What Brazil Means for the World

With an unprecedented turnaround in the runoffs, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has secured an equally unprecedented fourth term as president of Brazil, in what has certainly been the most dramatic election in the country’s history. Once again, Brazilian democracy can breathe a sigh of relief after facing down its greatest threat since the military dictatorship. But while many seemed to interpret Lula’s return four years ago as a sign that the threat had been definitively defeated, it is crucial to heed what the ballots now show: not only has it not gone away, it has continued to grow. 

Although Flávio Bolsonaro’s lead in the first round defied expectations, the far right’s other electoral gains on that day were no big surprise. In the last three Brazilian elections, the bolsonarista vote has grown steadily, consolidating its presence in Congress — in which it is now the largest force — plus state governments and legislatures, municipal administrations and councils. Lula’s triumph in 2022 did not overturn this trend; it simply recaptured one of the last remaining bastions of power not yet fully in the far right’s hands. In 2022, one of the best Brazilian presidents of all time ran against the worst and won by a small margin; now he has managed to claw back a difficult victory over a candidate who is not the most prominent politician even in his own family. The signs are clear. From the moment Lula is sworn in, he will be under siege from a strong, emboldened set of adversaries.

One particular term was invoked in recent weeks to describe the situation: there is, we are told, a far-right ‘revolution’ underway. A cultural revolution, no doubt, observable in the advance of a whole universe of values and cultural references associated with agribusiness along the expanding agricultural frontier in the Brazilian hinterland; or in the far right’s ability to give voice to the desires and frustrations of the grind artists in large and medium-sized cities: motorbike couriers, ride-hailing drivers, aspiring digital influencers and others in a permanent state of underemployment, juggling multiple jobs and dreaming of a world in which less regulation and lower taxes would allow them to realise their enterprising ambitions. A cultural revolution, finally, in the growth of evangelical churches in the peripheries and the rise of political entrepreneurs: online celebrities who turn far-right agitation into a lucrative career and who, in many cases, have managed to convert their media capital into resounding electoral victories.

But the term would be justified, above all, by the fact that it is the far right which has captured a desire for rupture that has been in the air for some time: a combination of disillusionment with the promises of democracy and modernity, indifference towards institutions seen as elitist and corrupt, a feeling that things cannot continue as they are, and a profound difficulty in imagining how they might be different. It is ultimately a revolt of a very conformist kind, to be sure, since it translates not into collective projects to counter the concentration of economic and political power that has dramatically intensified in recent decades, but in support for individuals who promise an even less regulated environment of competition of all against all. But its conformism makes it no less effective. 

Revolution or Acceleration?

All the elements of this analysis ring true — yet there is still something off about the choice of word. Not because ‘revolution; is the exclusive preserve of the left or because it has a determinate political content, but because far-right politics lacks something that seems central to the concept: the quality of moving against the grain, of going against the course of things. Regarding each of the points above, it could be said that the success of the far right stems less from its ability to move against the tide of history than from its aptitude for navigating the favourable winds of the nearly two decades of permacrisis that followed the financial meltdown of 2008.

The internalisation of an entrepreneurial ethos — what Verónica Gago has called ‘neoliberalism from below’ — is not new, but the cumulative result of the five decades of neoliberal reforms that have reshaped our world. It has been accelerated in recent decades by digital networks, platformisation, and a colonisation of politics by the attention economy that has empowered Big Tech — to intervene directly in elections, among other things — while giving political entrepreneurs an enormous market for the instrumentalisation of anger, resentment and hatred. Evangelical churches themselves have not been innovators in this world, but organisms especially adapted to it. Filling the gaps left by the absence of the state, and the Catholic Church’s withdrawal from poorer areas, their message of individual effort and salvation has resonated widely — Brazilian evangelism growing from 15 percent of the population in 2000 to 27 percent today. 

For a time, the aspirations stirred by this repatterning of social life and subjectivity had expansive horizons on which to project themselves: globalisation, the inflow of international capital, speculative bubbles such as those in the internet and property markets. When the latter of these burst in 2008, things took a darker turn all over the world. In Brazil, the end of the commodities cycle in 2015 meant that even some pillars of the Workers’ Party’s (PT) success would turn against it. In 2026, the Bolsonarista vote grew in Lula’s old Northeastern strongholds along the advancing frontier of agribusiness –– which, having benefited enormously from PT’s first administrations, realigned itself with the far right from 2018 onwards. The expansion of credit, instrumental to social inclusion in the early 2000s, turned into mass indebtedness, making the marked improvement in macroeconomic indicators in the last four years hard to register for most poor Brazilians, fuelling dissatisfaction and desire for change. 

The promotion of ‘popular entrepreneurship’ — another important part of PT’s discursive repertoire in times of prosperity — also backfired when the winds changed. Not only was the party blamed for the downturn, it lost the argument over the original causes of the boom. Redistributive policies were no longer seen as having stimulated the domestic market and enabled people to start their own businesses; they were recast as taking from the strivers to give to the indolent.

We can understand this shift by looking at how this key figure of our time, the entrepreneur, has been transformed in the collective imagination. The conditions after 2008 — a surge in underemployment, accelerating income concentration, financial asset inflation — eroded the connection between saving and investing in education, on the one hand, and social mobility on the other. As a consequence, the Protestant ethic of success through hard work reached an inflection point. When there is no clear path to owning a home or having children, the search for shortcuts intensifies: magical solutions like online gambling, cryptocurrencies, dreams of becoming a successful coach or influencer — lotteries that pick one winner out of every hundred thousand losers. Even the optimism of our times has something desperate about it.

The rise of the far right reflects what happens to the desires stirred by neoliberalism when its promises of a good life become increasingly difficult to fulfil: they turn sour. This is a politics for a time of diminishing expectations, exacerbated by the looming shadow of environmental crisis, when seeing life as a zero-sum game becomes ever more plausible. If conditions are unlikely to change — apart from getting worse — and redistributing the income concentrated at the top seems impossible, the only other option is for those at the bottom of the pyramid to compete with one another — and for the strongest to assert their advantage over the weakest via the mediations of race, gender, nationality and so forth.

It is because of all these continuities that it seems more appropriate to speak not of revolution but of the harnessing and acceleration of the social disintegration brought about by fifty years of neoliberalism, first in its expansive phase and then in its zombie-like post-2008 state. Feeding off the energies set free by this disintegration, the far right drives them in the direction of collapse: of liberal democracy and universalism, of the rule of law, state capacity, the environment and even sovereignty itself — with non-state sovereign actors like militias and drug trafficking networks finding direct representatives in politicians like Flávio Bolsonaro, who is now on the run from all the long-running criminal investigations against him.

Emancipation in the End Times

Viewing reactionary forces in this light, as an acceleration of existing trends, also helps to explain the structural advantages they seem to enjoy. Ideologically, the right is in line with our historical moment of narrowed horizons, the dominant moral grammar of individualism, punitivism and order, and the lived experience of many. Organisationally, it is embedded in the social fabric and finds on digital platforms a terrain that is naturally more compatible with the kind of politics it proposes. Economically, despite its anti-establishment rhetoric, it is perfectly aligned with the interests of domestic and global elites, ready to go full throttle on wealth concentration at the expense of democracy, the climate and the vast majority of the world’s population. 

More than anything else, Lula’s fourth victory means buying time. Time for democracy, suspending the risk of a judiciary take-over by an executive and legislative branch in Bolsonarista hands. Time for the environment, as four more years of a Bolsonaro in power would surely set the Amazon on an irreversible path towards savannisation. Time for public services like healthcare and education, warding off the immediate danger of deep cuts and privatisation. Time to protect institutions and public life from ever-growing infiltration by organised crime. 

Yet it is important to have about this victory the clarity that was missing in 2022: so far, this is only buying time. Lula III was a government of normalisation, which was certainly welcome after almost ten years of constant turbulence; but in a world where the natural course of things favours the far right, banking on normality is worse than insufficient. It is imperative to maintain the sense of urgency that made Lula’s last-minute victory possible. That means sustaining both the popular mobilisation of the second-round campaign and the boldness the federal government discovered in the final stretch, when a number of measures previously deemed impossible were passed: the ban on online gambling, the increase in the Bolsa Família allowance, the reduction in working hours and the constitutional amendment to introduce free public transport on weekends and holidays. To this list must very soon be added the regulation of Big Tech and the fight against unaccountable parliamentary amendments that seek to hijack the budget. 

Above all, the left will be obliged to confront the fundamental question that the far right’s success in harnessing social disintegration throws up: what does it mean to articulate an emancipatory project in times of diminishing expectations? How can desires, hopes and aspirations currently invested in the far right be transformed and redirected into an egalitarian, sustainable alternative?

Brazil’s against-the-odds triumph over Bolsonarismo, Donald Trump, organised crime, global elites and Silicon Valley has now become a source of hope and enthusiasm around the world –– like an electoral-politics equivalent of Vietnam. The staggering mobilisation that made it possible has offered a textbook case of what it takes to beat the far right and given a deep scare to the right-wing majority in Brazilian Congress. But it should be remembered that it was probably only a figure of Lula’s stature who could have beaten Bolsonarismo in 2022 and 2026 — which means that preparations for 2030, when he can no longer run, must begin now. 

Yet it is essential not to confuse electoral with political strategy. One thing, evidently important, is preparing strong candidacies for president and the legislative; the names that have forcefully pushed through the ranks of the left in these elections provide grounds for optimism and point possible ways forward. Another thing, however, is taking the passion and energy stirred by this second round and using it to compose a new social base that will not only be able to elect those candidates in the future, but force onto the backfoot those who would besiege the government, generating the demand and opportunities that could allow the latter to rise above expectations. 

In this sense, there is a vital lesson to be learnt from this epic comeback. It was initiatives originating outside the campaign headquarters, such as the online behemoth of Lula’s Army and the magnificent Revelando project, as well as the everyday tenacity of millions of activists, which proved decisive in the turnaround. It was neither Lula nor PT but the ecology that developed around them that won this election. If Lula, with this triumph, has indelibly inscribed his name in the pages of Brazilian history, it is this image of him in the last dance of his electoral career that will be most important for what is now to come: that of an extraordinary individual with an extraordinary trajectory, no doubt, but one who required an equally extraordinary people to carry him to the finish line.