

Shortly after withdrawing from the race and deciding to back Lula, Mr. Janones would turn out to be one of the most important figures in the 2022 election campaign, becoming the social media berserker that Brazil’s left wing had lacked for many years.

Indeed, Mr. Janones’s public life is inextricably tied to social media. In 2018, when Brazilian truck drivers staged a strike that paralyzed the country for over a week, Mr. Janones’s accounts were among those that drew the most engagement around the issue — even though he is a lawyer by trade, and had very few concrete links to the truck drivers’ movement. 

In a fiery Facebook video designed to draw responses, Mr. Janones urged Brazilians to support the truckers against the government of then-President Michel Temer, who he called a “bum.” That video got over 15 million views and more than 100,000 likes and comments. 

With 1 million Facebook followers at the time (20 percent of which lived in Mr. Janones’s home state of Minas Gerais), he used social media as a trampoline to become the state’s third-best-voted member of Congress in 2018.

For years later,...