Sento Sé, "Politics, from a Brizolista viewpoint, is above all to assume a radical option for the poor and the meek". Brizola shunned the class-based, corporatist character of his early populism and adopted a Christian rhetoric of friendship to the people in general—akin to the Russian narodniks than to classical Latin American populism. This new radical populism was seen as a threat to more orderly, liberal-democratic politics. It suffered from a lacking mastery of less personal mass politics techniques and required Brizola's charismatic and personal leadership of Brizola to function effectively. In Brizola's absence—or that of his persona—the PDT could not become a contender to power, hampering its development on the national level. In 1982, Brizola stood for governor of the State of Rio de Janeiro in the first free, direct, gubernatorial elections in that state since 1965. He ran a ticket of candidates for Congress that tried to compensate for his party's lack of cadres by offering a roster of people with no previous ties to professional politics, such as the Native Brazilian leader Mário Juruna, the singer Agnaldo Timóteo, and a sizeable number of Afro-Brazilian activists. He was aware that this last foray into race politics contradicted his previous, more conventionally radical policies. Brizola nicknamed his ideology Socialismo Moreno ("Socialism of Color" or "mixed-race socialism"). Brizola centered his personal campaign on issues such as education and public security, offering a candidacy that had clear, oppositional overtones and proposed to upheld the Vargoist legacy. By developing a nucleus of combative militants around himself—the so-called Brizolândia—Brizola led a campaign that melded violent confrontations and street brawls with a paradoxically festive mood, expressed by the motto Brizola na cabeça—a pun between "Brizola at the head of the ticket" and "High on Brizola", brisola being a contemporary slang for a small parcel of cocaine. To have his victory in the 1982 elections acknowledged, Brizola had to publicly denounce what the paper Jornal do Brasil described as an attempt at fraudulent accounting of the ballots by the private contractor Proconsult—a computer engineering firm owned by former military intelligence operatives—contracted by the electoral court to offer speedy electoral statistics. During the early ballot-counting process, Proconsult repeatedly supplied media with communiqués offering belated voting statistics from rural areas, where Brizola was at a disadvantage, which were immediately echoed by TV Globo. By denouncing this alleged fraud at press conferences, interviews, and public statements—which included a