Brazil's Naturalist Bloc Surges as the Vote Nears

BRASÍLIA — With the federal vote now weeks away, the Naturalist bloc has surged into contention on a single, incandescent question — whether to be human is to be unaltered — and a campaign that once turned on wages and water is turning, hard, on the body itself. Fresh polling puts the bloc near a third of the electorate, its best showing yet, drawn from voters across the old economic lines by a platform of enhancement caps, separate schooling, and a "natural-born" registry that its opponents call a wall and its supporters call a fence. Enhanced citizens — still barely one in twenty Brazilians — report the rhetoric curdling off the podium and into the street: rescinded job offers, landlords who suddenly have no rooms. "They say they are only protecting what is natural," said an augmented engineer in Brasília who asked that her clinic not be named. "But a country that registers me protects everyone except me." The incumbent coalition, caught between a frightened middle and a mobilized flank, is trying to hold a center that is thinning by the week. The vote will decide a government. The campaign is already deciding something larger, and colder: what the word citizen is allowed to mean.