World

In Brazil, supporting the right presidential candidate may actually get you a hot date.

“Please tell me that you aren’t a leftist, you are too pretty to be one,” Vivian read in one message she received on the dating app Tinder.

But Vivian supports Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a leftist who is one of two politicians facing off in a presidential runoff vote on October 30. So no match occurred, a sign of how politics has seeped into intimate everyday realms.

Indeed, the law of physics that opposites attract is not always the case on dating apps such as Tinder, Bumble, Happn and Grindr — certainly not in Brazil’s highly polarized dating world.

“I am a leftist (and) I will ask who you vote for. It’s important that we think alike,” warns Gabriela S., a 25-year-old psychologist in Sao Paulo, on her Bumble profile. She asked to keep her surname private. 

“It makes no sense for me to connect with people on the right,” said Gabriela, who added that she wouldn’t even enjoy a beer with someone who holds racist views or contempt for the LBGTQ community. 

Supporters of President Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right retired military officer who took office in 2019, have carved out their own space on social media to look for romance. 

A Facebook group page called Bolsoteiros, a wordplay that combines “Bolsonaro” with “singles,” has 6,700 members.

“The left defends all that we disapprove of,” 46-year-old Elaine Souza, a social worker, writes on the page she founded in 2019. But self-selected followers of her group “are halfway to finding a partner.”

The electoral decision Brazilians face is so divisive that the political filter on dating apps is “the most used by Brazilians,” said Javier Tuiran, communications director for Bumble in Latin America.

Use of the filter “rose in the months before” the first round of presidential elections on October 2, in which Lula won 48 percent of votes and Bolsonaro garnered 43 percent, Tuiran said.

– ‘We can work things out’ –

“I only (accept) those who won’t vote for Bolsonaro… Everyone else, we can work things out,” the Tinder profile for 37-year-old Rafael says.

Sorting out political differences can avert getting a relationship off on the wrong foot.

Psychologist Ailton Amelio da Silva said that “some differences can be complementary, but they generate incompatibility when they are important, as many feel about politics now” in Brazil.

Jose Mauro Nunes, who has a doctorate in psychology and is a marketing professor at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, said polarization in Brazil has inflamed “tribal” identities and created bubbles on social media where individuals prefer those who have similar ideologies.

Some dating apps see marketing potential in catering only to one side of the political spectrum, such as Lefty.

“Finding a companion is hard enough. Not having this (political) incompatibility is a big help for a lot of people,” said Alex Felipelli, president of Similar Souls, owner of the Lefty app, which has 15,000 users.

Another example is PTinder, an Instagram account with 26,100 followers that “seeks to generate interactions, including with singles announcements, among opponents of Bolsonaro,” said its creator, Maria Goretti.

The 38-year-old lawyer said she took inspiration from “the fear of friends of meeting someone, and then after an incredible night realizing the next morning that (the person) is nostalgic for dictatorship or has other Bolsonaro-like ideas.”

Goretti said that her Instagram account has already led to couplings, and even marriages. 

At a Red Cross centre in Moscow, a dark-haired woman nervously holds a phone to her ear, trying to dig out details on her Jewish roots to help her son flee President Vladimir Putin’s drive to mobilise troops to fight in Ukraine.

“Mum, your grandfather Moishe was born in 1870, like Lenin, right?” she asks.

“Getting an Israeli passport is the only way for my son not to go to fight in Ukraine,” the exhausted woman, who declined to give her name for security reasons, explained to AFP.

Tens of thousands of Russians have fled since Putin sent troops to Ukraine in February and then announced a nationwide military call-up in September.

Many have scrambled to find their Jewish roots to open up the doors to Israel. 

One of them is 32-year-old Ivan Mitrofanov, frantically looking for proof that his grandparents were Jewish.

As an IT worker, he is so far exempt from the first wave of mobilisation announced on September 21 after a series of Russian military defeats in Ukraine.

But Mitrofanov says he is “rushing to leave as long as the borders are open”.

Most Russians expect more mobilisation waves and some fear authorities will introduce martial law or close borders to men of military age.

– ‘My passport is toxic’ –

Mitrofanov thinks Israel is a better choice over Europe.

“In Europe, my Russian passport is toxic. I’ll go to Israel where we’re actually wanted,” he said. 

This new wave of emigration to Israel is so large that Moscow bureaucrats are starting to get tired. 

Tatiana Kalazhnikova, who works at an municipal administration office in western Moscow, said “90 percent of our clients come to look for their Jewish origins”.

Authorities have criticised Russians rushing to leave the country as unpatriotic and Kalazhnikova is not impressed.

“They want to leave Russia … for Israel where  war never ends,” she said sarcastically.

More than one million of Israel’s 9.4 million residents have roots in the former Soviet Union.

Israel says immigration applications from Russia and Ukraine have tripled since the conflict started. 

Its Central Bureau of Statistics counted 20,000 arrivals from Russia and more than 12,000 from Ukraine since the end of February.

Faced with an avalanche of departures, Russia in July ordered the dissolution of the Jewish Agency, which helps Jews emigrate, accusing it of breaking the law.

Many Russian celebrities — including Russia’s pop queen Alla Pugacheva and her comedian husband Maxim Galkin — have left for Israel. 

The announcement of a chaotic and often random mobilisation led to a new exodus, with tens of thousands flocking to the borders of Georgia and Kazakhstan for weeks. 

In a sign of just how many are choosing Israel, five new private agencies have opened to help Russians emigrate. 

Others are resorting to genealogists to help them find any trace of Jewish roots. 

Vladimir Paley, who specialises in Jewish genealogy, said he has received “10 times more requests” from both Russians and Ukrainians since the start of the conflict. 

“With the mobilisation, I mainly reply to the calls of mothers looking to expatriate their sons,” the 55-year-old said. 

– ‘Fear and disgust’ –

There have been many waves of emigration to Israel from Russia and the erstwhile Soviet Union. 

But this one is “out of fear and disgust,” one of Paley’s clients, 40-year-old Mikhail, said. 

A history teacher and author, Mikhail never thought of leaving. Putin’s mobilisation changed that and he wants to emigrate with his wife and child. 

But moving out — often a decision taken in a matter of hours — has also caused families to break up. 

Andrei Trubetskoy, a 58-year-old former official of the Russian interior ministry, said he understood in February that he “no longer wanted to have anything to do” with his own country. 

With his historian wife, he searched archives only to discover by chance details of his great-grandfather who was a Hasidic Jew. 

The couple were preparing their file and started learning Hebrew.

But, at the last moment, his wife refused and the couple divorced. Now he plans to leave alone.

“The decision to leave is often impulsive,” said Lyubov Borussyak, a sociologist at the Free Moscow University. 

She has surveyed 150 families who had chosen to leave since February. 

“Their goal is not to move to another country, but to leave Russia,” she said. “It’s an emigration of panic and fear.” 

Actress Angela Lansbury, who became a household name through her role as a writer-detective in “Murder, She Wrote,” died on Tuesday, her family announced. She was 96.

The British-born star, who found fame and fortune as one of television’s most memorable characters, was also a hugely successful and decorated stage and film actress.

“The children of Dame Angela Lansbury are sad to announce that their mother died peacefully in her sleep at home in Los Angeles… just five days shy of her 97th birthday,” a statement widely quoted in US media said.

Tributes came Tuesday from across the world, with Australian former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull posting a picture of the pair, who were cousins.

“Thank you Angela for the joy & love you have shared with all the world all your life,” Turnbull tweeted.

Meanwhile NASA posted what it called “a cosmic rose” — a deep space constellation — in memory of the actress.

Lansbury was nearly 60 years old when she netted the role that made her famous: the mystery writer and amateur sleuth in the smash television series “Murder, She Wrote.”

In a career spanning more than seven decades, she appeared in about 60 films and starred in some of Broadway’s biggest musicals. 

She snapped up six Golden Globes, five Tony Awards for her work in American theatre and, in 2013, an honorary lifetime Oscar.

But most remember her as the down-to-earth, middle-aged widow Jessica Fletcher who ferreted out criminals in the television series “Murder, She Wrote”, which ran from 1984 to 1996 on US television and was exported to dozens of countries, making her recognised the world over.

“I was amazed, almost everywhere in the world knew Jessica Fletcher. They treated me like a rock star,” Lansbury said in 2016.

The 264-episode series won her four of her Golden Globes, as well as a fortune: she garnered up to $300,000 per episode.

Even so, in 2017 at the age of 91, the still-lively actress spoke of her wish to play the role of Jessica Fletcher “just one more time”, British media reported.

– Teen screen debut –

Lansbury was born in London on October 16, 1925, to a family of politicians and actors.

Her grandfather, George Lansbury, was a leader of Britain’s Labour party in the 1930s and her mother, Moyna Macgill, was an Irish actress.

In 1940 she emigrated with her widowed mother to the United States, fleeing the World War II blitz.

Blonde with big, blue eyes, she studied acting in New York.

Her film breakthrough came at just 17 when she was cast as the conniving maid Nancy in the 1944 psychological thriller “Gaslight” with Ingrid Bergman, a role that won her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress and led to a seven-year contract with MGM studios.

Another Oscar nomination quickly followed, for “The Picture of Dorian Gray” in 1946, while a third nomination came for “The Manchurian Candidate” in 1963, roles for which she picked up two Golden Globes.

However, Lansbury was often sidelined into secondary roles, playing characters older than herself.

“I was playing older parts when I was terribly young because I wasn’t a big screen beauty. I am a character actress,” she told BBC radio in 2014. 

In the 1961 musical comedy “Blue Hawaii”, for example, she was the mother of a dashing tour guide played by Elvis Presley, who was only 10 years her junior.

– From Hollywood to Broadway –

Frustrated with her slow career in Hollywood, Lansbury moved to theatre in Broadway in the late 1950s.

She became a star in the title role of the 1966 musical “Mame”, about rich New Yorkers during the Depression, for which she trod the boards more than 1,500 times and won her first Tony Award. “Gypsy” (1973-1975) and “Sweeney Todd” (1979) followed.

But she continued to pick up roles in cinema, gaining a younger audience as the witch in the hit Disney film “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” in 1971.

She won her fifth Tony award in 2009 for her Broadway role as dotty clairvoyant Madame Arcati in Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit.”

She reprised the part, in her late 80s, in London’s West end in 2014 — her first time on a London stage in 39 years, winning rave reviews. 

“She’s the utmost professional,” Michael Blakemore, who directed her in the play, was quoted as saying in The Guardian newspaper in 2015. 

“I think people such as her, who have been acting since they were teenagers, develop special gifts because they learn the basis of their craft when they are young and impressionable,” he said.

Lansbury was married for 53 years to her second husband Peter Shaw, who died in 2003.

Britain made Lansbury a dame in 2014.

“In addition to her three children, Anthony, Deirdre and David, she is survived by three grandchildren, Peter, Katherine and Ian, plus five great grandchildren and her brother, producer Edgar Lansbury,” the family statement said.

“A private family ceremony will be held at a date to be determined.”