Brazil’s Iconic Yellow Soccer Jersey Is Now Its Version Of The Red MAGA Hat

SAO PAULO — Brazilians are heading to the polls to determine their next president on Sunday, bringing an end to a heated contest that will determine the fate of its democracy, the future of the Amazon rainforest and whether right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro will win a second term that would allow him to accelerate his attacks on both.

Many of Bolsonaro’s supporters are casting their ballots while wearing the iconic canary yellow soccer jersey that Brazil’s national soccer team has made famous around the world. But many Brazilians opposed to Bolsonaro can no longer stand the sight of the shirt — and wouldn’t wear it even if you promised them that doing so would guarantee a victory in next month’s World Cup.

The yellow jersey has become a potent cultural and political signifier in a bitterly divided Brazil: Bolsonaro, an admirer and ally of former U.S. President Donald Trump, has helped turn it into Brazil’s equivalent of the red MAGA hat.

It’s a cliche that soccer determines the national mood of Brazil, but the national team and its yellow shirt have long been used for political purposes. The military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985 used the team’s success — Brazil won two of its record five World Cup crowns during military rule — and its yellow shirts as a symbol of pro-regime patriotism. The jersey took on political significance again in 2015, when it was ubiquitous at protests against leftist President Dilma Rousseff.

Bolsonaro, a longtime fan of the dictatorship, cemented its status as an emblem of the Brazilian right-wing during a 2018 campaign that fully co-opted the jersey, the flag, and the green and yellow colors into signifiers of a particular type of patriotism meant to exclude the left, its supporters and anyone else Bolsonaro saw as an illegitimate piece of the national fabric.

During this election, Bolsonaro has wrapped the jersey into the conspiracies he’s spread about voter fraud as he’s sought to undermine the legitimacy of the contest. Bolsonaro has trailed his leftist rival, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in polls, and is widely expected to attempt to question the results if he loses the election Sunday.

In August, he warned that da Silva’s backers would “start wearing green and yellow” to “deceive” other Brazilians. Before the first-round vote on Oct. 2, he criticized the Superior Electoral Tribunal, which oversees elections and has been the subject of a relentless…