The rainbow flag stretched over the crowd had the sea behind it and a kilometer of people ahead. Around the Posto 5 lifeguard station, Copacabana beach hosted on Sunday (18) a musical rally for democracy in support of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) and his reelection bid, occupying at least six blocks of Rio de Janeiro's beachfront, according to Folha de S.Paulo, whose reporter captured the scene under a cloudy sky. One week before the runoff vote, set for October 25, the gathering brought a good part of the Brazilian songbook's pantheon to the same stage.
Called by Caetano Veloso and producer Paula Lavigne and organized by the 342Artes and Mídia Ninja collectives, the event began at 4:10 p.m. and featured performances by Caetano himself alongside João Bosco, Moacyr Luz, Ivan Lins, Simone, Fernanda Abreu and Djavan. Actresses Renata Sorrah, Leandra Leal and Cissa Guimarães also attended, Folha reported.
The lineup carries a memory that older faces in the crowd know by heart. Caetano, now 84, founded the Tropicália movement with Gilberto Gil and was jailed and exiled by the military dictatorship in the late 1960s, an experience that runs through his work to this day. Simone lent her voice to "O Bêbado e a Equilibrista", the João Bosco and Aldir Blanc song that became an anthem of the amnesty campaign that helped end the regime. Seeing those names together, on a stage set between the boardwalk and the sea, gave the rally a weight that goes beyond electoral arithmetic.
The event's host, actor Paulo Vieira, opened the proceedings by criticizing an attempt to block the rally in court. The Instituto José do Patrocínio, a conservative think tank, had asked the TSE, Brazil's top electoral court, to suspend the event, but Justice André Mendonça closed the case, according to Folha.
"They tried to stop this event from happening, and they failed. Democracy is exactly this: being able to make art, to sing, to speak out. This is not a rally, not a campaign concert and not a campaign event", Vieira said.
Attendees wore Lula T-shirts, stickers and flags, and politicians such as congressman-elect Guilherme Cortez (PSOL-SP) and congressman Henrique Vieira (PSOL-RJ) were present. Streets feeding into Avenida Atlântica were closed to traffic. Earlier in the day, a student rally led by UNE, the national students' union, filled two blocks of Avenida Presidente Vargas downtown, near the Candelária church, with composer Chico Buarque in attendance. After saluting democracy "against brutality and subservience" from a sound truck, Chico stepped down to the avenue and posed for photographs.
Rio was not alone. Sunday's mobilizations are part of the nationwide "Ato da Virada" (Turnaround Rally) movement, which took Lula supporters to Praça Tamandaré in Goiânia, with a sound truck and a march to Praça do Sol, as G1 showed, and to the Esplanada dos Ministérios in Brasília, where demonstrators gathered in front of the National Museum of the Republic, Poder360 reported. In the runoff, Lula faces Senator Flávio Bolsonaro (PL), son of former president Jair Bolsonaro. When the afternoon fell over Posto 5, the rainbow flag still covered the crowd, and the sea was still there, behind it, as it had been all day.