Down a residential alleyway where telenovela soap operas vie for attention with barking dogs, Vitoria Carolina has a disheartening message for Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and his re-election campaign.
The unemployed 23-year-old is glad of a recent increase in welfare payments for the country’s poorest, a crucial target demographic for the far-right populist. But she is adamant the extra income will not sway her at the ballot box in October.
“It’s just a strategy to win votes. It isn’t going to influence mine,” she said from the outskirts of Belo Horizonte, the capital of the south-eastern state of Minas Gerais. Like many other residents in the deprived hillside community of Granja de Freitas, she remains loyal to Bolsonaro’s leftwing rival Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the former president whose party built the social housing in which she lives.