In June 2013, Brazilians took to the streets by the millions in protest. Each of them could feel the reasons for their discontent, yet none could fully articulate them. The protests began following the imposition of public transport tariffs, first led by fringe leftist and anarchist movements but expanding to an extent previously unimaginable. Put simply, Brazilians realised that their lives sucked. They felt that they were paying too much for low-quality public services, one of the highest murder rates in the world, and sewage coverage resembling that of a war-torn African country. What started as opposition to ticket pricing, an issue which touched millions, even if lightly, became an opportunity for people to finally express their long-held frustrations with a political establishment which told them that everything was going well, but which their eyes and experience told them was failing.
Although the protests were not connected to any political party or ideology, they constituted a spark of political awakening on the Brazilian right. The June 2013 journeys, as they became known, did not lead to any immediate change. President Dilma Roussef, in office at the time, was re-elected the following year. Nonetheless, this was the first sign that the democratic system established by the progressive 1988 Constitution (hereafter the ‘Regime of 1988’) was not delivering on its promises in the eyes of voters, and one which came as a huge surprise to the political and media establishment, the guardians of the Regime.
After the 2014 election, the Brazilian right was able to organise and capitalise on a failing government. The President’s fiscal indiscipline caused an economic crisis worse than that of COVID. From the end of 2014 to the end of 2016, there was a real per capita GDP contraction of 10% and a rise in unemployment from under 7% to 13%. Against this economic catastrophe, the endemic corruption of the government, and under very specific constitutional pretexts, the Brazilian right led mass protests to impeach the President. At the forefront of this movement was a group called Movimento Brasil Livre (literally Free Brazil Movement, or MBL). The impeachment succeeded, and Brazilians got rid of the leftist Workers' Party after 13 long years in power. It was natural to think that MBL would command the Brazilian right moving forward, capturing the spirit of the successful impeachment process, which was a genuinely right-wing movement, unlike the 2013 journeys.
It was not to be so. That political moment was subsequently captured by an obscure congressman with an unimpressive legislative record called Jair Bolsonaro. In 2018, he led a successful presidential campaign, uniting the different sects of the Brazilian right and a disillusioned middle class to vote for the only real novelty candidate in 20 years, who would go on to lead the first right-wing government in Brazil’s democratic period.
Today, Jair Bolsonaro is under house arrest after an attempted coup, and his followers are rallying around his son, Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, for the presidential election this year. However, for the first time, the Bolsonaro family is facing credible opposition from the right — indeed, from MBL themselves — something that was previously unthinkable given the grip Bolsonaro had on his ideological camp.
To paint a picture of the current state of the Brazilian right, its divisions, and its potential, for an international audience, we must first explore its history and the ideas that have shaped its contours today.
A brief history of the Brazilian right: military juntas, Islamic traditionalists, and communism
The Brazilian right is a young movement. While there have been many variations of conservative and anti-leftist tendencies since the return of democracy in 1985, it was only during the 2016 impeachment process that it consolidated into a united political force. For three decades, Brazil did not have an organised right. From 1985 onwards, political control passed between various social and liberal democratic factions before its ultimate capture by the radical left at the dawn of the 21st century with the election of Lula da Silva in 2002. Whilst there was some contestation over the extent to which markets, on the one hand, and redistribution, on the other, constituted the best response to shared progressive concerns, the broad thrust of political objectives was near-universally agreed.
The reason for the great void on the right during this period is fairly obvious: Brazil’s transition to democracy was preceded by 21 years of a military dictatorship which was initially supported by Brazilian civilian right-wing groups, tainting the right by association for many years after. To be ‘right-wing’ in the 90s and 2000s was to be culpable for the repression of the previous regime, and nobody in polite company could countenance such connotations. Ironically, this was compounded by the actions of the junta itself, which viewed civilians with suspicion and as such suppressed the development of civil society on the right as well as the left, if with less violent fervour. When the military administration withdrew, there was no organic right-wing force to fill its position in Brazilian civic life.
This absence of a political right did not mean that there were no ideological disputes during the period. The Regime of 1988 has been defined by polarisation around the main left-wing party, the Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores¸ abbreviated to PT). Its ideology is called the petismo, which contrasted against the antipetismo, primarily represented for many years by the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira, PSDB), a liberal and social democratic party. While petismo can be defined narrowly as an ideological and rhetorical identification with PT, antipetismo is a broad rejection of this phenomenon. PSDB’s enduring dominance within antipetismo enabled their ability to hoover up the votes of most conservative or right-wing Brazilians for decades, despite offering little in relation to their political objectives.
Antipetismo takes on different characters and results from different motivations across various sections of Brazilian society. The business and financial sectors dislike the party’s economic program, especially the redistribution of income and socialisation of assets. Farmers and those in agri-business — the only industry that has actually grown in Brazil over the last thirty years — have felt themselves under constant attack by the party and its supporters, the sem terra (‘landless’), who have attempted to occupy and confiscate their land through force, intimidation, and violence. Conservative Christians view with suspicion the party’s more socially ‘progressive’ factions. The military and police forces have been infuriated by the leniency with which criminality is treated, and the way in which both have been demonised as forces of oppression by leftist intelligentsia associated with PT.
Finally, the middle class felt unrepresented by the party’s rhetoric, which never left any conceptual space to discuss those occupying a status between the much-derided ‘rich’ and those languishing in abject poverty. If the middle classes could have been convinced of PT’s merits, it was through their promise of improved public services, such as healthcare, education, and public safety. Yet once the party came into power in 2003, it defaulted (as is so often the case) to the easier task of redistribution, shying away from public service reform. A series of corruption scandals that plagued the party until 2016 alienated these voters all the more.
Unified only by a common antipathy towards PT, these groups remained separate and uncoordinated until the arrival onto the scene of Olavo de Carvalho, who first provided a coherent right-wing expression of antipetismo. Olavo was one of the most consequential figures in Brazil’s recent history, and certainly one of the most idiosyncratic. In his youth, he was a communist militant, later developing an interest in esotericism and becoming an astrologist, influenced by his reading of René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon; he entered Schuon’s Islamic tariqa, Maryamiyya. The final stage in his eclectic intellectual life was as a Catholic Americanist who adopted both the political platform and conspiracy theories of the U.S. Tea Party, including a conviction that Barack Obama was not a legitimate U.S. Citizen and a belief that Pepsi manufactured its drinks using aborted foetuses.
Beyond these quirks of personality, Olavo was highly articulate (at least when he chose not to be straightforwardly rude instead). He was, at least apparently, very well read, introducing many different political thinkers and ideas to the Brazilian repertoire in the 90s and 00s, and was one of the few public personalities who accepted the label ‘right-wing’. A relatively well-respected figure in public discourse, he wrote for many major Brazilian newspapers and appeared on television regularly before moving to Virginia and starting an online philosophy course (from which no one ever graduated). He also started his own podcast, True Outspeak, where he would comment on current affairs alongside whatever else took his fancy — and it was here that I first came across his work.
Olavo had three big political ideas (brace yourself). The first was the conviction that the reconstruction of the Roman Empire, understood in its abstract sense as a katechontic universal state, is the ultimate telos of Western civilisation, and has been for the past 1500 years. The Catholic Church attempted this in the Middle Ages, then Britain, and now America, which has come closest to success — or so he argues. The second was that there exists a cosmic competition between three great power projects: the liberal-Western, the Russo-Chinese, and the Islamic.
The final, and most important, was that, since the Renaissance, there has existed what he called ‘the Revolutionary Movement’, which is a broad project to de-Christianise the West and establish a New World Order. Olavo frequently used ‘communism’ and ‘the revolutionary movement’ interchangeably, but confusingly also leant on a more specific definition of the former as the ultimate culmination of the latter on occasion. For Olavo, communism was more a culture than an economic system. The left became aware of this through Antonio Gramsci, he claimed, and had subsequently set about trying to infiltrate all major institutions to slowly enforce communism. Gay marriage, abortion, progressive taxation: all of this served the communist strategy.
Whilst Olavo may have treated some of these concepts a little more carefully in some of his texts, his average reader took them without nuance. For example, a large part of the Brazilian right, drawing inspiration from his work, supports Ukraine because they genuinely believe that Putin is a communist in disguise. In 2016, a small march for Donald Trump in Rio de Janeiro where protesters urged Trump to fight the ‘communist’ Hillary Clinton. Olavo’s followers and the broader Brazilian right influenced by his ideas consider Brazil an integral part of Western Civilisation, the ultimate synthesis of Judeo-Christian morals, Greek philosophy and Roman legal tradition. Hence, they suggest, Brazil should align itself tightly to the West’s leader, the United States, especially when it is under a Republican President, as well as Israel (although this particular peccadillo is also a consequence of Brazil’s evangelical element, more on which later), as did President Bolsonaro. Having consumed a lot of Olavo’s thought over the years, it was a shock for me, having moved to Denmark, to find that people here did not consider Brazilians Western at all.
While most of the establishment saw him as a fringe figure, Olavo did touch a nerve with the broader electorate. Some of his works, analysing the decadence of Brazilian culture and its elites, did become best sellers. By being one of the only public figures to speak in openly right-wing terms, and refusing to constrain his critique of the left to the economic realm or keep it within the bounds of political liberalism, he attracted admiration from all of the antipetista factions. He provided a cultural and religious argument against the left, indulged in libertarian economic views and characterised some of the major Brazilian problems, such as criminality and political corruption, as part of the leftist political project. That is what the Brazilian conservative wanted to hear, even if it came in rather confused packaging.
Perhaps most importantly, Olavo understood that politics is not conducted in the realm of ideas, but by people seeking power (and, in a democratic context, election). But frontline politics was not for him, and he needed an avatar to implement his project. That person was Jair Bolsonaro.
Bolso-Olavism
Former President Jair Bolsonaro is not a well-read man. He was a former army captain, jailed for insubordination, who mostly represented the corporatist interests of retired military men from Rio de Janeiro. His long term in Congress yielded minimal results, failing to pass a single piece of legislation. Most of his interventions on the floor were to hail the former military regime and criticise excessive welfarism by the left. When the social and liberal democrats were in power in the 90s, he also opposed the economic reforms that ended Brazil’s hyperinflation, such as privatisation of state-owned companies. Bolsonaro existed not to imagine a future for Brazil, nor even to defend its past in order to advance a certain position — his was the purely therapeutic politics of a man whose time had passed.
He only began to receive media attention after publicly coming out against a government educational initiative on LGBT issues, which came to be known as the ‘gay kit’. In a country which maintains a majority holding relatively conservative religious views (even if those views are seldom practised), it was odd that no respectable figure dared to criticise the project, afraid of being considered homophobic. Bolsonaro was not afraid, and called out what he described as an attack against ‘Brazilian values’. From then on, his following grew as he continued to express, brusquely, sentiments that many Brazilians shared. He said he did not want his children being exposed to ‘two moustached dudes kissing each other’. He said that criminals did not need re-education; they only needed to ‘get fucked’ or be ‘killed’, and that people should have guns to protect themselves. He said that welfare policies incentivised poor people to reproduce and promoted sterilisation as an alternative. Whatever the validity (or lack thereof) in these views, Bolsonaro began to channel popular sentiments without any structural solutions, much like the least promising populists elsewhere.
It is here that Olavo enters the picture once again. The two men’s audiences overlapped quite neatly, and eventually both camps got in contact and began working together. One assumes that Bolsonaro has not himself read much of Olavo’s work, but he frequently appeared on Olavo’s live shows as President, wielding one of the author’s best sellers: ‘O mínimo que você precisa saber para não ser um idiota’ (‘The minimum you need to know to not be stupid’); repeating the same vocabulary as Olavo on the need to save Brazil from communism. It was a book Bolsonaro sorely needed if he was to construct a coherent political project, and Olavo’s platform gave him the reach he needed just as much.
Olavo saw this alliance with clear eyes as well. He believed that a right-wing, explicitly Christian candidate would win an election as the voice of the silent majority, and he expected his ideas to be the animating force behind any resulting administration. He used Bolsonaro for his own political project, as Bolsonaro did with him, forging a synthesis that became known as Bolso-Olavism.
The rise and fall of Jair Bolsonaro
Bolsonaro came to power by uniting three broad groups of voters. First, there were the religious conservatives, mostly evangelicals, who represent a quarter of the Brazilian people, concentrated in the more populous urban areas of the country. They were not necessarily readers of Olavo, but they shared a common language. There is a conspiracist mentality in many neo-Pentecostal churches around the world, which was fertile soil for the idea that PT wanted to ‘impose communism’ to ban Christianity, close the churches and persecute Christians (even if PT’s roots as an outgrowth of the Basic Ecclesial Communities, groups organised by leftist militants within the Catholic Church, belie this suggestion). Bolsonaro was also quite fond of Israel, which holds a special place in Brazilian Evangelicals’ hearts, and was baptised in the Jordan River by an Evangelical pastor. Given Brazil’s vanishingly small Muslim community (less than 0.5% of the population) and the fact that the only supporters of Palestine in the country are leftist militants, this sympathy should not come as a surprise.
The second group were anti-corruption voters, including the lavajatistas, supporters of Operation Car Wash — one of the largest anti-corruption investigations in the world, which had uncovered a number of egregious scandals involving PT leadership. Up to 2013, international analysts were mesmerised by how passively Brazilians responded to corruption scandals, evident as their rampancy was to most, with no one ever punished as a result. All of that changed after 2014, when Brazilians saw for the first time politicians and businessmen going to jail for corruption offences. Bolsonaro, presenting as a law-and-order candidate and not having any known corruption allegations against himself, was able to capitalise on voters’ anti-corruption anger. After his victory, Bolsonaro even nominated the judge leading the operation, Sergio Moro, to become his Justice Minister (in Brazil’s unusual legal system, judges can co-ordinate police operations directly).
Finally, there were the economic liberals — the group of which I myself was part. Whilst many voters saw Bolsonaro as too extreme in his nostalgia for the military period and his ultra-conservative social views, a large part of the electorate was willing to overlook this in the hope that he might deliver an economic alternative to the failing socialist project. Bolsonaro himself was never an economic liberal, and was actually quite fond of state dirigisme, as this was the economic model of the military governments. However, he signalled that he would nominate Paulo Guedes, a University of Chicago economist who advocated liberal shock therapy along the Chilean model (good Chicago boy that he was), to be his finance minister, softening the concerns that many business elites and middle-class voters had about his agenda.
These three groups of voters could unite around their expectations of a Bolsonaro presidency: promotion of conservative Christian values, a heavy crackdown on crime, and a Thatcher-style revitalisation of the economy. They expected an end to political corruption, the rejection of ‘woke’-inspired policies throughout public and quasi-public institutions, and technocratic management of the economy and public services.
They would be sorely disappointed.
The problems began before Bolsonaro even took office. Shortly after his election, during the transition period, it was reported that his son (Flávio Bolsonaro, who had just been elected to the Senate after 16 years as a state congressman) had committed fraud whilst serving as a representative. Rachadinha, as this type of crime is informally referred to, essentially involves embezzling taxpayer money by hiring staff to do fake jobs and taking a cut of their salaries in return. It is a relatively common practice in Brazil, especially among the more incompetent politicians who lack the nous and finesse to pull off more sophisticated, quieter schemes.
The reverberations of this scandal echoed throughout Bolsonaro’s term in government. The new President failed to advance any anti-corruption measures, aligning himself instead with various tainted figures among the corrupt establishment in order to protect his family.
Neither did he find the courage to tackle the abuses of the Supreme Court and the failures of Brazil’s criminal justice system. The Regime of 1988 was designed with extensive safeguards for citizens against abuses by the state, forged as it was in the trauma of the military junta’s persecutions. However, this has subsequently meant that the law is applied far too leniently, with extreme restrictions on police authority and criminals given multiple opportunities to escape jail on various grounds. This system gives the rich and powerful, who can often pull strings and can always afford expensive defence lawyers, a particular advantage in avoiding justice. Furthermore, it gives ideologically motivated judges plenty of constitutional excuses to release common criminals. Bolsonaro did nothing to fix these problems, and the situation remains as bleak as ever. Last year, for example, a judge released a young man with 87 entries in his police record, claiming that it ‘cannot be presumed that the accused will re-offend’. I presume he has already gone on to do precisely that.
The promise of economic shock therapy from Paulo Guedes also failed to materialise. The only significant steps forward were a set of reforms to the pension system, which the country had already been debating during the two-year interregnum between Rousseff’s impeachment and Bolsonaro’s victory, and central bank independence — which, whilst probably for the best in Brazil especially, is not exactly a motivating issue for voters without economics degrees. In fact, Bolsonaro’s government oversaw one of the greatest expansions in lazy welfarism Brazil has ever seen, with the introduction of what was effectively a minimum income guarantee during the pandemic, which was then preserved subsequently to drum up support among the lowest classes in society.
Bolsonaro’s government also had a habit of overpromoting particularly unpopular figures and especially toxic ideas emanating from the more ridiculous parts of its ideological hinterland (a tendency familiar to North American readers). Many of these people were recommended by Olavo himself. However, their influence never lasted long as their incompetencies and contradictions revealed themselves. Bolsonaro appointed two Education Ministers who were influenced by Olavo, the first a Colombian, Velez Rodriguez, who barely spoke Portuguese and lasted only four months in post, and the second, Abraham Weintraub, who — despite being Brazilian-born — regularly made basic grammatical errors in Portuguese written communications and was fired abruptly during the middle of the pandemic. Others lasted a little longer, including Dante Mantovani — head of the National Arts Foundation (FUNARTE) — who believed that communist agents had infiltrated the CIA during the 60s, and had intentionally distributed LSD at Woodstock to destroy the traditional family and, as a result, capitalism as a whole (it remains unclear precisely what the causal link here is, I’m sure as much to Mantovani as to the rest of us). He also made the case that the Beatles were secret students of the Frankfurt School, and that Elvis Presley had been a Soviet experiment designed to corrupt the minds of the youth.
Bolsonaro’s other son, Carlos, who technically held no position other than that of a mere city councillor in Rio de Janeiro, nonetheless exerted huge influence on the government, especially when it came to strategy and communications. Carlos was deeply sympathetic towards Olavo, and was believed by many (including some of Bolsonaro’s former associates) to be severely mentally ill. Carlos operated what was known as the ‘hate office’ (Gabinete do Ódio), co-ordinating online attacks and character assassinations against anyone who dared to disagree with his father, including fellow party members.
Much like elsewhere, COVID also proved revealing of the Bolsonaro government’s flaws. Whilst readers’ views may differ on this subject, what was most egregious about Brazil’s national response is that there was no national response. Bolsonaro himself thought it unnecessary to impose any measures to contain the spread of the disease, yet he left state governments free to step into the void of his inaction — leading to the imposition, in some places, of measures beyond what even Europe saw.
Yet, without a co-ordinated central government response, these measures presented as simultaneously onerous and futile, doing little to ameliorate the challenge of dealing with the virus. Bolsonaro took an equally hands-off approach to vaccinations, where the central government essentially released itself of any responsibility to manage the process. All of this was made worse by the rapid cycling of ministers in the Bolsonaro administration — by 2021, it was his fourth Health Minister (not) dealing with vaccination strategy. COVID split Bolsonaro’s coalition between the ideological wing, who viewed any government intervention as a Trojan horse for communism, and his more moderate supporters who had backed him looking simply for a functional government.
Thus, by the time that the 2022 general election came around, Bolsonaro had thoroughly disappointed a broad cross-section of his supporters. Olavo passed away early in the year after criticising the President (an act he had harshly admonished in others previously) heavily, suggesting that he had been nothing more than a poster boy for his own campaign (true, to a certain extent). Many of the ministers and staff that Olavo had nominated or that were under his influence had left the government by the time of his death, and some of them had begun to lay the groundwork to seize the baton of his movement from the failing Bolsonaro after the election. Former Education Minister Weintraub, for example, ran for governor of São Paulo, positioning himself as the representative of the ‘true right’ in contrast to candidates supported by the President who had sold out and joined the corrupt establishment.
These attempts essentially went nowhere for one simple reason: Bolsonaro continued to exercise full authority over the Brazilian right. Weintraub and others sought an accommodation, stating that they still supported the President (either as the only way to avoid the return of the left to power, or more optimistically as someone who would make an effective leader in his own right were he only freed from the influence of his dastardly advisors). Either way, the semi-Bolsonarist strategy failed as well, and those attempting it were eventually drowned by a sea of online fury driven by Carlos Bolsonaro. An alternative would only emerge from a complete dissociation with the Bolsonaro project: new faces who had never been involved in his government, bore no responsibility for its failures, and had no feudal relationships with the Bolsonaro family or its support base to carefully manage as they sought a new path.
It is here that MBL enters the picture once again.
From Milton Friedman to Curtis Yarvin
Between Rousseff’s impeachment in 2016 and Bolsonaro’s defeat in 2022, MBL was relegated to the margins of the Brazilian right. Even though the group was responsible for co-ordinating the impeachment process and creating the institutional pressure for economic reforms under the caretaker government of Michel Temer, it was not able to capitalise on the moment to seize political victories for itself in the way that Bolsonaro was.
More than anywhere else, the Brazilian right began as an online phenomenon, and the language it speaks in is native to that environment. Whilst both MBL and Bolsonaro had sizeable online presences, the two followings had very different character — especially generationally. Bolsonaro’s military sympathies (an association which MBL always avoided) enabled him to exert influence on older voters and those who cared most about law and order. MBL’s liberal intellectual origins meant many of these voters felt they were insufficiently ‘Christian’. Bolsonaro, on the other hand, despite being a twice-divorced non-practising Catholic married to an Evangelical with all sorts of strange episodes in his personal history, received the blessings of various religious figures (and, more importantly, of Olavo) and was endorsed as the figurehead of the ‘truly Christian’ right. Moreover, MBL’s focus on the technical economic and legislative strategy work of securing Temer’s economic reforms, whilst necessary and valuable, meant that they spent less time appealing to voters — whilst Bolsonaro instead used public funds to travel around the country keeping his supporters engaged. This period in particular allowed Bolsonaro to outpace his competitors and seize control of the right in the lead-up to 2018.
In the 2018 elections, MBL candidates for the legislature did run mostly on an economically liberal and anti-corruption platform, viewing these as both the most important issues for Brazilian prosperity and the greatest failures of previous administrations. For the average voter, this pitch sounded very similar to what some of Bolsonaro’s candidates were saying. Both camps drank from the same liberal-libertarian cup, such as Mises and Friedman. However, Bolsonarists preferred to be directly associated with Bolsonaro and placed heavy emphasis on social and religious issues. MBL was not close to Bolsonaro in the election’s first round but did lend him their support in the run-off in order to avoid PT returning to power. Some of the great figures of MBL were elected without Bolsonaro’s support, like Kim Kataguiri to Congress and Arthur do Val to São Paulo’s State House, yet after the run-off, the Brazilian right came united into its first elected government.
Nonetheless, this détente on the right would not last long. MBL saw early on that Bolsonaro would not be able to pass their legislative agenda through Congress. Instead of doing actual political work, Bolsonaro preferred to convene protests against the legislature, which only further disturbed his political allies. Furthermore, Bolsonaro started nominating historical PT apparatchiks to key positions, such as Augusto Aras, who became Attorney General in the autumn of 2019. Aras was a federal prosecutor known for his lenient tendencies, finding every breach in the law to undermine Operation Car Wash and release those jailed by it. His term as Attorney General even drew praise from Supreme Court Justice Dias Toffoli, previously PT’s party lawyer and one of the party’s proxies on the Court. Bolsonaro was nominating outright leftists to run some of the country’s most important offices, and yet no Bolsonarist dared to criticise.
Aras’s nomination started an irreconcilable division between those who supported a firmer law-and-order approach and the Bolsonaro family, which wanted to stop any investigations that could lead to Flavio’s indictment. The final straw was when Sergio Moro abandoned the Justice Ministry in April 2020, alleging that the President did not want him to do his job. Moro was seen as a symbol of the government’s anti-corruption commitment, having led Operation Car Wash, and his resignation was one of the most serious crises of the Bolsonaro period. From that point on, MBL adopted an independent position on the right, which led to a massive online attack by Carlos’s bots and the group losing hundreds of thousands of followers. MBL’s leadership even suffered phoney accusations from Bolsonarist prosecutors, which the group eventually defeated in court.
It was clear to MBL that they needed to create an alternative to Bolsonaro on the right. The first thing to do was to provide a different right-wing narrative to that of Bolso-Olavism.
The dominant narrative within the Bolso-Olavist camp is that the alternation between various democratically elected governments within the Regime of 1988 is a sham — what Olavo called Lenin’s ‘scissor strategy’, in which only socialistic parties are given the opportunity to participate in democratic elections, providing the illusion of choice and change whilst ensuring the maintenance of a basic set of agreed principles of governance. In opposition to this came Bolsonaro, to liberate Brazilians from communism. He was defeated only because the challenge he took on was so great: the opposition provoked by speaking the truth was too terrible, the task of replacing leftist cadres within the bureaucratic apparatus too large. Yet, having learned the necessary lessons and built the necessary alliances, the second attempt will surely succeed where the first did not.
There are many problems with this narrative. Firstly, it gives the impression that Brazil did not have any major issues up to PT’s rise. Secondly, PT has been in power controlling the presidency 17 out of 41 years of democratic rule, and Brazil is not yet communist — in fact, cultural opposition to communism proper has never been higher. Third, it completely ignores the missed opportunities of Bolsonaro, and how his inexcusable failures have disillusioned those who once supported him.
MBL offers a more sophisticated reading of history. Brazil, they suggest, was already a miserable country before the rise of the left. Neither the ascension of PT nor the election of Bolsonaro led to any significant material changes in Brazilians’ quality of life, which has remained in a constantly poor state over time once global structural and technological changes are accounted for. The internet and the AI revolution may be improving things now, but that is despite the continuity in government, not the result of changes within it. In fact, Brazil’s development lags behind many competitors, with China being an obvious example of a country outpacing it in every way. Brazil then has existed only as a passive beneficiary of other countries’ advances.
The reason for this inertness is the capture of the Brazilian state by what is known in the country as the ‘Big Center’ (Centrão) — opportunistic machine politicians without real ideas. Big Center politicians provide support to every government. In exchange, they expect the national government to provide subsidies and investment for their electoral bases. However, the extent to which these Big Center politicians have established control over the machinery of state means that, in practice, much of this investment is siphoned towards the private benefit of the politicians themselves, leaving sufficient crumbs for voters to continue offering their support, but ensuring they are kept permanently in sub-human conditions, thereby remaining dependent on their patrons.
Big Center politicians usually do well with very poor and poorly educated voters in under-served areas. Immediately before an election, they will halt their corruption to provide some small relief, renovating a few streets (usually contracting a firm with which they are financially involved) or enacting other highly public displays in exchange for votes. This strategy has persisted since the earliest days of Brazilian independence, keeping the same families in power and the rest of the people trapped in poverty. This establishment has no interest in developing the country, as that would destroy the system that keeps them in power.
Big Center politicians prefer low-profile offices to avoid scrutiny, mostly in the legislative branch. If they run for executive positions, it is mostly mayoralties or gubernatorial offices in the poorest states, where their political groups already have an entrenched position. Furthermore, the Regime of 1988 supports the Big Center position by greatly restricting the power of the Executive office. The Constitution stipulates minimal constitutional investments as a share of GDP in many areas, such as Education and Healthcare. Moreover, the country is facing rapid ageing, with pensions consuming an increasingly larger share of the budget. Brazil also has one of the highest real interest rates in the world, and past fiscal incontinence has meant that interest payments have totalled as much as 45% of Brazil’s annual government revenues. All in all, almost all of the country’s expenses are automatically determined, with less than 10% of the budget remaining subject to discretionary control. Finally, as the government cannot cut these expenses by itself, and institutional control over the budget is low, Big Center politicians take the President hostage by diverting larger and larger shares of the budget to their personal and political gains.
This reading of the Big Center’s role in Brazil’s politics has two implications for MBL strategy. First, it meant that they needed to create their own political party. Non-leftist political parties in Brazil are usually controlled by Big Center politicians as a way of electing congressmen and making money. Brazil finances its political parties annually with its budget, giving more money according to congressional representation. This year, the Party Fund (as it is known) totals R$1,2 billion (about £177 million). Besides that, Brazilian elections are mostly financed through taxpayer money, which again is proportionally distributed according to parties’ size in Congress. This year’s election is estimated to cost about R$ 5 billion (circa £740 million). Thus, Big Center politicians run Brazilian politics as a closed cartel, aiming to get the largest share possible in Congress to keep the money flowing, eventually aligning themselves to a nationally relevant politician (such as Lula or Bolsonaro) to attract votes.
Nor is starting a party in Brazil a simple process. Running as an independent candidate is not allowed, and creating a new party is incredibly hard. Not even Bolsonaro succeeded in doing so, forcing him to run in 2018 and 2022 as the candidate of two small, near-defunct but still approved parties. MBL ran a two-year process of collecting and validating enough signatures all around the country to launch their new vehicle. In November of last year, it was officially announced that its party, Partido Missão (Mission Party), had been approved by the Brazilian Electoral Court, meaning that it could run candidates independent of Big Center politicians.
The second strategic implication was that it needed to abandon some of the libertarian commitments it had previously held. One of these fetishes was the transposition of the American federalist system to Brazil. Many on the right, including Bolsonaro’s former Finance Minister Paulo Guedes, thought that Brazil centralised too much power at the national level, and defended more autonomy for local governments. However, if local governments are mostly run by Big Center politicians under little public scrutiny, that meant a consolidation of their power. Something analogous had happened in Brazil during its First Republic (1889-1930), where states were basically mini-republics, having their own constitutional arrangements. It is a period known for limited economic development and concentration of power in the hands of a few local families, ending with a civil war in 1930. Repeating that arrangement would be historically imprudent.
MBL updated its intellectual canon. It replaced Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher for Curtis Yarvin, Nayib Bukele and Lee Kwan Yew. They created their own printed magazine, Revista Valete, to provide a place for dissident and creative voices to express their ideas. It still shared most of the right’s critique of the PT, from its corruption to its economic incompetence, but elevated it to something beyond ‘privatise everything and lower taxes’ — the agenda of the right before Bolsonaro. It now offers serious solutions to fight criminality, a topic on which Bolsonaro was previously seen as unassailable, with policies based on the Enemy Criminal Law doctrine from Gunther Jakobs. Proposals such as judicial bans of criminal organisations and prohibitions on propagating criminal culture through songs and symbols, as is done in democratic countries like Denmark, are a significant improvement from the ‘give guns to everyone’ approach of Bolsonaro. Most importantly, it aims to redesign Brazil’s political incentives by attaching public funds distribution to measurable achievements, such as the share of the population with sewage coverage or child illiteracy rates. As said by the presidential candidate for the Mission Party and MBL leader, Renan Santos, in a speech to a gathering of mayors: ‘I don’t want to see mayors debating transgender bathrooms, I want you to be concerned with whether the children in your cities can read.’
Infighting in the Bolsonaro Camp
Today, Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, son of Jair Bolsonaro, is still the favourite to be the right’s candidate for President running against Lula later this year. However, whilst he maintains a significant lead over his competitors (if not over Lula himself), his numbers have fallen over the past few months.
The first reason for this is his association with the Banco Master scandal, by far the most significant one he faces. Banco Master was a bank that sold fake financial products in a pyramid scheme, leading many clients to lose substantial sums, including the public pension funds. The scheme is one of the largest in Brazilian politics, with politicians from all sides involved. The biggest hit to Flavio so far was a leaked audio message between him and the bank’s CEO, Daniel Vorcaro, in which he asks for R$61 million (£9 million) to finance a movie about his father.
Secondly, Flavio has been in a power dispute with his father’s wife, Michelle Bolsonaro. While she is not seen as a true Bolsonaro by his most committed supporters, she is deeply Evangelical and has some popularity, especially among Evangelical women. She is also quite close to Congressman Nikolas Ferreira. Nikolas is young, Evangelical and received the most votes of any congressman in the 2022 election thanks to Bolsonaro’s support. While he has never criticised the former President, it is clear that he is amassing a followership, and many conservative Evangelical leaders disillusioned with Bolsonaro and his family see him as a preferable successor. For now, though, it seems that Michelle has lost the feud with Flavio, showing the grip that the family clan still has over their followers.
Finally, Flavio Bolsonaro is running a markedly different campaign to that of his father in 2018. Flavio is now running a socially progressive campaign which is keen to avoid allegations of sexism or homophobia. He has on occasion adopted the use of gender neutral pronouns, and has supported feminist proposals in an attempt to court the female vote (Brazil, much like Argentina, has an unusually intransigent feminist movement). Earlier this year, he voted for the ‘Misogyny Law’, which characterises a broad range of acts including ‘misogynistic’ jokes and even controversial readings of bible verses as criminal, and now he proposes to give free mobile phones to over 70 million women to expand internet access.
All of this is leading to a corrosion of the Bolsonaro family’s grip on the right, much to the benefit of Renan Santos and Ronaldo Caiado, the former governor of Goiás and the third contender in the race. Caiado tries to claim that he is more conservative than Bolsonaro, but so far lacks substance and fails to attract voters outside his electoral base in the middle of Brazil. Furthermore, as the Bolsonaro family still holds a tight grip on this kind of ideological voter, it is hard for Caiado to make inroads.
Santos, on the other hand, pitches himself to the voters who search for an alternative to both Lula and Bolsonaro, visiting small towns run by organised crime and underserved by the public sector. He tries to show what the real Brazil looks like, bringing up solutions for problems that voters experience day to day, such as violence and lack of social mobility, beyond the spurious discussions of the great salons in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
This is a smarter strategy than Caiado’s. Santos’ strategy dates back to 2022, when MBL did not support either Lula nor Bolsonaro in the run-off. Whilst polling in Brazil is somewhat unreliable, Santos is hitting nearly 10% according to certain pollsters. By attracting voters who identify with neither of the two frontrunners as well as disillusioned Bolsonarists, MBL hopes to continue gathering steam and eventually defeat Flavio to enter the runoff against Lula. However, Santos is fighting an uphill battle. The election is in October, and his campaign is woefully under-resourced compared to his competitors, who have extensive public funding at their disposal. It may be that only another defeat and four more years of PT governance can disabuse the Brazilian right of its obsession with the Bolsonaros — but mounting a serious campaign this time round will place MBL back on the map, readying them to take up the mantle after Flavio’s failure is revealed.
Conclusion
The spirit of the 2013 protests was not right-wing, but modernising. Brazil had failed to realise its potential, and remained stuck at the same level of underdevelopment it had been at for decades. Anticipation of two major sporting events to which the country would play host (the World Cup and the Olympics) and the resulting comparisons to other countries at home and abroad brought home this reality all the more starkly.
The impeachment processes of 2016 revived the right for the first time in decades, and propelled it to the centre of Brazilian political discourse, culminating in Bolsonaro’s victory in 2018. Outside of the specific missteps of that administration, its movement was entirely reactive, dumbly reflecting the concerns of large parts of Brazil’s population without a clear agenda to resolve them. More than anything, it left behind the spirit of 2013. It had no interest in modernisation, political or economic, and fell therefore into the same traps that every previous administration had: corruption, welfarism, and incompetence.
MBL and Renan Santos, on the other hand, represent the real spirit of the 2013 journeys. Whilst clearly positioning themselves on the right, their enemy is not left-wing politicians or the decay of Christian morals, but the Regime of 1988 within which all politics has been conducted previously and which is the cause of the permanent pauperisation of the Brazilian people. In that way, they offer a far more radical critique than Bolso-Olavism.
All over the world, we have seen right-wing governments rise to power only to fail in delivering on their promises and cede control back to the left after their inevitable defeat. In none of those countries has the right subsequently conducted such a comprehensive review of its canon as it has in Brazil. The new right in Europe is, perhaps understandably, developing its agenda around identity and the preservation of native culture in opposition to migration. Yet the challenge in Brazil is very different, and the response must be too. MBL’s mission is to overcome its country’s political structure, the latest incarnation of a fundamental misconception which has delivered misery for 200 years.
Brazil has spent many decades trapped in the consequences of its chequered past. But among these sparks of possibility, still yet to burst fully into flame, one cannot help but hope that it may become the first country in which a reinvigorated right can accomplish a modernising revolution. Never truly the country of the future, perhaps Brazil can nonetheless become a country of the present.
This article was written by João Rafael Rodrigues Santillo, a Brazilian economist based in Copenhagen. He also writes an economics newsletter in Portuguese and English. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
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