Brazil jersey hostage to politics a month from World Cup

BELO HORIZONTE, Brazil: Every four years, there is an explosion of green and yellow in Julio Cesar Freitas’s neighborhood as locals cover the streets in the colors of the Brazilian flag.

But this year, Freitas felt compelled to add an explanation alongside the sea of decorations outside his family’s construction supply shop: “It’s not politics, it’s the World Cup.”

Football-mad Brazil is famously passionate about the World Cup, which it has won more than any other country — five times. But this year, the signs of football fever have taken on a different meaning.

Battling to win reelection in an Oct. 30 runoff against veteran leftist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, far-right President Jair Bolsonaro has adopted the flag and the national football team’s jersey as symbols of his own.

Bolsonaro regularly sports the colors of the flag, his rallies are drenched in yellow and green, and he urged supporters to wear the national team Selecao’s iconic jersey to vote in the first-round election on Oct. 2, in which he finished a closer-than-predicted five percentage points behind Lula.

With Brazilians bitterly divided by the elections, yellow and green have become politicized — sometimes dampening outward displays of World Cup fever in Brazil, whose team head to Qatar as favorites ahead of the November 20 kickoff.

The unease is visible in Freitas’s neighborhood, Caicara, in the southeastern city of Belo Horizonte.

The city organizes a decoration contest for every World Cup.

Freitas, whose family has been taking part since 1994, says there were negative reactions this year in the politically divided community after they hung their decorations two weeks ago — rows upon rows of mini triangular flags strung across the street.

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