Campanha Permanente, Visibilidade Midiática e Propaganda Política: Um Estudo das Estratégias Comunicacionais dos Candidatos Lula/Haddad (Pt) e Bolsonaro (Pp, Psc, Pen E Psl) de 2015 a 2018

Resumo (EN)

Based on the interface between Communication and Politics, the present study aims at investigating the strategies of the supposed permanent campaign of candidates and political parties competing in the second round of the 2018 presidential election - Jair Bolsonaro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and, later, Fernando Haddad (Workers’s Party – PT). Lula was prevented from running for the election and was replaced by Haddad. To this end, the theoretical framework includes three axes. At first, it discusses the centrality of the media and its interface with the political field, including the debate on the mediatization process of social processes. The second conceptual axis focuses on the main debate of this study, which is the discussion on permanent campaign, understood as the confluence between government communication and electoral communication, used as a long-term strategy by politicians, aiming at the maintenance and conquest of power. (HECLO, 2000; MARTINS, 2016; NOGUERA, 2001). Political and electoral propaganda are also discussed, whether through mass or digital media. Finally, the discussion is about the crisis of political representation and coalition presidentialism, in addition to pointing out the specificities of the 2018 political and electoral context. Given that the election was polarized between PT, represented at first by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and, subsequently, Fernando Haddad versus Jair Messias Bolsonaro (Social Liberal Party – PSL), the goal is to analyze both the Free Party Propaganda (PPG) programs as a corpus, which was extinguished in 2018. In this case, the analysis was made from the programs that aired in the period from 2015 to 2017, and the programs of the Free Electoral Propaganda Schedule (HGPE) as a space for electoral communication during the 2018 election. The study begins with the hypothesis that PT used PPG more intensively to build Lula’s image as a candidate. Bolsonaro, in the analyzed period, engaged with three different parties (Progressive Party – PP, Social Christian Party – PSC and PSL and even considered entering the National Ecological Party – PEN) and made little use of PPG. Bolsonaro’s focus ever since his role as deputy has been to gain visibility mainly on social networks and popular television programs. Therefore, it was necessary to verify, during the PPG period of Bolsonaro’s parties from 2015 to 2017, the video posts on the politician's Facebook page at the time the PPG programs were aired. In addition, due to the Brazilian legislation that determined the end of the PPG in 2018, it is understood that the candidates moved their efforts to social networks. Therefore, the most viewed videos from January to July 2018, posted by Lula and Bolsonaro on their Facebook pages will be analyzed, which characterizes a hybrid research object. It is based on the main hypothesis that there are points of media confluence in the narratives produced by pre-candidates Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Jair Bolsonaro, even though they had produced different representations through different media channels, characterizing the permanent campaign. As a methodological strategy, Bardin’s Content Analysis (2011) was applied in order to separately analyze the objects through a quantitative and qualitative perspective, and then identify points of confluence and dissonant aspects. It can be seen that the candidates made use of the media in a hybrid manner. Lula and Bolsonaro used the spaces of mass and digital media to build the permanent campaign. However, due to the media’s gramar adaptation, speeches made in digital media tended to be more informal, although containing themes similar to those of the mass media. Therefore, in the context of the 2018 election, different media channels interconnected. When politicians lost space in the mass media due to legislation that put an end to the PPG, they more intensively shifted to digital media. It can be noticed that the themes used before the official campaign period, whether through mass or digital media, were resumed during the electoral period. This process is conceptualized as a ‘permanent integrated campaign’ because it makes use of media channels in such a way that one media channel complements and reinforces the discourse of another media network, in a process of circularity and intersections, as pointed out by José Luiz Braga (2012).