Leftwing Brazilians are hoping to use their country's first World Cup match to reclaim its well-known yellow and green football jersey from Jair Bolsonaro's far-right movement.
The canarinho little canary shirt has become the most potent symbol of support for Brazil's nationalist leader who won power in 2018 but had his hopes of a second term dwindled last month after leftist former president Luiz In cio Lula da Silva won the presidential election.
Lula is going to take power on January 1 and is spearheading efforts to wrest back control of the football shirt, as well as other Brazilian symbols such as the national anthem and flag.
The 77-year-old has announced that he will watch Thursday's match against Serbia wearing a canarinho with the number 13 representing his Workers Party PT emblazoned on the back. Leftwing football fanatics can download the design from Lula's official website and make a shirt of their own.
Lula told reporters recently that we can't be ashamed of wearing our green and yellow shirt. It doesn't belong to one particular candidate. It doesn't belong to one particular party. The colours of 213 million people who love this country are green and yellow. Marcelo Freixo, another prominent leftist politician and football fan, said he would watch Brazil's debut in Qatar, wearing a yellow and green shirt, paying tribute to his local team, Flamengo, as well as the storied Sele o.
The Fascist movements have always expropriated national symbols, but we won the election and it is now time to reclaim all of our national symbols, which belong to all of us, Freixo said. The Brazilian flag, the Brazilian team and the national anthem have never been owned by the far right. Reginaldo Lopes, a PT congressman and Lula ally, sported the canarinho during a recent interview with the Guardian, a look that would once have marked him out as a Bolsonarista.
It is wrong for a political faction to try and appropriate something that is a symbol for all Brazilians. Not all leftist Brazilians are finding it easy to re-embrace a jersey that has come to represent an extremist president who has devastated the Amazon and whose calamitous Covid response has resulted in nearly 700,000 deaths.
The reconciliation has been further complicated by the fact that several leading Brazilian players, including the star striker Neymar, are Bolsonaro backers.
I am not ready to wear the yellow shirt yet, said Priscila Motta, a 43-year-old publicist, as she dropped her son off at school wearing Brazil's blue away shirt on Thursday. Andr Porcaro, a 41-year-old engineer from the city of Eugen polis, planned to pull on his yellow shirt for the first time since the 2018 World Cup on Thursday.
I think that the yellow shirt isn't linked to politics today. Porcaro said that if someone sees me wearing the shirt on the street, they won't automatically assume that I'm a Bolsominion, using one of the derogatory names for followers of the outgoing president.
Is it possible that Porcaro will still be wearing yellow on Friday? He said he didn't think that. Maybe I ll wear it during the World Cup, but I think it is almost impossible to dissociate the yellow shirt from this political movement. Freixo believed that the time had come to counter attack against Bolsonaro's authoritarian bid to kidnap the canarinho. He said that we must reclaim these symbols and democratise them as Brazil prepares to launch their quest for a sixth World Cup title.