The Bolsonaro Paradox: Camila Rocha Esther Solano Jonas Medeiros

Latin American Societies
Current Challenges in Social Sciences
Camila Rocha
Esther Solano
Jonas Medeiros
The Bolsonaro
Paradox
The Public Sphere and Right-Wing
Counterpublicity in Contemporary Brazil
Current Challenges in Social Sciences
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Instituto de Ciências Políticas (IPOL)
University of Brasília
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Maria Jose Álvarez Rivadulla
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Universidad de los Andes
Bogota, Colombia
Alejandro Natal
Department of Social Processes
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana
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Camila Rocha • Esther Solano • Jonas Medeiros
The Bolsonaro Paradox

The Public Sphere and Right-Wing
Counterpublicity in Contemporary Brazil
Camila Rocha Esther Solano
São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil International Relations Department
Federal University of Sao Paulo
Jonas Medeiros Osasco, São Paulo, Brazil
Law and Democracy Nucleus (NDD)
Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning
(CEBRAP)
São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
ISSN 2730-5538 ISSN 2730-5546 (electronic)

ISBN 978-3-030-79652-5 ISBN 978-3-030-79653-2 (eBook)
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From Camila to Samuel and for a politics
that, in his words, has “more moms.”
From Esther to Mateo, my light, so that your
Brazil can be a more generous and just
country.
From Jonas to Sérgio, who was sensitive to
what was happening since the Orkut days.
Foreword
The debate about the current global political moment appears to be organized
around two alternative interpretations: that of a “crisis of democracy” or of a “fas-
cist regression.” The terms point to irreconcilable positions. It is not that those who
use the label “crisis of democracy” ignore the authoritarian risk, or that those who
speak of a “fascist regression” are ignoring that democracy lost its social ballast, to
the contrary. But the different views of the situation do not share common ground,
be it theoretical or practical.
The “crisis of democracy” view tends to be associated with dominant theories in
political science, often identified with institutionalist perspectives. In this strain of
thought, the dominant vocabulary is that of “populism,” understood as the enemy of
democracy and therefore lacking any positive constructive potential. This diagnosis
tends to include two theses to explain the global crisis (derived from the theory of
which it is part): people want democracy to provide what it cannot, and in connec-
tion, the crisis reveals elements of instability (institutional or noninstitutional) that
were hidden before. In this line of thinking, authoritarian threats, the economic
crisis, and the connection with previous historic experiences are mostly understood
as exogenous and merely related to this fundamental diagnosis. And the only practi-
cal off-ramp that this perspective visualizes is a return to the way democracy worked
pre-crisis, a move backward in time, perhaps with some lessons learned.
On the other hand, the “fascist regression” reading is usually associated with
theories that seek the roots of the current crisis in a combination of an economic
crisis, entrenched social authoritarianism, and neoliberal ideology. According to
this view, with the global economic crisis of 2008, the neoliberal alliance between
forces on the left and right around a limited and limiting democracy fostered a reor-
ganization and strengthening of authoritarian social forces as an alternative to this
same neoliberal order that led to the current crisis. Within this interpretation, there
are those who view a “radically democratic populism” as a possible practical off-
ramp, and there are those who diagnose an irreversible plunge into authoritarianism
and processes of de-democratization that could only be abolished through the aboli-
tion of capitalism itself. This latter group views capitalism as intrinsically fascist,
not merely authoritarian.
vii
viii Foreword
If I had to locate The Bolsonaro Paradox in contemporary debates, I would say

before anything else that it is a book that seeks to escape these alternatives, propos-
ing a recasting of the debate about the current moment in new terms. And this was
only possible, in my view, through its parti pris for the “social.” It is through the
everyday fabric of the social world and the support that it offers—or does not
offer—to institutions, narratives, and policies underway that the crisis and its struc-
tural elements can be understood.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, this fabric of Brazil’s social world
was affected by a double invisibility. The first type of invisibility is longstanding
and comes from a dominant public sphere and democratic institutionality that are
exclusive and selective in relation to some forms of life. The second type of invisi-
bility has to do with new possibilities of organization and vocalization of social
groups allowed by the internet, by platforms, and by social media. The traditional
ways of causing invisibility were blinded by alternative forms of visibility. The new
invisible could only be seen when there was no more control over it.
From this point of observation, The Bolsonaro Paradox was constructed. It was
through detailed and close observation of publicity and counterpublicity that the
book could avoid the alternatives of the “populist explanation” (in the “crisis of
democracy” framework) or “reductio ad fascismum” (in the “fascist regression”
framework). It is also what simultaneously allows the book to propose a new
explanatory frame. An undertaking that is easy to say, but difficult to do. I believe
The Bolsonaro Paradox was successful in this task, principally for two reasons.
Firstly, it brought together intersections of research and people studying related
topics in a similar way, people who more than a few times worked together on spe-
cific projects. It is rare to achieve the degree of convergence between different peo-
ple, concepts, and research groups that is seen here. It is something that can only be
explained, ultimately, through a focus on the object of research itself, which was no
longer treated as a chance to prove a previous thesis but rather shifted to being
viewed according to its own complexity.
The second reason that The Bolsonaro Paradox was successful, in my view, is
that it knew how to appropriate the guiding idea of “counterpublics” in a very spe-
cial way. Beginning with Michael Warner’s original formulation, in which counter-
publics are those that “consciously and disruptively disobey rules of decorum set by
dominant publics,” The Bolsonaro Paradox advances toward establishing a typol-
ogy. According to the book, “there would be a distinction between central and
potentially dominant publics on the one hand and peripheral publics on the other,
with peripheral publics divided between those that are subaltern and
non-subaltern.”
The book seeks and finds its own path without ever abandoning the concreteness
of its object of study, the concreteness of Bolsonaro. In order to do this, The
Bolsonaro Paradox is constantly generous with its readers. When necessary, it
offers deep insights into Brazilian history that allow the issue at hand to be under-
stood. When a concept appears that calls for demarcation and definition, it expands
on the topic in order to help with reading and allow the positions that are taken to be
clearly situated.
Foreword ix
This occurs, for example, with the rendering of the Brazilian “right,” which
extends for almost 70 years, from the end of the 1950s until the present day. The
richness and originality of this reconstruction is evident not only in its accounts of
significant oscillations in how this field understands itself, but also in the character-
ization of the diversity and breadth of its internal debates. This wide-ranging view
was possible, on the one hand, through its basis in a pluralistic view of the idea of
counterpublics and, on the other, through the execution of in-depth interviews
according to an exhaustive mapping of the field and its dimensions, fractures, and
strains of thought, always seeking to locate them at decisive moments in Brazilian
history.
This also occurs when connecting the guiding idea of counterpublics to one of
the book’s main diagnostic assumptions: the crisis of the renewed pact of 1988 that
was formed through the enactment of a new constitution after more than 20 years of
military dictatorship in Brazil. The new Brazilian pact of the time was only possible,
as the book shows, because, in a way, it widened the space of the public sphere,
allowing historically excluded groups to have some access to the public debate,
even though it was limited. At the same time, the book shows how Brazil’s revolts
of June 2013 made clear that the terms of this 1988 pact had become insufficient.
And here, once again, a constant ability to keep its focus makes The Bolsonaro
Paradox so interesting and original. Instead of examining the different aspects of
that crisis, it concentrates on examining the publicity, the development, and the
structures of different public spheres. Not least, therefore, June 2013 gives light to
a peculiar social accumulation that resulted from the proliferation and use of the
internet in Brazil. This analysis is nothing less than an essential piece of the explan-
atory puzzle of the most relevant social phenomenon of twenty-first century
Brazilian history. Because the revolts of June 2013 first arose like a lighting bolt in
a blue sky. There was enormous disorientation around an explanation. There was an
enormous proliferation of ad hoc explanatory theories. And it is no exaggeration to
say that this situation largely continues today.
The Bolsonaro Paradox allows us to understand that disorientation, as well. It
shows that, with honorable exceptions, people were failing to look at a fundamental
side of that process. Trying to explain social changes of such a magnitude as mere
effects of an economic crisis that had not even configured itself in Brazil at the time
and aiming to look just at institutions to find design flaws—similar to looking at the
social world only to find fascist regression—blocked the ability to see something
essential and much more promising in explanatory terms: a reconfiguration of
sociability through a complex notion of publicity.
This is what allowed The Bolsonaro Paradox to take its explanatory leap for-
ward; it was this focus that allowed it to explain June 2013 as the long process of
construction that it was. Because the book shows how the period before June was
marked by “the spread of the internet and the proliferation of counterpublics on the
left and right.” And this initial “proliferation” gradually, in the post-June period,
became “organization.” Peculiar “organizations,” organizational crystallizations
surrounding “network nodes.” And, in addition, peculiar hierarchies and structures
of identification were formed, those that we find in the classifications and typologies
x Foreword
at which Camila Rocha, Esther Solano, and Jonas Medeiros arrived through exten-
sive and intensive fieldwork.
This generosity of explanation and clarification at each moment that the topic
demands it is what allows readers to see Bolsonaro emerge. Here, Bolsonaro is a
result, not a cause, and not something that happened by chance. That is because the
complexity of all these processes cannot be reduced to one person, even an occupant
of the presidency. And it is because Bolsonaro’s rise was not inevitable and did not
occur in a landscape void of any other possibilities. To the contrary, the book is
committed to describing the intense political battles that were occurring off the
radar of institutional politics and that only episodically gained visibility in the tradi-
tional public sphere. Even when they were exposed in the then-dominant public
sphere, their deep social dimensions were not.
Above all, the book shows and demonstrates that the long, subterranean set of
processes that led to June 2013 are still underway, in other forms, in new and
renewed arrangements. Because reconstructing these processes allows, on one
hand, for the understanding of Bolsonaro, it also allows a view of the possibilities
beyond him. Those include both the possibilities that were open before his rise to
power and those that remain open today and can still bring about other outcomes
than Bolsonaro.
It is not that the task of understanding Bolsonaro is trivial; far from it. At least for
those who, like the authors of this book, are not content with trivial explanations.
The breadth and the depth of analysis that can be found in The Bolsonaro Paradox
derives from correctly targeting their point of departure: As much as circumstances
matter, understanding Bolsonaro’s rise to power and the continuation of his presi-
dency as the result of a mere concurrence of circumstances is one of the gravest
theoretical errors—and a grave practical error too, though that is not the matter at
hand here. There are structural elements behind the rise of Bolsonaro and every-
thing he represents. And that is the perspective of this analysis.
One of the enormous merits of the book is precisely that of showing how circum-
stantial and isolated factors ended up crystallizing as structural elements. It ended
up being a “paradoxical” structure, as the title affirms. That is why the “paradox”
only is named at the end. Because the book tells the story of how that paradoxical
structure was formed. On one hand, “counterpublicity” itself reveals to be paradoxi-
cal. After all, it is built not only through confrontation and conflict with the domi-
nant public sphere and with publics and counterpublics that oppose it according to
dominant dichotomies. It is also built within the counterpublics themselves. Yes,
Bolsonaro is an anti-establishment president, an anti-system president, and this
appears to be sufficiently paradoxical. It is a paradox that must be understood in
order to understand his style of government. It is a paradox that must be understood
in order to comprehend how he presents himself as the only possible response to the
chaos that he himself produces. Because this is not about merely saying that there is
a method to the chaos that Bolsonaro produces: rather, the chaos is his own method.
Here, again, the focus of The Bolsonaro Paradox and the reason why it is so
interesting is evident. Such a characterization is insufficient to meet the concrete-
ness of the Bolsonaro phenomenon. It is at this moment that speaking of Bolsonaro
Foreword xi
only as an anti-system president and reducing the problem to his style of govern-
ment would be vastly insufficient. Just as the premise of a “fascist society” is equally
insufficient. Because that was not what the trio that authored this book found in the
fieldwork they carried out. What they found instead was a paradoxical logic that
extends in three dimensions which must be considered together in order to be duly
understood. It is at this moment that speaking of “Bolsonarism” is necessary in
order to understand the paradox in its entire scope.
The most salient and relevant of these dimensions of the paradox is the mainte-
nance of an anti-system perspective by a right-wing counterpublic that eventually
saw itself represented in the maximum systemic position, that of the Brazilian presi-
dency. After all, how can a social positionality that becomes dominant maintain its
self-identification as marginal and that of contesting the system? Last but not least,
this dimension of the paradox is the most salient and relevant because it suggests a
paradoxical position that cannot be maintained for very long. It suggests that an
attempt at shutting down the democratic regime in Brazil may not be merely one
option, but perhaps the only possible line of action in order for right-wing counter-
publics to maintain the position they won without self-destructing.
Ultimately, another dimension of the paradox comes from the fact that Bolsonaro
maintains the support of a substantial portion of the electorate even amid circum-
stances as difficult and dramatic for any politician as the pandemic, the economic
crisis, and the rise in unemployment. This is due, surely, to the fact that Bolsonaro
rules only for those who support him, the group that he considers “authentic
Brazilians.” But, as the book also shows, it also derives from the fact that a relevant
number of those supporters see no other possible figures, beyond Bolsonaro, who
might represent them.
And it is precisely there that a third dimension of the paradox appears: the right-
wing counterpublics, which first united as part of a large anti-system front, the “new
right,” begin to diverge and oppose each other radically. The most salient result of
the large front was the election of a supporter of the military dictatorship, which
stands opposite to the positions of many right-wing counterpublics. On this matter,
the book once again reveals a decisive practical point: ignoring these fissures and
splits in the right-wing counterpublics and artificially flattening their differences
and divergences can result in strengthening the hard-authoritarian nucleus inside
this multiplicity of counterpublics.
For all of these reasons, The Bolsonaro Paradox is not simply “the paradox of
Bolsonaro” but also and simultaneously “the paradox as Bolsonaro.” Bolsonaro is
rather a possible configuration of a constellation of elements. The great challenge is
to identify those elements and show how they assemble in Bolsonaro, and also
simultaneously show how Bolsonaro himself unites them and continues to maintain
their amalgamation, even in circumstances as ever-changing and extraordinary as
the current Covid-19 pandemic.
It is procedures and premises like these that allow for proposals of informed
comparisons with other configurations, in other constellations of elements, in other
time periods, and in other places. What projects Bolsonaro beyond his circum-
stances is that, as soon as he is understood, his rise becomes a model. Without losing
xii Foreword
any concreteness, this analysis allows Bolsonaro to no longer be seen as eccentric

or abstruse. In other words, Bolsonaro is no longer simply a “Brazilian deviation.”
This shows that the reader has in their hands what is simply one of the most
complete and successful attempts to explain Bolsonaro and what he represents
today in Brazil. In this book, they simultaneously have a proposal of understanding
the current moment that aims to go beyond the mere ideas of “populism” or “fas-
cism”—and because of this, these research findings also go beyond a mere
“Bolsonaro case”—and a precise reconstruction of this specific phenomenon that
will allow the reader to find echoes in other experiences and other places. Because
the greatest possible threat to democratic coexistence would be to transform the
Bolsonaro phenomenon into an exotic, folkloric, and distant episode. And that is
exactly what this idea of a “paradox” aims to avoid.
President, Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP) Marcos Nobre

Professor, State University of Campinas (UNICAMP)
São Paulo, Brazil
June 2021
Preface
Jair Bolsonaro is, without a doubt, the world’s most radical far-right president who
was democratically elected in recent decades. Under his governance, Brazil was
considered the country that worst handled the Covid-19 pandemic, with over
500,000 deaths by June 2021, according to government statistics. In the previous
month, Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo, blamed for Brazil’s lack of vaccines,
resigned under several different political pressures. A career diplomat who was rec-
ommended for his cabinet position by philosopher Olavo de Carvalho—who drew
close to the Bolsonaro family years ago—Araújo considered the World Health
Organization “globalist” and argued that the virus, which he called the “communa-
virus,” was an ideological device of a “globalist project” that would lead to
communism.
Few political analysts took Bolsonaro’s 2018 presidential candidacy seriously.
Even fewer tried to explain his victory without referring simply to his special cir-
cumstances in the election, including the fact that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the
country’s most popular political leader, did not participate in the race; that campaign
television spots were shortened in comparison with previous years; and that
Bolsonaro was victim to a knife attack aiming to assassinate him 1 month before the
first round of voting, which earned him increased media attention and allowed him
to skip most of the debates with other candidates.
While all of those factors contributed to his rise to power, understanding it more
deeply requires going back in time. After all, Bolsonaro’s aim is to destroy a fragile
post-bourgeois public sphere that was institutionalized in Brazil with the demo-
cratic pact established in 1988 after 20 years of military dictatorship. To that end,
Bolsonaro and his supporters employ a discursive strategy called right-wing coun-
terpublicity: an aggressive rhetoric filled with curse words and acid humor—politi-
cal incorrectness—in order to restore traditional hierarchies, values, and ways of
life. By occupying the Brazilian State, Bolsonaro created a new dynamic in the
public debate: dominant counterpublicity, an unstable phenomenon based on reiter-
ated attacks on institutions that seek to substitute their mild progressive foundations
and foster an authoritarian political culture.
xiii
xiv Preface
The use of ideas such as a post-bourgeois public sphere, right-wing counterpub-

licity, and dominant counterpublicity to explain contemporary Brazilian politics
came about through a relatively inductive process as we took a series of qualitative
data into account. The analysis we present in this book includes excerpts of inter-
views we conducted over the years with members of Brazil’s right and Bolsonaro
supporters, who are identified in bold text in the chapters that follow. All of us had
already individually conducted qualitative studies with both activists and everyday
people for some years, when, in 2017, Esther sought to interview Bolsonaro sup-
porters after carrying out several surveys in protests for the impeachment of Dilma
Rousseff. She made her first contact with Camila, who interviewed right-wing
activists and leaders, and they then joined forces to understand the motivations of
Bolsonaro voters more deeply. At the same time, Jonas and Camila, members of a
research group on the public sphere at the Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning
(CEBRAP), began to use the concepts of publics and counterpublics to understand
their research findings: the emergence of a new feminist activism in Brazil and the
emergence of a new right, respectively. Soon after, both began to use the same con-
cepts to understand the dynamics of Bolsonarism, to the thrill of Esther, who con-
sidered the approach more intriguing than the frequently used concept of populism,
as it captured dynamics that often remain invisible in typical analyses of Brazilian
politics.
To that end, we expose our theoretical premises in Chap. 1, considering the struc-
tural transformations in the Brazilian public sphere in historical perspective. We
highlight both a sociopolitical dimension, showing advances and retreats as differ-
ent social actors are included or excluded from the traditional public sphere, and a
technical-cultural dimension, analyzing how different media condition the pub-
lic sphere.
In Chap. 2, we analyze the emergence of a new right in Brazil beginning in 2006,
more than 10 years before Bolsonaro’s election as president. At that time, the tradi-
tional right did not identify as such due to the stigma of having participated in the
military dictatorship. They had begun to work inside the parameters of the pact of
1988, leaving groups that were opposed to the pact without representation. Those
groups united as a new “shameless” and more radical right. Based on the claim that
a “leftist cultural hegemony” existed in the country, initially proposed by philoso-
pher Olavo de Carvalho, the new right began to spread counter-hegemonic dis-
courses that in large part relied on aggressive rhetoric that broke with decorum:
counterpublicity. The formation of counterpublics related to the new right permitted
broader circulation of an economically ultraliberal and socially conservative ideol-
ogy on Orkut, a social networking site created by Google in 2004, and later in domi-
nant publics via book publishing, the education system, the mainstream media, and
the political system.
In Chap. 3, we trace how institutional advances and demonstrations of women
and the LGBT+ community, among others, were felt by conservative parts of
Brazilian society as a true “progressive shock.” In the 2010s, different sectors of
society began to demand a deepening of the post-bourgeois public sphere, affirming
their rights both in the institutional arena and through shocking performances that
Preface xv
questioned dominant codes, especially regarding gender and sexuality. The nascent
new right, which had until then been dominated by ultraliberals, allied itself with a
growing conservative backlash to these demands. This bore fruit both in institu-
tional politics and in the public debate, through the spread of conservative counter-
publicity that aimed to restore traditional norms, hierarchies, and ways of life.
The heightening of tensions fueled a new cycle of protests that peaked in Brazil’s
June 2013 demonstrations, when millions of people took to the streets across the
country to protest the political system’s self-shielding from their demands. Small
groups of ultraliberals and even supporters of the military dictatorship were among
the protesters. While groups on the political left continued to push for social rights,
groups mobilized by the emerging new right began a campaign to impeach president
Dilma Rousseff 6 days after her 2014 reelection was announced. Chapter 4 explores
the mass participation in this campaign, which was spurred by anti-Workers’ Party
sentiment, anti-corruption sentiment, and by a deep and widespread mistrust in the
political-party system. The chapter also registers how Jair Bolsonaro’s presidential
campaign was uniquely able to channel the sentiments of anger and joy that coex-
isted in the streets through establishing a figure perceived as a sincere, authentic,
and honest political outsider.
Overall, we try to accompany the accelerated technical-cultural, sociocultural,
and sociopolitical transformations of the Brazilian public sphere through the joint
analysis of publics and counterpublics, be they subaltern or not. While studies of
non-subaltern counterpublics have multiplied in the Global North, this book seeks
to develop an original contribution in considering the phenomenon from the Global
South, using an interpretive approach that does not abandon the normative reflec-
tions of Critical Theory. Bolsonaro’s government is addressed in Chap. 5, in which
we seek to outline the different paradoxes that we have identified as characteristics
of the Bolsonaro phenomenon, highlighting the effects of what we view as a
dominant Bolsonarist counterpublicity that aims to destroy the pact of 1988 and
disintegrate Brazil’s post-bourgeois public sphere, constantly signaling the restora-
tion of a new bourgeois autocracy inspired by the military dictatorship.
This book would not have been possible without the support of Friedrich-Ebert-
Stiftung Brasil, which we thank in the figures of Thomas Manz, Christoph Heuser,
and Gonzalo Rojas, and the efforts of Bruno Fiuza of Springer, journalist and trans-
lator Catherine Osborn, and professor and lawyer Bianca Tavolari. We also thank
Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Brasil and the Tide Setubal Foundation for permission to
publish contents of research that we conducted for this book, as well as sociologist
Antonia Malta Campos for sharing ethnographic data collected at street protests and
Pablo Ortellado and Lucia Nader, early colleagues in research and discussion.
Professor Adrian Gurza Lavalle of the University of São Paulo (USP) actively col-
laborated in the development of arguments presented here, as did all of the col-
leagues in the “Counterpublics Subgroup” of CEBRAP’s Law and Democracy
Nucleus (NDD), whom we thank for the attentive reading of our work and perma-
nent encouragement of our ideas, especially Fabiola Fanti, Mariana Valente, Márcio
Moretto Ribeiro, Natália Neris, and Rúrion Melo. We also thank Marcos Nobre,
CEBRAP president and State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) professor, for
xvi Preface
the constant support for research and reflection activities and for his dedication to
this book’s foreword.
Finally, we would like to register here our most affectionate gratitude toward all
of the people who generously agreed to be interviewed by us and without whom this
book would not be possible.
São Paulo, Brazil Camila Rocha

Esther Solano
Jonas Medeiros
Contents
1 Introduction�� 1
References�� 8
2 The New Brazilian Right: Radical and Shameless�� 11
2.1 The Traditional Right: Hayek and the Fight
Against Communism�� 13
2.2 The New Right’s Emergence: Mises and the
Combat of “Leftist Cultural Hegemony”�� 25
2.3 The Institutionalization of the Nascent New Right�� 43
References�� 54
3 The Conservative Reaction and the June 2013 Revolts�� 59
3.1 The “Progressive Shock” and the Conservative Reaction�� 60
3.2 The Protest Cycle and the Revolts of June 2013�� 78
References�� 90
4 Bolsonaro’s Rise �� 95
4.1 The Impeachment Campaign (2014–2016)�� 97
4.2 Toward Bolsonaro’s Election (2016–2018)�� 116
4.2.1 Public Security and the Militarization of Life�� 124
4.2.2 Meritocracy and Victimism�� 128
4.2.3 Corruption and Anti-politics �� 130
4.2.4 Moralization and Christianization of Life�� 131
4.2.5 Pop Hatred and the Language of the People�� 132
References�� 137
5 Conclusion�� 141
References�� 147
Index�� 151
xvii
Abbreviations1
ANFAVEA National Association of Automotive Vehicle Manufacturers

ANPES National Association of Economic and Social Programming
CBC Brazilian Cartridge Company
CBF Brazilian Football Confederation
CBJP Brazilian Justice and Peace Commission
CEDES Chamber of Economic and Social Studies and Debates
CIEPP Interdisciplinary Center for Ethics and Personalist Economy
CNBB National Conference of Bishops of Brazil
CNV National Truth Commission
CPT Pastoral Land Commission
CUT United Workers Central
Diap Interunion Department of Parliamentary Aides
DIEESE Interunion Department of Socioeconomic Statistics and Studies
DIP Department of Press and Propaganda
ECA Statute of the Child and Adolescent
EPL Students for Liberty (Brazil)
FEE Foundation for Economic Education (English name)
FGV/EPGE The Getúlio Vargas Foundation’s Brazilian School of Economy and
Finances
FHC Fernando Henrique Cardoso
FIPE University of São Paulo’s Institute of Economic Research Foundation
GSI Cabinet of Institutional Security
IBF Brazilian Institute of Philosophy
IEE Institute of Business Studies
IFL Institute of Leader Formation
IL Liberal Institute
ILIN Liberal Institute of the Northeast
All abbreviations reflect Portuguese names of Brazilian groups, unless otherwise noted.
1
xix
xx Abbreviations
IMB Mises Institute Brazil

IMIL Millennium Institute
IPEA Institute of Applied Economic Research
IPES Institute of Research and Social Studies
MASP São Paulo Museum of Art
MBL Free Brazil Movement
MCCE Movement to Combat Electoral Corruption
MDB Brazilian Democratic Movement
MEB Rightward Brazil Movement
MPL Free Fare Movement
MPL-SP São Paulo Free Fare Movement
MSM Media Without a Mask
MST Landless Workers’ Movement
MUP Movement of Progressive Unity
OAB Order of Attorneys of Brazil
PCC First Capital Command
PCdoB Communist Party of Brazil
PCO Workers’ Cause Party
PDC Christian Democrat Party
PDS Democratic Social Party
PEC Proposed Constitutional Amendment
PFL Liberal Front Party
PM Military Police
PMDB Brazilian Democratic Movement Party
PP Progressive Party
PPS Popular Socialist Party
PR Party of the Republic
PRB Brazilian Republican Party
PRP Progressive Republican Party
PSDB Brazilian Social Democracy Party
PSL Social Liberal Party
PSOL Socialism and Liberty Party
PSTU Unified Socialist Workers’ Party
PT Workers’ Party
PV Green Party
ROL Revolted Online
SNI National Information Service
SPM Special Secretariat of Policy for Women
STF Federal Supreme Court
TCU Federal Court of Accounts
TFP Brazilian Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property
TSE Superior Electoral Court
UBES Brazilian Union of Secondary Students
UBM Brazilian Union of Women
Abbreviations xxi
UDN National Democratic Union

UFC Federal University of Ceará
UFRGS Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul
UNE National Union of Students
UJS Union of Socialist Youth
USP University of São Paulo
Chapter 1
Introduction
The election of Bolsonaro, a congressman who openly praises the military dictator-
ship and was scorned by political elites for more than 20 years, was not fruit of a
historical accident, but rather the unprecedented result of equally unprecedented
political and social processes. Amid Brazil’s opening to democracy in the late
1970s, a new model of public debate emerged in the country that widened the poten-
tial for subaltern groups within society to be politically and socially incorporated.
The institutional benchmark of this process was in the year 1988, when a new dem-
ocratic pact began in the country, supported by the 1988 Federal Constitution and a
new political arrangement that Brazilian political scientists call coalition presiden-
tialism. It is precisely against this pact and against this more inclusive public debate
that Bolsonaro and his supporters aim their criticism and attacks, which caused
some analysts to believe that his government marks the apex of the Brazilian public
sphere’s collapse.
Historically, many Brazilian thinkers considered the national public debate frag-
ile or even absent, given the hypertrophy of private life and the resilience of a patri-
monialist State in the country. We, however, agree with political scientist Adrian
Gurza Lavalle (2004) who said that Brazilian public life must be rethought using
new parameters. Accordingly, through creative appropriation of concepts from the
Global North, we understand the development of and transformations in the
Brazilian public sphere using historical periods of our own delineation: (1) the
development and consolidation of a bourgeois public sphere between 1808 and
1930; (2) the emergence of a semi-bourgeois public sphere characterized by demo-
cratic integration of the urban working class between 1945 and 1964; and (3) the
genesis of a post-bourgeois public sphere that began during the country’s redemoc-
ratization in the late 1970s and 1980s.1 We seek to consider both a sociopolitical
1
The work of Fernando Perlatto (2018) served as a methodological inspiration to mobilize
Brazilian historiography in order to sociologically understand the structural transformations in
Brazil’s public sphere.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
C. Rocha et al., The Bolsonaro Paradox, Latin American Societies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79653-2_1
2 1 Introduction
dimension, highlighting advances and retreats as different social actors included or

excluded from the traditional public sphere, and a technical-cultural dimension,
analyzing how different media condition the public sphere but do not constitute an
ultimate determination, differentiating our work from techno-deterministic analyses.
The classic concept of the public sphere was conceived by Jürgen Habermas
(1989) through a historical analysis of the bourgeois public sphere’s development in
key Western European countries. During the late seventeenth century and through-
out the eighteenth century, a new questioning of government and church authorities
arose in English coffeehouses, French salons, and German Tischgesellschaften. As
time passed, the reading public that frequented those spaces incorporated itself into
a public debate based on rational-critical argument, with criticism of absolute mon-
archies transmitted through print media creating new potential for limiting their
despotism.
In Brazil, it was only in 1808 that a bourgeois public sphere similar to the model
described by Habermas developed more permanently and with significant geo-
graphic reach. That year, the Portuguese royal family, fleeing Napoleon’s invasion,
installed itself in Rio de Janeiro. Until then, the printing of books and newspapers
had been prohibited; some of the revolts against the Portuguese crown, such as the
Minas Gerais Conspiracy and the Bahian Conspiracy in the late eighteenth century,
were supported by contraband books and secret societies that circulated anti-
absolutist writing and speeches underground (Pait, 2018). Liberal, Enlightenment,
or republican ideas were controlled and censored by the State for being considered
dangerous and revolutionary, given that the Portuguese empire had a strong Catholic
orientation (Neves, 1999). It was only beginning in 1808 that cultural life widened
and local political, economic, and cultural elites began to try influencing the politi-
cal process and limit state power.
However, the expansion of freedom of the press was still limited by state censor-
ship, which sought to contain opposition to the monarchy and slavery. Public debate
at the time focused primarily on reconciling divergent interests within the elite
rather than democratically including other parts of society (Nunes, 2010). In that
regard, Brazil’s public sphere resembled those in more central countries—consider-
ing the bourgeois class’ dominance over the working class—with the difference
that, in Brazil, the economy was based on slave labor. Those limitations were only
decisively questioned in the 1860s and 1870s by the abolitionist movement, thanks
to the expansion of the university system and the widening of circles that fostered
public opinion capable of criticizing imperial institutions (Alonso, 2015). Even so,
the legal abolition of slavery in 1888 was not accompanied by other social reforms,
such as land distribution, leaving large rural property owners untouched.
In 1889, a republican regime substituted the monarchy by means of a military
coup, but this did little to alter the dynamic of the local bourgeois public sphere.
Conflicts and negotiations between state political elites proceeded similarly to the
way they had under the monarchy, such that historian Cláudia Viscardi (2019)
described Brazil’s public debate during the First Republic as a “theater of the oligar-
chies.” After all, despite the existence of a working-class alternative press, illiterate
1 Introduction 3
Brazilians were a majority in the country and still lacked the right to vote, reinforc-
ing the working classes’ exclusion from the public sphere even more.
It was only at the end of the First Republic and the start of Getúlio Vargas’ gov-
ernment in 1930 that workers began to be incorporated as political subjects, though
in a partial manner. Mass communication via radio was fundamental in this process,
with parallels to what happened in authoritarian European governments, such as
those of Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, and Franco in Spain. In Brazil, this
did not approximate absolute manipulation or control of the popular masses by the
State, though censorship of public opinion was carried out by the Department of
Press and Propaganda (DIP) of the New State, Vargas’ 1937 to 1945 dictatorship;
the radio programs had true resonance with people’s concrete experiences when
they included episodes from their lives and references to their pleasures and emo-
tions (Haussen, 2001).
During Vargas’ 15 years in power (1930–1945), the State worked to partially
incorporate discourses from the working-class alternative press, though it erased
their origin in an attempt to control the “worker’s speech.” To that end, Vargas
invented trabalhismo, a way of legitimizing working-class political participation by
including workers’ demands in a manner subordinate to the State (Gomes, 2005). It
was only at the end of Vargas’ dictatorship that the voices of workers themselves
began to be heard more emphatically in the public debate, especially on the radio,
which by broadcasting their demands allowed for the development of a semi-
bourgeois public sphere in the country.
Still, while radio facilitated workers’ political participation, the traditional print
media contributed little in this sense, showing a fragile commitment to democratic
institutions (Martins, 2020). That fragility became especially explicit in the early
1960s, when trabalhista president João Goulart announced his intent to carry out
the Basic Reforms, policy advances for the working class that included agrarian
reform. This announcement caused an intensification of anti-communism among
right-wing groups, and the press did not hesitate in explicitly supporting a civil-
military coup against Goulart in 1964. Once in power, military leaders installed a
dictatorship that lasted 20 years and interrupted the working classes’ gradual incor-
poration into politics, intensifying the kind of censorship, persecution, and violence
that had been used by the New State dictatorship before it.
During the military dictatorship, mass communication jumped forward with the
creation of Globo Television Network, actively supported by the government.
Rooted in a Rio de Janeiro communications group that already owned newspapers
and radio stations, Globo soon became the country’s leading television network, and
public debate increasingly became ruled by the logic of images. However, at the
same time that Globo produced dictatorship-aligned television journalism that was
false and fictional, the network also criticized the government through realistic nar-
ratives in its novela soap operas that incorporated the “anarchic creativity” of artists
and screenwriters aligned with the left (Bucci, 2016). Thus, while the consolidation
of Brazil’s culture industry advanced alongside the suffocation of the public sphere,
partial broadcasting of political dissidence on television was fundamental to
4 1 Introduction
captivating the growing urban masses, whose access to the country’s wealth dwin-
dled as the years passed.
Sociologist Florestan Fernandes (1976) wrote that the dictatorship’s main objec-
tive was precisely to avoid, at all costs, the democratization of wealth, prestige, and
power. Because of this, he interpreted the regime as a bourgeois autocracy, which he
described as a permanent counterrevolution aiming to disintegrate all modalities of
the public sphere—bourgeois as well as semi-bourgeois, in our understanding—in
order to assure, through the use of violence, reproduction of an extreme concentra-
tion of the economic surplus. Indeed, the dictatorship reversed the small income
redistribution that the 1945–1964 democratic regime had enabled. Violent repres-
sion of union activists allowed the redesign of institutions in order to abruptly alter
income distribution in favor of capital (Souza, 2016). In parallel to the growth in
urban inequalities came the cultural and physical extermination of Indigenous
Brazilians, especially in the Amazon region, made possible by an alliance between
the military government, multinational companies, and Brazilian private and state
companies that furthered the advance of extractivism and the expropriation of land
and resources from the people who inhabited it (Davis, 1978).
Finally, Black Brazilians, women, and the LGBT+ community were also
repressed by the regime. Brazil’s Black movement was targeted by a policy of sur-
veillance and repression in order to eliminate dissidences thought to be destabiliz-
ing and subversive, even while authorities exalted Brazil’s miscegenation and
supposed racial harmony (Kössling, 2007). Against LGBT+ Brazilians, a govern-
ment posture of defending “morals and good customs” sought to regulate dissident
and stigmatized desires, affections, and sexualities in a normative and authoritarian
way, based on a justification of protecting youth and preserving social cohesion and
integration (Quinalha, 2017). As such, the bourgeois autocracy, beyond being a
“dictatorship of class,” as Fernandes (1976) put it, inextricably arranged people by
class, ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality, revealing the intersectional character of
the term “bourgeois”: a property owner, white, male, and heterosexual.
Recognizing that arrangement is fundamental to understanding both Brazil’s
process of redemocratization and the emergence of Bolsonarism in the twenty-first
century. Ultimately, it was the actions of workers, women, and Black, Indigenous,
and LGBT+ Brazilians, among other groups, that blocked the bourgeois autocracy
and the culture industry from controlling the country’s redemocratization in the
1970s and 1980s from the top down. Though they did not have strong decision-
making power in the traditional public debate, peripheral circulation of discourses
from these groups, beginning in their own alternative press, allowed for the develop-
ment of diverse public opinion that began to penetrate the State, especially through
the slow work of social movements (Coutinho, 2011).
When the dictatorship ended in 1985, the constitutional drafting process that
soon followed, between 1987 and 1988, ended up including many of these move-
ments’ demands. Much of the new constitution was composed of a progressive sub-
stratum that incorporated demands the dictatorship had blocked from becoming
public, mostly related to workers (Sader, 1988), Indigenous Brazilians (Lacerda,
2008), and issues related to the environment (Alonso et al., 2007), race (Neris,
1 Introduction 5
2018), gender and sexuality (Medeiros & Fanti, 2019; Alves, 2020), and the rights
of children and adolescents (Pinheiro, 2005), among others. Because of this, it
became known as the Citizen Constitution.
After its enactment in 1988, an unprecedented institutionality emerged in the
country, supported by a new political arrangement: the “democratic pact of 1988.”
Sustained simultaneously by the new constitution and by coalition presidential-
ism—a form of government based on large legislative coalitions—the pact was built
on implicit understanding that true implementation of the social changes announced
in the constitution would occur in a slow, gradual, and safe manner, with both
advances and retreats (Nobre, 2013). In any case, despite the sluggishness of the
State, Brazil’s public debate expanded slightly to include different groups that coex-
isted despite disparities in their decision-making power, inaugurating what political
theorist Nancy Fraser (1997) calls a post-bourgeois public sphere.
It was this widened public sphere and the pact of 1988 itself that entered into
crisis, after more than 20 years of existence, shortly before Bolsonaro’s election.
During his government, it fell under constant threat. A crucial aspect of the crisis
was the proliferation of counterpublics on the left and right, facilitated by the reach
of the Internet (Downey & Fenton, 2003). While the commercial use of the Internet
began in 1995, it was Brazilians’ intense embrace of social media beginning in the
mid-2000s that started to contribute to the decline of the post-bourgeois public
sphere, which was primarily based on television, the mainstream media, and the
alternative press. In this book, we seek to understand the multiple dimensions of this
process, considering technology’s impact as well as its interaction with recent polit-
ical and cultural changes. To that end, we use concepts from the post-Habermassian
theory to approach the dynamics of the public sphere, public and counterpublic
studies, meaning that in our understanding, the public sphere consists of multiple,
more or less digitized discursive arenas called publics (Celikates, 2015), each with
their own level of centrality and power. Taking the dynamics of public debate into
account, those publics might be more or less central and dominant, more or less
peripheral and subordinate, and composed of or lacking majorities of members who
hold hierarchically subaltern social positions, such as women, workers, and Black,
Indigenous, and LGBT+ Brazilians, among others (Fraser, 1997). Publics that are
more central and potentially dominant are generally those closer to the State, to
capital, and to science, while other publics occupy more peripheral and possibly
subordinate positions in comparison.
What all of the publics have in common is the fact that they are self-organized,
voluntary spaces oriented by sociability among strangers, that is, for the purpose of
forming links between people who do not know each other a priori. Participation in
the publics requires some amount of attention, in addition to a shared understanding
that arguments should be based on a rational-critical discussion style. This under-
standing acts as a kind of predominant ideology in dominant publics. While more
performative discourses and modes of address are present to some degree in any
public, rational-critical argument has more legitimacy in that it allows for a more
effective interaction with the State (Warner, 2002).
6 1 Introduction
Meanwhile, it is important to remember that power relations in the public sphere

are not static. In other words, dominant publics are those with more decision-making
power in society at a given moment. This occurs when publics naturalize their cul-
tural horizons by spreading and perpetuating their own codes, performances, and
ideas until they become understood as a consensus. The process consolidates as the
publics legitimize their discourses and practices in central discursive arenas: those
related to the State, the market, and science. However, peripheral publics with less
decision-making power and less hegemonic potential can gain more power and
legitimacy over time, while dominant publics can lose their legitimacy and influenc-
ing potential, becoming peripheral and weak. One example of this is Brazilians who
support monarchy, who became minor, peripheral players after the republic was
installed; another is anti-communists and supporters of the military dictatorship’s
legacy, who also experienced an important loss of power and legitimacy in the pub-
lic debate soon after redemocratization.
Some publics seek an opposite path to that of gaining legitimacy with the State,
the market, or science. With the explicit aim of attacking the State and the estab-
lished order, they try to circulate discourses that oppose a cultural horizon perceived
as dominant and that stands out for its performative character, causing shock and
disturbance in the social order. Because they consciously and disruptively disobey
rules of decorum set by dominant publics, these groups are called counterpublics
(Warner, 2002).
The counterpublics’ necessarily disruptive, indecorous, and shocking mode of
address, counterpublicity—their way of combating the predominance of dominant
publics’ worldviews—is what differentiates them. To that end, it is crucial that
members of counterpublics have a shared perspective that they are facing off against
a dominant cultural horizon. In their understanding, rational-critical discourse is
limited in its capacity to question the more powerful position of dominant publics,
exactly because those publics are structured by relationships of domination, which
motivates the use of a “politics of shock” to draw society’s attention (Rocha &
Medeiros, 2020). Thus, what unites members of any counterpublic is the shared
perception that their worldviews are subordinate to a dominant cultural perspective
that alienates, silences, assaults, belittles, and even ridicules them, motivating their
recourse to counterpublicity.
The concept of a counterpublic was first used to understand the actions of subal-
tern social groups in the public sphere. However, recently, it has also been used to
understand the ascension of groups and leaders on the political right (Downey &
Fenton, 2003; Thimsen, 2017), as we will do here. While in literary critic Michael
Warner’s pioneering theory about counterpublicity (Warner, 2002), queer counter-
publics viewed heteronormativity as hegemonic in dominant publics, for the pur-
pose of our analysis, members of right-wing counterpublics also read certain
discourses as hegemonic. Regardless of whether globalism—the idea that progres-
sive elites aim to conduct transnational rule (Carvalho, 2009)—is an objective real-
ity or not, what matters is that, according to the shared perception of members of
anti-globalist counterpublics, globalists are hegemonic in dominant publics, such as
the mainstream media, the university system, and international organizations
(Araújo, 2021).
1 Introduction 7
While both left- and right-wing counterpublics use counterpublicity, an impor-

tant distinction is that only some users of counterpublicity are subaltern. The quali-
fication of subaltern or not subaltern refers to either a dominated or dominant social
position within systems of oppression, such as class, race, gender, and sexuality.
Subalternity necessarily includes a structural and objective aspect as well as a sym-
bolic and subjective aspect (Hill Collins, 2009). That is, anti-globalist women might
make up a counterpublic, but it could not be considered a subaltern counterpublic
solely based on the fact that they are women. After all, the women in question prob-
ably do not perceive themselves as dominated within a social structure that privi-
leges men, or, if they do, this perception is likely not central to their perspective. But
they likely do see themselves as culturally subordinated by what they view as domi-
nant globalist publics. Similarly, the right-wing LGBT+ community could also be
considered as belonging to a non-subaltern counterpublic, as they do not understand
themselves as people dominated by a heteronormative social structure, even though
that structure objectively exists and inspires killings for motives as banal as panic
caused by a boy walking in a supposedly effeminate way (Butler, 2006).
With this in mind, it is possible to delineate a typology of publics and counter-
publics here. Firstly, there would be a distinction between central and potentially
dominant publics on the one hand and peripheral publics on the other, with periph-
eral publics divided between those that are subaltern and non-subaltern. An example
of a subaltern, peripheral public in Brazil is feminist activists who mobilize in
neighborhood associations of urban peripheries to demand more day cares or public
facilities for victims of domestic violence (Medeiros, 2017). They use rational-
critical arguments in an effort to influence dominant publics, especially those related
to the State, hoping their demands will be incorporated into more inclusive public
policies (Fraser, 1997). Taking another example, activists who carry out disruptive
and shocking performances in the public sphere to call attention to feminist causes—
such as Slut Walk participants, who expose their breasts in public—would be con-
sidered subaltern counterpublics (Medeiros & Fanti, 2019; Gomes, 2018). Instead
of using rational-critical arguments, participants in these protests bet on the “poli-
tics of shock,” that is, carnivalesque transgressions of gender and sexuality norms
that aim to criticize the dominant cultural perspective and signal an intent of eman-
cipation from oppressive norms.
Similarly, we can consider supporters of monarchy or unrestricted economic
privatization who defend their positions with rational-critical arguments as non-
subaltern peripheral publics and those who use disruptive and shocking discourse
right-wing counterpublics. Aiming to criticize the Brazilian cultural horizon linked
to the pact of 1988, viewed as dominant, members of right-wing counterpublics use
aggressive rhetoric, curse words, and acid humor, “political incorrectness” that aims
to alter the social order to restore traditional hierarchies, values, and ways of life. By
occupying the Brazilian State, their members created a new dynamic in the public
debate, dominant counterpublicity, an unstable phenomenon based on reiterated
attacks on institutions that seek to destroy and substitute the foundations of the post-
bourgeois public sphere and foster an authoritarian political culture (Rocha &
Medeiros, 2021).
8 1 Introduction
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Chapter 2
The New Brazilian Right: Radical
and Shameless
Years before Jair Bolsonaro rose to power, a new right-wing activism began to
occupy Brazil’s social media and streets, astonishing political analysts who were
used to associating social movements and demonstrations with left-wing groups
alone. Some said that despite these activists’ use of new techniques, the ideas they
defended were basically the same as those of Brazil’s traditional right,
neoliberalism1 and conservatism,2 and therefore, no such “new right” existed.
However, while there are certainly continuities with the right that has been active
1
Neoliberalism is understood here as a group of social, political, and economic ideas and practices
that emerged in an attempt to rehabilitate the old laissez-faire policies that sharply declined after
the 1929 crisis. The use of the prefix neo is significant and signals an important change in relation
to nineteenth-century laissez-faire policies (Boas & Gans-Morse, 2009; Jackson, 2010). Unlike
laissez-faire economic liberalism, neoliberalism defends the State’s active participation in free
market promotion. That is, those who adhere to laissez-faire believe the State should have no role
in the economy, while the neoliberal stance is that the State should actively regulate in order to
create a judicial-legal apparatus that stimulates the good functioning of the free market (Morresi,
2008; Dardot & Laval, 2014). It is possible to say that in recent decades, neoliberalism gained such
importance that it became, in the words of Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval (2014), the new way
of the world, laying the ground for progressive neoliberals such as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair
(Fraser, 2017) and conservative neoliberals such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. In light
of the argument developed in this chapter, it is important to demarcate the differences between
neoliberalism and more radical political strains that call for a free market, the latter of which had
significant influence on the development of Brazil’s new right. While economists Milton Friedman
and Friedrich Von Hayek can be classified as neoliberals, we believe it is more adequate to consider
Ludwig Von Mises a libertarian, as proposed by libertarian journalist Bryan Doherty (2009).
2
Conservatism, more than a broad thought tradition, is an attitude toward the world that is neces-
sarily reactive to advances in the spheres of values and customs. According to conservative phi-
losopher Roger Scruton (2015), because of their refusal of the abstract, conservatives tend to
present their own arguments in a plaintive way when seeking to preserve traditions at risk of sub-
stitution by something they consider worse. This goal of preservation is anchored in an understand-
ing that certain social mores are not arbitrary but rather condensations of knowledge reached over
a long learning process that favored society’s reproduction. In the words consecrated by the great

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79653-2_2
12 2 The New Brazilian Right: Radical and Shameless
since Brazil’s military dictatorship and redemocratization, this phenomenon is

based on new ideas and new actors who seek a break with the constitutional pact of
1988 and who had important influence on Bolsonaro’s ascent to power.
Beginning in 1988, a new democratic pact came into effect in the country based
on the new constitution, known as the “Citizen Constitution,” and on the practical
necessity of building legislative coalitions in order to assure the president’s ability
to govern, dubbed “coalition presidentialism” by Brazilian political scientists.3 This
new order broke with the political model of the military dictatorship, which sociolo-
gist Florestan Fernandes called a bourgeois autocracy, and included pathways to
gradually construct a post-bourgeois public sphere that aimed to increasingly
include socially subaltern groups. Furthermore, the pact spurred right-wing groups
that were active during the military regime to try to adapt themselves to its new
constraints.4
The business community, accustomed to direct contact with ministers and
bureaucrats from the highest echelons of Brazil’s string of military governments,
was compelled to seek new forms of political participation5 after the 1988 pact.
They had to circumvent the difficulty of interacting with right-wing parties, which
were regionally fragmented and often had personalist leaders (Dreifuss, 1989),
complicating efforts at building a common platform. In addition, there was still a
“branding” problem. After redemocratization, openly identifying as right-wing
became uncomfortable. The “fear of being marked by the regime” was common on
the right.6 Due to its association with authoritarianism, people shied away from
critic of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke, this leads to a feeling of responsibility for the
dead, for the living, and for those who are not yet born.
3
According to Sérgio Abranches, the Brazilian political scientist who coined the expression,
“Brazil is the only country that, in addition to combining proportional representation, a multi-party
system, and ‘imperial presidentialism,’ organizes the Executive branch based on large coalitions. I
will call this peculiar feature of concrete Brazilian institutionality, for lack of a better name, ‘coali-
tion presidentialism’” (Abranches, 1988).
4
These attempts at adaptation came especially after President Fernando Collor (1990–1992) tried
to govern without a broad coalition and was impeached, as pointed out by businessman Thomaz
Magalhães, director of the pro-market think tank the Atlantic Institute, who said, “Suddenly, a
comrade appeared saying different things. Everyone thought it was wonderful. Obviously, his gov-
ernment was good until the first day he took office, but from then on, it was a disaster” (Rocha,
2019, p. 93). The former director of the Liberal Institute, the oldest pro-market think tank in Brazil,
Arthur Chagas Diniz, said, “Collor was liberal but he was crazy, a thief. Unfortunately, Collor was
a disaster for Brazil” (Rocha, 2019, p. 94).
5
This is well illustrated in a statement by the coordinator of the Brazilian Union of Businesspeople,
Antônio de Oliveira Santos, made during the National Constitutional Congress (1987–1988) and
transcribed by Dreifuss: “We lack experience in the democratic game. We lost the ability to maneu-
ver. In the previous regime, a businessperson talked to, at most, four people: [president] Figueiredo,
[finance minister] Delfim, [central banker] Galvêas, and the minister of the corresponding area,
and a law by decree resolved the rest. Today the game is democratic. Our big interlocutor now is
Congress” (Dreifuss, 1989, p. 44).
6
This is according to the account of Alex Catharino, a historian who frequented the Rio de Janeiro
Liberal Institute during the 1990s, served as a fellow of the Russell Kirk Center and of Atlas
2.1 The Traditional Right: Hayek and the Fight Against Communism 13
self-identifying as right-wing and chose to use another milder term: “center.” The
same phenomenon occurred in Argentina, where it became well known in special-
ized literature as the “ashamed right” (Power, 2010).
The shame of asserting right-wing identity was not limited to politicians. It also
occurred among ideologues, supporters, and voters. It was only between 2006 and
2010, during the height of president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s popularity, that the
shame gradually began to dissipate and a new right began to emerge that was radical
and unafraid of affirming itself. This began with its members’ actions in discursive
arenas, especially on the social network Orkut, which preceded Facebook in terms
of popularity in Brazil.
To lay out how this process took place over time and trace its connections with
the traditional right, we opt to divide this chapter into three sections. In the first, we
briefly reconstruct the trajectory of the right that has been active in Brazil since the
1940s, considering its bridges with the new right that would appear years later; in
the second, we show how the Internet allowed for the proliferation of counterpub-
lics (alternative public spheres) and thus for encounters and debates between people
who felt marginalized and unrepresented in the dominant public sphere, fueling the
spread of ultraliberal writing and ideas; and finally, in the third, we describe how
this discourse expanded toward a process of institutionalization of the counterpub-
lics in the form of study groups, candidates for student government, new ultraliberal
institutes, and an attempt to create a political party, increasingly influencing domi-
nant publics. The chapter seeks to show how, in the midst of a series of political and
social transformations in the country, a new constellation of actors and ideas devel-
oped that was fundamental in Brazil’s turn to the right.
2.1 T
he Traditional Right: Hayek and the Fight
Against Communism
The ties between leaders of the new right and those of the right of previous decades
were mainly woven through contacts fostered over many years by Brazilian and
foreign pro-market organizations known as think tanks.7 In the late 2000s, the
Network in Brazil and, as of late 2020, was the editor-in-chief of LVM, the publishing arm of the
Mises Institute Brazil.
7
Think tanks can generally be defined as permanent organizations responsible for conducting
research and/or disseminating ideas related to public policy proposals. That said, most pro-market
think tanks tend to act in a manner that specialized literature considers political and ideological
advocacy (Desai, 1994; Cockett, 1995), based mainly on the promotion of market freedom, some-
times combined with conservative values, and of public policies that aim to bring about such an
orientation. In practice, this means that, in the words of Heritage Foundation CEO Mike Caroll, the
“business” of this type of organization is “people,” that is, the gathering of cadres ready to influ-
ence and eventually act directly in governmental bodies. For more information on the work of
think tanks in Brazil post-redemocratization, cf. Gros (2002), Casimiro (2011), Hauck (2015), and
Rocha (2017).
c ircuits formed by think tanks founded in the 1980s and 1990s grew, attracting fig-
ures ranging from anarcho-capitalists to ultramontanist monarchists, which facili-
tated encounters between older generations of intellectuals and businesspeople with
young enthusiasts active on social networks, in student movements, and in street
demonstrations, who began to constitute a new right.
The founding of the first pro-market think tanks in Brazil is intimately linked to
neoliberalism’s worldwide spread beginning in the 1930s through the activity of
intellectuals, activists, politicians, and businesspeople (Cockett, 1995; Stedman-
Jones, 2014). In Brazil, the promotion of neoliberalism took place amid a strong
anti-left campaign between the 1940s and 1950s that united conservative Catholics
and anti-communist businesspeople committed to the defense of private property. In
1946, Austrian economist F. A. Hayek’s most popular work, The Road of Serfdom,
originally published in 1944, was translated into Portuguese with the support of
civil construction businessman Adolpho Lindenberg.
Lindenberg’s intent in establishing contact with Hayek and sponsoring the book’s
translation and publication was, in his own words, to defend private property via
“scientific bases” and to stop the advance of the Catholic left and its main agendas,
such as agrarian reform:
Here in Brazil, before the revolution,8 in the ‘50s, there was a Catholic movement, leftist,
very important, that wanted to form communist societies called base communities, [formed
by] workers, laborers, priests, feminists, all of them grouped in these grassroots communi-
ties. [...] And there was another movement, which was where I participated, which was
“Tradition, Family and Property,” directed by Plínio Corrêa de Oliveira, and this movement
was a conservative, traditionalist Catholic movement, and from the beginning, we opposed
the movement of the left. Plínio Corrêa de Oliveira wrote a book: Agrarian Reform, Matter
of Conscience, because agrarian reform was the banner issue of the Catholic left. They
thought it was possible to divide large properties, to make only small properties, in short, to
destroy the Brazilian agrarian structure. [...] I, at that time, wrote in a newspaper called
Catholicism that had a wide circulation in Catholic circles, showing how the liberal econ-
omy is the true economy, it is the economy based on natural law and property rights, and
that Catholics have an obligation to fight the left. [...] When I saw the Catholic left advance
a lot, I looked for a movement that would combat the left, and I found Hayek. So I took a
book of his, I got excited, and said: “I’m going to publish this here to give the thing weight,
someone respected.” So I wrote to him, to Hayek, and he authorized me to publish the book.
And it was good, you see, because Hayek gives a proven scientific support, he gave a [sci-
entific] basis for what we were defending. Then afterward Mises also appeared, and an
American, Friedman. That trio is the main one. (Rocha, 2019, pp. 60–61)9
Alongside his cousin, Plínio Corrêa de Oliveira, Adolpho Lindenberg was one of
the main founders in 1960 of the Brazilian Society for the Defense of Tradition,
8
Term used to refer to the 1964 civil-military coup by some of its supporters.
9
The interviews in this book with right-wing activists, businessmen, and intellectuals were con-
ducted by Camila Rocha between 2015 and 2018 and originally published in Portuguese in her
doctoral dissertation (Rocha, 2019). Excerpts used here include minor modifications of form, such
as the elimination of repeated words, hesitations, and verbal tics, in order to increase fluidity with-
out modifying content. The words or phrases in brackets were not explicitly spoken by the inter-
viewees but were implied in the context of the interview; we include them for clarity.
Family, and Property, better known by its abbreviation TFP,10 which had a close
relationship with members of the Brazilian royal family and which also acted in
other Latin American countries. At the time, there were many groups and organiza-
tions like TFP committed to fighting communism (Motta, 2002). The appeal of such
discourse could be seen in the mass turnout to the “March of the Family with God
for Freedom,” which was organized by conservative Catholic women and drew
around 300,000 people to the streets of the city of São Paulo on March 19, 1964.
The demonstration was in response to a March 13 rally organized by President João
Goulart, at which Goulart announced a suite of progressive policy changes that
became known as “the Basic Reforms” (Cordeiro, 2009).
At the time, while Catholic conservatism had significant reach into broad sectors
of society, neoliberalism was more restricted to certain elites who, like Lindenberg,
were concerned with what they saw as substantial advances by Brazil’s left. Among
those elites were people such as economist Eugênio Gudin, who attended the ninth
meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society11 in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1958 (Boianovsky,
2018) and businessman Paulo Ayres Filho, who had important contact with the
Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)12 since 1959 and who later became a
member of the Mont Pelerin Society (Spohr, 2012).
Ayres Filho was one of the main facilitators of the civil-military coup suffered by
president Goulart on April 1, 1964, which Gudin also supported. In 1961, to shut
down the left’s advances, Ayres Filho had founded the Institute of Research and
Social Studies (IPES) in the city of São Paulo, bringing together businesspeople,
politicians, members of the military, and intellectuals.13 The group included conser-
vative Catholics and intellectuals linked to the Brazilian Institute of Philosophy
(IBF) and the Conviviality Society,14 as well as TFP members who drew close to
Ayres at the time, as Lindenberg recalled:
10
As of late 2020, Lindenberg chaired the Plínio Corrêa de Oliveira Institute (IPCO), founded in
December 2006. For more information, see: https://ipco.org.br/quem-somos/#.W-27UnpKhmA
11
The Mont Pelerin Society was founded in 1947 by Hayek with the aim of stimulating the
exchange of ideas between intellectuals aligned with the theses of The Way of Serfdom who came
from different countries and academic contexts, such as Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, Karl
Popper, Wilhelm Röpke, Lionel Robbins, Walter Eucken, Walter Lippmann, Michael Polanyi, and
Salvador de Madariaga, among others (Cockett, 1995; Stedman-Jones, 2014).
12
The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) was founded in March 1946 in the US city of
Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. Conceived by businessman Leonard Read, the organization
received financial assistance for many years from a millionaire fund, the Volker Fund, created by
tycoon William Volker and managed by a free-market enthusiast. Because of this, the institution
had relative autonomy from immediate political interests. It aspired to educate Americans about
the advantages of free-market capitalism (Doherty, 2009).
13
Subsequently, between the 1960s and the 1970s, IPES had branches in other Brazilian capitals.
For more information, cf. Dreifuss (1987) and Ramírez (2007).
14
The IBF was founded in 1949 in the city of São Paulo and was initially headed by jurist and
philosopher Miguel Reale, later bringing together people such as Luis Washington Vita, Vicente
Ferreira da Silva, Renato Cirell Czerna, Heraldo Barbuy, Vilém Flusser, Leônidas Hegenberg,
Roque Spencer Maciel de Barros, Ubiratan Borges de Macedo, Antonio Paim, and Ricardo Vélez
Rodríguez. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, the IBF began to work with Catholics from the
I myself knew Paulo Ayres socially, you know, but I only got closer to him when I saw that
he was defending [that position] too. He frequented São Paulo a lot. I was a friend of theirs,
I had a card [from IPES], everything, but Plínio Corrêa de Oliveira was very worried about
not wanting to give a political aspect [to our movement], so we never entered the UDN
[National Democratic Union, a conservative political party]. IPES we supported, but we did
not enter, [we were] collaborators. There is also Roberto Campos [economist who became
a planning minister during the dictatorship], who is an important figure, Ives Gandra [con-
servative jurist] himself, but the main figure is Paulo Ayres. He was very smart, very active,
very well connected. And there is also someone [who often accompanied] Paulo Ayres, who
was a great industrialist from Ultragaz [Henning Boilesen]. He was very active, had money,
financed [the institute] too. (Rocha, 2019, pp. 62–63)
In 1962, IPES opened offices in the city of Rio de Janeiro and in several other
Brazilian states (Dreifuss, 1987). Theoretically, the units were autonomous, but in
practice, they were led by the São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro nuclei, with the Porto
Alegre and Belo Horizonte branches considered the most active (Ramírez, 2007).
The organizational structure of IPES, which included an Executive Committee, a
Steering Committee, and an Advisory Council, was occupied by businesspeople
from various sectors who contributed financially, as well as by members of the mili-
tary and intellectuals. The intellectuals were allocated among different working
groups that formally acted on fronts, such as publication and dissemination, educa-
tion, union work, social assistance, economic activities, political analysis, studies,
editorial work, the Brasília office, and integration. The military participants, led by
general Golbery do Couto e Silva, sought daily to investigate the content of press
agencies, obtain information from different military bases, and produce hundreds of
articles each month for distribution in the media or to serve as a basis for pamphlets
and conferences. They distributed analysis of communist activities to members of
the military without identifying its source, compiling dossiers of individuals and
groups who were suspected of subversion. These suspects totaled 400,000 in 1964,
forming the basis for the National Information Service (SNI) created by the military
government right after the coup (Ramírez, 2007).
The intellectuals, for their part, were responsible for producing a series of publi-
cations that promoted anti-communism, “democratic” values directly associated
with support of a free market, and justifications for a military intervention aimed at
overthrowing Goulart. Like Lindenberg, most of these intellectuals were conserva-
tive, and a significant number were Catholic, including priests. Among the intel-
lectuals were members of the Brazilian Institute of Philosophy (IBF), founded in
1949 in the city of São Paulo and headed by jurist and former integralist15 Miguel
Conviviality Society, which was created in 1961 in the city of São Paulo by Father Adolpho Crippa
of the Order of Salvatorians and included participants such as Paulo Mercadante, Creusa Capalbo,
Antonio Paim, Nelson Saldanha, Ricardo Vélez Rodríguez, and Ubiratan Borges de Macedo
(Gonçalves, 2017).
15
The Brazilian Integralist Action, or simply integralism, was a far-right, fascist-inspired political
movement founded in 1932, officially extinguished in 1937 (Trindade, 1979; Bertonha, 2014), and
later rehabilitated by groups that formed a neointegralism (Gonçalves & Caldeira Neto, 2020).
Reale, and the Catholics of the Conviviality Society, created in 1961 in the same
city by Father Domingos Crippa of the Order of Salvatorians (Gonçalves, 2017).
Although there were neoliberal intellectuals at IPES, spreading neoliberalism
beyond elite circles was not its goal. Nor was it the goal of the economists brought
together by the National Association of Economic and Social Programming
(ANPES), founded in 1964 by economist Roberto Campos. Despite its responsibil-
ity for visits to Brazil by some foreign economists, including Milton Friedman in
1973, ANPES was exclusively focused on envisioning public policies for the coun-
try rather than spreading neoliberalism to a wider audience (Aranha, 2016;
Boianovsky, 2018), just as IPES’ main objective was overthrowing president
Goulart.
Shortly after the coup, most Brazilian neoliberals supported and/or participated
directly in the government of marshal Humberto Castelo Branco (1964–1967), such
as Roberto Campos, who ran the planning ministry, and Otávio Gouveia de Bulhões,
who became minister of finance. However, at the end of Castelo Branco’s term came
the start of a series of military governments guided by a developmentalist perspec-
tive that ran contrary to economically liberal principles, and the neoliberals lost
their newly conquered space within the State. That space shifted, instead, to sup-
porting conservative figures with anti-communist discourse linked to the IBF and
the Conviviality Society.
Because the civil organizations housing the neoliberals had closed by that point,
the neoliberals started to act in a more solitary way in civil society. This can be seen
in the case of businessman Henry Maksoud, who owned a range of companies,
including the engineering firm Hidro Service and the luxury hotel Maksoud Plaza.
Maksoud was a pioneer in spreading Hayek’s and Friedman’s ideas in Brazil beyond
elite circles. Through the publication of the magazine Vision, book translations, and
the television program Maksoud and You, he sought to influence an audience of
what Hayek called “secondhand dealers in ideas” (Fonseca, 1994). Hayek even trav-
eled to Brazil three times at Maksoud’s invitation, between 1976 and 1981 (Gros,
2002), and on his last visit, he lectured at the University of Brasília to an audience,
including Eugênio Gudin, Roberto Campos, and Otávio Gouveia de Bulhões. Still,
the activities that Maksoud promoted were never housed in a specific organization
for that purpose, something that would only occur in the early 1980s during Brazil’s
redemocratization.
During the transition to democracy, conservative ideologues who had been sup-
ported by the military regime saw their influence fade. Businessmen and people in
government had other priorities than fighting communism, and conservative
speeches with a strong dose of anti-communism no longer had the same appeal.
This unfavorable scenario meant that conservatives, whose discourse was worn out
and who were unable to attract major financing for their organizations, started to
defend the free market in a more organic and less pragmatic way than they had in
the 1950s and 1960s. In the words of Ricardo Vélez Rodríguez, a Conviviality
Society member who would later become education minister in the Bolsonaro
government:
In 1979, when I came to do my doctorate here in Brazil, [Father Adolpho] Crippa offered
me a research position at the Conviviality publishing house. I affiliated myself, but I said:
“Crippa, this is démodé. I think the commies have to be fought and criticized, but dedicating
ourselves to that alone will only add up to something small. We need to present a proposal.”
[...] He was a staunch anti-communist, but he wanted to change. Why? Because he received
financial support from the São Paulo businesspeople, but the São Paulo businesspeople
didn’t finance that anti-communist discourse anymore. That discourse was worn thin, and
they started to help less. I said to Crippa: “Of course, businessmen are seeing that things are
changing, that anti-communist discourse doesn’t resolve the issue. We have to think about
Brazil from a more radical angle and how to dismantle patrimonialism, so that Brazil can
really go developing.” (Rocha, 2019, pp. 79–80)
This spurred Vélez Rodríguez and other conservative intellectuals to seek out
circles formed by the Liberal Institute (IL) and the Institute of Business Studies
(IEE). The former was founded in Rio de Janeiro in 1983 by Donald Stewart Jr., a
Brazilian businessman of Canadian origin, and José Stelle, Hayek’s translator and
an editor of the Maksoud-published magazine Vision. The latter was created in 1984
by Winston and William Ling, businessman brothers of Chinese origin. At the time,
the institutes’ main goal was to influence the direction of Brazil’s redemocratiza-
tion. A prominent pro-market figure of the period was University of Chicago-trained
economist Paulo Rabello de Castro, who sought to actively influence businesspeo-
ple and politicians. Rabello de Castro was part of the Chamber of Economic and
Social Studies and Debates (CEDES) founded in 1980. He understood that CEDES
could provide a different response to the country’s economic crisis than those
offered by the dictatorship’s authoritarian national-developmentalist model or by
the democratic developmentalism touted by left and center-left groups:
We had a vision that many things needed to be changed, liberalized, and [it was necessary]
to have areas of liberalization, mainly price liberalization, because the regime was also
authoritarian in prices and completely anti-liberal. [...] There were price controls, there was
an Interministerial Commission on prices, currency was controlled by a fixed-rate system.
In practice, it was a fixed exchange system. Dirigisme with state-owned companies, oil,
steel, petrochemicals, cement, fertilizers. State control was much broader than what it is
today. CEDES emerged in order to provide a response linked to Brazilian agriculture,
promising that agriculture, if liberalized, would cease to be a supposedly lagging sector of
the economy. Because that was the analysis at the time: a lagging sector, full of farmers
exploiting the poor and the oppressed. All of the nomenclature came from the left. Nobody
understood anything about agriculture, but there was a whole interventionist doctrine, a
proposal for agrarian reform, which nobody knew what it was. The expropriation part was
correct, but what would be done next was obviously not planned. And in the midst of all
this, a group appeared that said that everything was wrong, that they were throwing away
the potential of agriculture and that the agriculture sector would have to pay for the conse-
quences. Obviously, it won’t pay all the bills. Seeing that this sector has to be liberalized,
we would also carry out a gradual liberalization of the whole economy, and that would
result in a new economy and a new development cycle that we had already realized we were
losing. (Rocha, 2019, pp. 70–71)
CEDES was composed of academics, mostly graduates of the University of São

Paulo and many of its Institute of Economic Research Foundation (FIPE). It had
great freedom to draw up public policy proposals despite the fact that it was housed
in what Rabello de Castro himself called “the temple of national conservatism,” the
Brazilian Rural Society, which theoretically was more resistant to neoliberalism. At

the time, however, the Rural Society was chaired by Renato Ticoulat Filho and other
agribusiness leaders who were, according to Rabello de Castro, more intellectual-
ized and open to innovation. The group also included bankers such as Roberto
Bornhausen, president of Unibanco, and the Andrade Vieira family, which owned a
bank closely linked to the agribusiness community in the state of Paraná, Banco
Bamerindus. According to historian René Dreifuss, CEDES was sustained by 50
companies and associations, Brazilian and international, and Ticoulat said that it
limited itself to “academic activities, of an absolute apoliticism,” although its objec-
tive was to “unite the business community in order to demonstrate that neoliberal-
ism is not a savage capitalism, a creator of misery, but a lever for social development”
(Dreifuss, 1989, pp. 52–53).
After leaving CEDES in 1984, Rabello de Castro returned in 1986. That same
year, he was asked to present his ideas to a closed-door meeting of 140 business-
people, which took place on October 4 and 5 at a hotel in Guarujá, on the coast of
São Paulo state.16 Among the attendees were Flávio Teles de Menezes of the
Brazilian Rural Society; Werther Annicchino of Copersucar; José Luís Zillo of the
São Paulo Sugar Union; Carlos Antich of Sanbra; Laerte Setúbal of Duratex; Jacy
Mendonça, the director of Volkswagen and vice president of the National Association
of Automotive Vehicle Manufacturers (ANFAVEA); Norberto Odebrecht of the
eponymous construction company and his son Emílio; Flávio Andrade, president of
Standard Ogilvy; and Jorge Simeira Jacob of the Fenícia Group, who served as
president of the Liberal Institute’s São Paulo branch. According to Rabello de
Castro, the meeting aimed to discuss strategies for inserting liberalizing ideas into
the Constitutional Congress that would begin the following year:
I organized the economic debate at the request of CEDES, where Ticoulat was president,
and a congressman attended who had been elected with lots of votes, Guilherme Afif
Domingos. The speaker at the formal dinner was Marco Maciel [head of the president’s
civil cabinet], the backbone of what was then the Liberal Front Party, bringing a kind of
liberalism to the party. This group would form the basis of the so-called Centrão [“big cen-
ter”] as of 1987, providing a little bit of rationalizing guidance to total craziness that the left
wanted to bring about at the Constitutional Congress. The executive secretary of this
Centrão was a young Ph.D. in law, invited by CEDES, named Gastão Toledo. He was there,
30 years ago, helping people at the Congress make amendments and forming what would
be the 1988 Constitution. (Rocha, 2019, p. 85)
At the time of the Constitutional Congress, a crisis of national-developmentalism

loomed large in Brazilian politics, deepened by a debt crisis and an inflationary
spiral. Most politicians could be divided into those who wanted to abandon devel-
opmental policies and those who called for their continuation, with modifications.
The former, who identified more with neoliberal proposals, wanted to bet on eco-
nomic opening, the integration of Brazil into networks of globalized capitalism, the
slimming down of the state machine, and the elimination of “obstacles” to
16
This can be seen in the article “Businesspeople Hear from Maciel in Closed Meeting,” published
in the newspaper Folha de São Paulo on October 5, 1986, Section 4, p. 41.
stimulating foreign investment. The latter sought to continue the developmentalist

legacy by maintaining state-owned companies and protecting “national assets” but
called for reforms in order to redistribute income and urban and agrarian property,
as well as for democratizing measures that would allow the working classes greater
political participation and freedom of organization (Sallum Jr., 1996).
These two ideological poles, the “neoliberalizing” and the “socializing,” served
as goalposts between which most of Brazil’s lawmakers positioned themselves, in
different blocs and groups (idem). In 1979, the country’s party system fragmented.
During the military dictatorship, only two parties were allowed: ARENA, the party
of the regime, and the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB), which contained its
opponents. During the 1987–1988 Constitutional Congress, a bloc known as the
Centrão was formed by most members of the Brazilian Democratic Movement
Party (PMDB, formerly MDB), who aligned with the “neoliberalizing” pole, and
former ARENA members who now mostly belonged to the Democratic Social Party
(PDS) and the Liberal Front Party (PFL). The PMDB members who identified more
with the “socializing” pole, with rare exceptions, became part of the Movement of
Progressive Unity (MUP) (Sallum Jr., 1996), which was known as “the left of the
PMDB” (Assumpção, 2008), or, in the words of congressman Domingos Leonelli
(PMDB, from the state of Bahia),17 “the left rib of the PMDB” (Fleischer & Marques,
1999, p. 64). The MUP was considered a “close ally” by center-left politicians such
as Miguel Arraes (PSB) and Mário Covas (PMDB),18 which included around 40
lawmakers of the 559 who participated in the National Constitutional Congress
(Fleischer & Marques, 1999; Sanchez, 2003) and formed a bloc with leftist parties,
such as the Workers’ Party (PT) and the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB), in
order to submit amendments to the draft constitution.19
Centrão politicians succeeded in blocking the most controversial bills introduced
by leftists at the congress (Dreifuss, 1989). Still, in Rabello de Castro’s evaluation,
the Guarujá meeting with businesspeople had been unvictorious, because most of
them had departed unconvinced by pro-market discourse. Winston Ling, an IEE
founder present at the meeting, recounted that it was also the scene of harsh disputes:
Everyone was there, all of the important businesspeople in Brazil. It was a very serious
meeting about the future of the country. I remember that the speaker was Paulo Rabello de
Castro, and I remember that meeting well because there was an argument in public that I
17
Leonelli “stated his belief that half of the MUP members could join a socialist party, as long as
they could count on the support of important figures like PMDB senators Mário Covas and
Fernando Henrique Cardoso, leaders in the Constitutional Congress and in the Senate, respec-
tively” (Fleischer & Marques, 1999, p. 64).
18
Cf. “What is the MUP” in Folha de São Paulo, July 31, 1987, available at the Digital Library of
the Senate.
19
See the articles “Consensus and 32 Only Differed on Two Points” from newspaper Correio
Braziliense on September 6, 1987, and “Moderates Defeat Amendment That Would Allow Lawsuits
Against Companies” from newspaper O Globo on October 4, 1987, available at the Digital Library
of the Senate.
had never seen before, a verbal argument between Donald Stewart and Emílio Odebrecht.20
Because the purpose of the meeting was to discuss the direction of Brazil, and Donald
Stewart, as president of the Liberal Institute, was pushing for liberalism. A lot of people
were there, a lot of people connected to the Liberal Institutes too, and Emílio Odebrecht
stood up and said something like: “You are some dreamers. The real world is not like what
you are dreaming,” and so on. And then Donald replied, and he replied back, and then they
split, and so on. I’ll never forget that argument. I was impressed! At that time, I was visiting
lots of businesspeople trying to sell books, asking for donations, but no one ever spoke as
aggressively against liberalism as Emílio Odebrecht did. (Rocha, 2019, p. 87)
At the end of the meeting, the head of the president’s civil cabinet Marco Maciel
told businessman Jorge Gerdau, who was linked to the Liberal Institute, that “the
constitutional proposal prepared by the Afonso Arinos Commission21 is not liberal
and that many of its members would sign maybe part, but not all, of the text.”22
Despite their failure to influence the new constitution, in the early 1990s,
Brazilian pro-market organizations reached their heyday. The Liberal Institute had
eight branches throughout Brazil and in 1993 hosted the Mont Pelerin Society’s
annual meeting in Rio de Janeiro. The Atlantic Institute, another pro-market think
tank, was founded by former CEDES members led by Paulo Rabello de Castro and
Rio de Janeiro businessman Thomaz Magalhães. Most of the organizations founded
at the time could easily dialogue with the Liberal Front Party (PFL), which housed
former ARENA politicians. Roberto Bornhausen, the brother of PFL politician
Jorge Bornhausen, even chaired São Paulo’s Liberal Institute, and the Atlantic
Institute helped draw up platforms for the party. Intellectuals who had been linked
to Conviviality Society, such as Antonio Paim and Ricardo Vélez Rodríguez, sought
to ideologically influence the PFL and taught several courses to its members.
The pro-market organizations’ boom began to fade after sociologist Fernando
Henrique Cardoso of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) was elected
20
Emílio Odebrecht would go on to lead his family’s construction firm, which had a close relation-
ship with the Brazilian federal government over the years and was later revealed to have partici-
pated in bribery schemes to earn public contracts in Brazil and across Latin America.
21
“In September 1986, a few months before the National Constitutional Congress started its work
in February 1987, a provisional committee created by the Executive concluded a draft Constitution
that, nonetheless, ended up not being officially sent to Congress. Though it was called the
Provisional Commission for Constitutional Studies, the group became known as the Afonso Arinos
Commission, as its president was the jurist, former federal congressman, and former senator
Afonso Arinos de Melo Franco. Among the 50 members of this group were businessman Antônio
Ermírio de Moraes, political scientist Bolívar Lamounier, anthropologist and sociologist Gilberto
Freyre, writer Jorge Amado, jurist Miguel Reale, unionist José Francisco da Silva, jurist Sepúlveda
Pertence (then attorney general) and economist Walter Barelli (then technical director of the Inter-
Union Department of Statistics and Socioeconomic Studies, Dieese). José Sarney (who would later
become a PMDB Senator representing the state of Amapá) and Cristovam Buarque (who would
later become a PDT Senator representing the Federal District) also participated in this process:
Sarney, then president of the Republic, was the one who assembled the commission through
Decree 91,450 on July 18, 1985; Cristovam, a professor who had not yet started his political career,
was among the 50 members of the group.” Retrieved from https://www12.senado.leg.br/noticias/
materias/2008/10/01/comissao-afonso-arinos-elaborou-anteprojeto-de-constituicao
22
Cf. Folha de São Paulo, October 5, 1986, Section 4, p. 41.
president in 1994 and a major currency reform finally got runaway inflation under
control. The institutes started to struggle to retain funding; many businesspeople
thought it was no longer necessary to finance the dissemination of pro-market ideas
as the federal government, which was in alliance with the PFL, would likely incor-
porate them on its own. In the words of businessman Winston Ling, founder of the
Institute of Business Studies:
“What happened to the Liberal Institutes, are they all gone?” And then they told me what
happened: “Look, the [currency reform] Real Plan happened and then no Institute was able
to raise money anymore, because they went to knock on funders’ doors and they said, Look,
we were successful, we achieved our goal, we are already in liberalism. We no longer need
the Institute. Inflation is zero, and now the deal is work and earn money. We don't need this
anymore.” (Rocha, 2019, pp. 96–97)
The 1999 death of Liberal Institute founder Donald Stewart Jr. accelerated this
process. In the early 2000s, almost all of the Institute’s offices closed, with only the
headquarters in Rio de Janeiro and the branch in the state of Rio Grande do Sul
remaining open. The Institute of Business Studies, for its part, focused on facilitat-
ing its annual Liberty Forum, which unites leaders from different sectors in the city
of Porto Alegre. The Atlantic Institute temporarily distanced itself from party poli-
tics after having been close to the PFL in the 1990s and the party’s would-be presi-
dential candidate in 2002, Roseana Sarney, who stepped down after a scandal.
Without question, among the surviving organizations, the Liberal Institute’s Rio de
Janeiro headquarters faced the greatest difficulties. Its activities through the first
half of the 2000s were precarious, based on meager donations from a few Brazilian
businessmen and foreign organizations, as recalled by historian and regular visitor
to the institute Alex Catharino:
The Liberty Fund usually gave an annual check for $5,000 to $10,000, at most, never more
than that. The institutions’ grants were small. For example, I worked at Atlas Network,23
and at the time, I was the one who dealt with this, and Atlas donated $3,000 annually to the
IL in Rio. For the rest, it was only $1,000. The one in Brasília received $500. So it was
something that barely paid the institution's electricity bill, because these grantmaking insti-
tutions, they give small amounts to various institutions. There is never a really big donation.
(Rocha, 2019, p. 100)
On top of the funding difficulties, lack of staff turnover was a challenge. Many
staffers still carried the blemish of having participated in and/or supported the mili-
tary regime, a legacy perceived as “uncomfortable” by the younger generation who
started to visit the Liberal Institute in the 1990s, as Catharino recounted:
What existed of liberal thought, or of conservative democratic thought, was killed in 1964
[the year of the coup]. In a way, 1964 gave more strength, a legitimacy even, to the left,
which was being persecuted by an authoritarian regime, and the right was taken out.
23
Atlas Network was founded in 1981 in the United States with the goal of facilitating more than
400 pro-market think tanks across the world (Rocha, 2015). It is the eighth-most important think
tank in the United States, according to the index Global To Go Think Tanks 2014 developed by the
University of Pennsylvania. For more information on the activities of the Koch brothers, cf.
Doherty (2009).
Because if you were a right-wing person, and you got involved in politics, the military was
against it: “Politics is a communist thing.” So there was a generation that was lost, because,
unfortunately, [Chicago school economist] Og Leme himself worked with [planning minis-
ter] Roberto Campos in the Castelo Branco [first military president] government. When
[second military president] Costa e Silva left power, and [vice president] Pedro Aleixo was
not allowed to assume power, that’s an important point in the ‘64 movement, in my view.
The more liberal figures, Otávio Gouvêa de Bulhões, Roberto Campos, Og Leme, Pedro
Aleixo himself, Milton Campos, these people supported the coup at first, thinking it was
going to be a temporary coup, and it wasn’t, [because] the general elections that had been
promised never came about. That was the big mistake. Those people left the government,
and that’s the moment that the hard line entered. Delfim [Netto, economist] came in, things
got worse again, and it was very heavy. These people who sort of carried out small services,
[saying] “Oh no, I'm in a Secretariat,” first they became marked by the regime, and then that
older group was forever associated with the military. And [that] was people’s fear, of being
associated with the military. The Brazilian National War College asked the Liberal Institute
several times to send guest lecturers to conferences there. Some went, but most felt uncom-
fortable, because in 1992 they were still people who had lived through that moment. (Rocha,
2019, p. 110)
Among the few people who approached the organization at that time was transla-
tor Márcia Xavier de Brito, who went to an event at the recommendation of a friend,
the philosopher Olavo de Carvalho. Carvalho had a blog, begun in 1998, entitled
Sapientiam Autem Non Vincit Malitia (Wisdom Is Not Defeated By Malice), and
wrote articles, including opinion pieces, for outlets such as newspapers Jornal da
Tarde, Jornal do Brasil, Diário do Comércio, O Globo, and the magazine Bravo!
which he reposted on his website. By that period, he had also authored several
books criticizing Brazil’s left and Marxism in general, released with smaller pub-
lishers. They included The New Era and the Cultural Revolution: Fritjof Capra and
Antonio Gramsci (1994), The Garden of Afflictions (1995), and two volumes of The
Collective Imbecile (1996 and 1998), which strongly criticized Brazilian left-wing
intellectuals and academics. Carvalho said that those works, especially The
Collective Imbecile, opened space for conservatives and economic liberals within
cultural circles from which they had been excluded since the 1980s (Borges, 2015).
Xavier de Brito and Catharino, too, were worried about the right’s difficulty
advancing in cultural arenas. In 2001, they had become Atlas Network’s only two
fellows in Brazil after having participated in the American organization’s initiative
“The Freedom Project.” One year later, they and others close to the Liberal Institute
founded the Interdisciplinary Center for Ethics and Personalist Economy (CIEEP),
based on networks with other US organizations that had been built through the Atlas
connection. The organization was active in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo until 2010
and aimed to discuss the moral foundations for the free market with a cultural and
conservative approach. This was in light of cultural advances by the left and espe-
cially the Catholic left, which had been very influential in founding the PT in 1980
and the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in 1984:
I think the thing is much more cultural and has much deeper roots. Economics and politics
are consequences. We were always interested in training. I was always very connected with
education, and we were seeing interest in the Liberal Institute fall. Brazil was in a “Fernando
Henrique phase,” and people thought everything was more stable. The church also had its
liberation theology, and Rio de Janeiro was the least-affected place because of [cardinal]
Dom Eugênio Sales, who was more conservative, so Rio seemed like the place to start with
more cultural work. (Márcia Xavier de Brito) (Rocha, 2019, p. 106)
Our view was that it was no use defending these ideas on a purely economic basis. We
won the economic discourse. We united Catholics, Jewish people, Protestants, there were
Methodists, there were Presbyterians. Our idea was to try [to fight] the left’s advance in
Brazil that had occurred due to liberation theology. The PT emerged on one side from
unions and on the other from intellectuals. There were always these two arms of the party,
but people forget about the work of figures like Dom Cláudio Hummes, the priest who
accompanied the demonstrations at the ABC [industrial region of São Paulo where the PT
was founded], [cardinal] Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns, [bishop] Dom Pedro Casaldáliga, the
whole issue of Pastoral Land Commission [in which church figures defended the rights of
rural workers]. The MST arose from the Pastoral Land Commission, so we had to turn to
cultural discourse, to religion, to ethics, this is the field of debate, to the arts. And that’s
what we tried to do during that period at CIEEP, but we didn’t have money. It’s difficult to
convince a donor, “Look, we are going to set up an ethics course here. Can you finance it?”
“We’re going to start a course on English Renaissance poetry and its influence on Brazilian
romantic poetry.” People are not interested, they lack this vision. So it was very limited.
(Alex Catharino) (Rocha, 2019, p. 108)
The difficulties faced by Xavier de Brito and Catharino in the cultural arena
repeated themselves for Carvalho. According to Xavier de Brito, in the late 1990s,
Carvalho wanted to establish himself as a cultural critic. Using connections from his
time as a journalist, he reached out to people in the pro-market circles of the period,
seeking financing for his activities. He even said that it was Rio de Janeiro Liberal
Institute founder Donald Stewart Jr. who first introduced him to the work of econo-
mist Ludwig Von Mises (Garschagen, 2013). But his own books were still
little-known:
At that time, he was simply a journalist who had released that book The Collective Imbecil,
which circulated in a very restricted environment. Nobody even knew who he was. He was
starting out as a cultural critic, because his thing at the time was to be a cultural critic, and
he taught a course at [cultural center] Lauro Alvim, in front of the beach, a cool space, and
there were Globo artists [connected to the television network] who started to attend. Take
The Collective Imbecil. You don’t see anything, absolutely nothing, in Olavo’s discourse
that is about politics. He talks there about social mores, eventually he talks about racism,
“gayzism,” but that’s one or two articles. He had already released The Garden of Afflictions.
Then he was praised by [journalist] Paulo Francis, a half-page of the newspaper, in O
Globo, but he was still not successful. So he started looking for sponsorship. He frequented
a specific circuit. He got along with Roberto Campos, met [ambassador José Osvaldo de]
Meira Pena because of Roberto Campos, and went to the Liberal Institute. During the time
that I was at the Liberal Institute, in 1997 or 1998, he came trying to get close to Professor
Og [Leme] and Alex [Catharino]. (Rocha, 2019, pp. 101–102)
However, after attending a public course on social and political thought at the
Rio de Janeiro Liberal Institute, Carvalho failed to make a good impression because
of his aggressiveness toward ideological opponents.24 According to Xavier de Brito,
24
“He approached the IL and went there to do a project, [...] and Og [Leme] said to Alex [Catharino]:
‘Go watch. I want to know your opinion about whether or not we should bring this guy into our
circle.’ And Alex went [...] and thought that he was disrespectful with the ideological opponent.
2.2 The New Right’s Emergence: Mises and the Combat of “Leftist Cultural Hegemony” 25
he still sought funding from cigar manufacturer Sousa Cruz, traditionalist Catholic
group Opus Dei, and the American organization Atlas Network but was not success-
ful. Thus, with his own money from book sales, journalism, and teaching private
philosophy courses, Carvalho—who declared himself a supporter of free-market
economics, traditionalist and conservative religious ideas, philosophical realism,
anarchism in the sphere of morals and education, and nationalism and opposition to
“global government” when it came to international politics25—shifted his efforts to
spreading his ideas on the Internet.
As time passed, Carvalho abandoned the idea of cultural criticism and focused
more and more on analyzing the political scene. He denounced the left-wing orga-
nization the São Paulo Forum,26 which he claimed was the main organizer of a com-
munist advance in Latin America. Together with other critics of Marxism and the
Brazilian left, in 2002 he created the site Media Without a Mask, which published
articles from several authors on politics, economics, and philosophy. Carvalho soon
became increasingly well known among Brazilian users of digital forums of the era,
especially on Orkut, a social network that preceded Facebook in terms of popularity
in Brazil and that would become fundamental for the emergence of a new right in
the country.
2.2 T
he New Right’s Emergence: Mises and the Combat
of “Leftist Cultural Hegemony”
The Brazilian business community and market analysts in Brazil and abroad com-
plained little about the two presidential administrations of sociologist Fernando
Henrique Cardoso (1994–2002), a scenario reflected in the decline of the pro-market
think tanks. In the words of Atlas Network fellow Márcia Xavier de Brito, “Brazil
was in a ‘Fernando Henrique phase,’ and people thought everything was more sta-
ble” (Rocha, 2019, p. 106). But as the 2002 elections approached, the Workers’
Party, led by unionist and former metalworker Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—or sim-
ply, Lula—started to look like a strong competitor, awakening suspicion in elites.
Aware of this unease, the leftist party adopted two goals: to clarify to the Brazilian
business community that it would not oppose their interests and to convince the
Can you disagree [...]? Of course you can, [...] but he went beyond the limits of respect. He didn’t
talk about ideas” (Márcia Xavier de Brito) (Rocha, 2019, p. 102).
25
For the details of his ideological self-positioning, cf. Carvalho (1998).
26
Carvalho’s first criticism of the São Paulo Forum on his personal blog, on April 21, 2001,
occurred in an article that was also published by Época magazine about genetically modified agri-
culture in Cuba. It was titled “Who Would Say? But Not Everything That is Good for Cuba is Good
for Brazil” (http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/transgenicos-em-cuba/). The São Paulo Forum is a
Latin American political conference founded in 1990 at a seminar organized by the Workers’ Party
in the city of São Paulo. As of late 2020, it included more than 100 leftist political parties and
organizations from the region. More can be found at http://forodesaopaulo.org/
financial market that it would maintain the three-pronged economic policy enacted
by the previous government (a floating exchange rate, fiscal targets, and inflation
targets). They were not easy tasks.
Given the degree of market dread surrounding Lula’s campaign, the party worked
to smooth over his image with the slogan “Peace and Love Lula” and, most impor-
tantly, to make his intentions explicit. In June 2002, in an alliance with the Liberal
Party, Lula appointed businessman José Alencar his running mate (Vaz & Dantas,
2002). During a meeting about the party’s platform, Lula read the “Letter to the
Brazilian People,” a document which newspaper Folha de São Paulo described as
aiming to “calm the financial market” (Folha Online, 2002). The letter affirmed the
party’s commitment to:
[...] preserve the primary surplus as much as necessary to prevent the internal debt from
rising and destroying confidence in the government’s capacity to honor its commitments.
But we must insist: only the return to growth can bring the country to a consistent, lasting
fiscal balance. Stability and the control of public accounts and inflation are today assets of
all Brazilians. (Folha Online, 2002)
But those efforts still appeared insufficient to calm the financial sector. As polls
in September 2002 showed Lula might be elected, foreign market analysts voiced
deep worry at Lula’s declaration that central bank president Arminio Fraga would
be replaced in a possible PT government. An employee of a large investment bank
was categorical: “He [Lula] can say what he wants and the market’s uncertainty will
continue” (Benevides, 2002). Indeed, in September, the São Paulo Stock Exchange
(Bovespa) had its worst moment of the year with a 16.9% drop, mainly because of
uncertainty about the election (Portes, 2002). On October 10, 17 days before the
presidential runoff, the dollar hit a historic high, mostly due to the possibility of a
Lula victory.
In spite of the market’s fears, Lula was elected president on October 27, 2002,
with votes spread across all income brackets (Balbachevsky & Holzhacker, 2007;
Singer, 2012), signaling a kind of convergence of the electorate. And despite not
receiving the financial sector’s support, Lula was faithful to the promises in the
“Letter to the Brazilian People,” maintaining an orthodox economic policy. A “mar-
ket name,” BankBoston international president Henrique Meirelles, was appointed
central banker. Finance minister Antonio Palocci, despite being a PT politician with
Trotskyist origins, was even more orthodox than his predecessor when it came to
keeping the so-called economic tripod.
To that end, Palocci based his economic platform on a document called the “Lost
Agenda”27 created by economists, including former Princeton and University of
Chicago professor José Alexandre Scheinkman and Marcos Lisboa of the Getúlio
Vargas Foundation’s Brazilian School of Economics and Finances (FGV/EPGE). It,
in turn, was based on a plan drawn up for the PMDB’s Ulysses Guimarães Foundation
but refused by 2002 PSDB presidential candidate José Serra (who had a PMDB run-
ning mate) for being “right-wing.” Scheinkman had been invited to help design a
27
http://resenhadabolsa.com.br/portfolio-items/entrevista-marcos-lisboa-a-agenda-perdida/
presidential platform for candidate Ciro Gomes but instead, together with Lisboa,
decided to “make a document that did not choose a party in the presidential dispute”
(Cariello, 2012). Embraced by Palocci, the agenda was implemented from 2003 to
2005 by economists sympathetic to its proposals who began to join the government,
such as Lisboa and Ricardo Paes de Barros, whose doctorate was obtained from the
University of Chicago and who would become known for designing the cash trans-
fer program Bolsa Família.
That was how, during Lula’s first term, the PT stopped being viewed as a threat
by the market (Patu, 2006) and started to enjoy approval levels similar to those of
Fernando Henrique Cardoso (FHC) in his first term. After 2 years in office, in
December 2004, Lula had a 54% approval rating, 40% of Brazilians rated his gov-
ernment as regular, and 13% disapproved of it. Those rates were practically identi-
cal to FHC’s at the same point, but 54% of Brazilians also said that Lula was doing
a better job. In spite of having received his lowest-yet approval rating of 35% in
August 2004, by the end of the year, Lula had recovered his popularity, especially
among Brazilians with college degrees, whose approval rose from 30% in August to
47% in December, and among Brazilians earning above ten times the minimum
wage, whose approval rose from 36 to 50% (Datafolha, 2004). Still, Lula’s growing
approval among these groups would suffer a strong jolt in June 2005 from a corrup-
tion scandal nicknamed the mensalão (“the big monthly”) in allusion to monthly
payments to lawmakers in exchange for supporting initiatives of interest to the exec-
utive branch.
The mensalão became one of the best-known corruption scandals to Brazilians,28
likely owing to its heavy mainstream media coverage, which was harsher than the
media coverage of past episodes (Miguel & Coutinho, 2007). The medicine the
press prescribed to contain the political crisis, especially punishments for those con-
sidered guilty, varied over the months of 2005. As the case unfolded, there were
continued waves of denunciations against the federal government. In the first wave,
in June 2005, presidential chief of staff José Dirceu resigned and months later had
his legislative mandate revoked. In March 2006, finance minister Antonio Palocci
resigned despite having become a key component for maintaining the government’s
economic policy (Miguel & Coutinho, 2007).
In addition to causing resignations of key PT government ministers, the scandal
impacted the party’s image and contributed to a rise in mistrust in the political sys-
tem among some Brazilians. Between 2002 and 2006, the party experienced a 16%
drop in polls about party identification (Paiva et al., 2007). The percentage of
Brazilians who named the PT among parties that “only think of themselves” rose
from 5 to 20, and the percentage of Brazilians who said the PT was the party with
the highest number of corrupt politicians rose from 4 to 27, making it the leader in
In an opinion survey carried out by the PT’s Perseu Abramo Foundation in 2006, 76% of the
28
population affirmed that the mensalão existed, which indicates low confidence in the party’s own
version of events regarding the scandal—that the financial transfers that were the original focus of
complaints were due to money that former party treasurer Delúbio Soares had failed to account for
(Venturi, 2006).
both categories in 2006. Previously, the PMDB and “all,” respectively, had led those
polls (Venturi, 2006).
In an article about Brazilians’ political opinions and party sentiment between
1990 and 2007, political scientist Yan Carreirão wrote that the end of that period
saw a generalized ideological dilution among more partisan voters. He argued that
it was mostly linked to more ideological PT voters drawing back from the party,
which many people believed had become indistinguishable from other parties when
it came to ethics after the mensalão scandal (Carreirão, 2007). This distancing may
be related to the 11% drop in the number of voters who said they felt represented by
a political party between 2002 and 2006, as well as the drop over the same period in
voters who said they liked any party, from 35% to 27%. Finally, the ethical devia-
tions attributed to the PT appear to have impacted party sentiments and confidence
in Congress, which declined in comparison with other institutions. Voters voiced a
rise in general discontent with the political system from 2002 to 2006, which made
it more difficult for them to distinguish between parties (Paiva et al., 2007).
It was precisely in the wake of the mensalão, in 2006, that the first movement
related to the new right was founded. Called the Rightward Brazil Movement
(MEB), it was formed primarily by young lawyers and led by Ricardo Salles, who
would later become environment minister in the Bolsonaro government. Its aim was
to carry out a campaign to impeach Lula because of the scandal. But according to
historian Rodrigo Neves, one of the group’s members, the idea did not take off
because of Brazil’s economic improvement at the time:
Rightward Brazil emerged in 2006 as a little club of right-wing lawyers, with one or two
engineers, one or two administrators. It was a group of Ricardo Salles’ friends. It was
Ricardo Salles and some friends from law schools, [the University of São Paulo’s] Largo
São Francisco, PUC [the Catholic University], Mackenzie, recent graduates who were
opposed to the PT and had been shocked by the mensalão. At the time, they started out with
an idea similar to the MBL [Free Brazil Movement, which would develop later]: “Let’s
build a mass movement.” They were all young, and they had the same perspective as the
MBL, at that time. But the project was too far at the vanguard for that period, because they
wanted to be the MBL during the era of the mensalão. Their idea was: let’s mobilize people
to get Lula impeached. But at the time, it didn’t take off, because it was 2006. Brazil was in
the middle of that hype of the economic bubble that the PT created, with everyone’s salary
going up artificially, and the economy growing in a frenetic bubble. It didn’t work.
Everybody knew that Lula had committed a crime and everybody knew that Lula was cor-
rupt and that the PT had bought votes, and nobody even cared. (Rocha, 2019, p. 117)
Like the Rightward Brazil members, most political analysts cited in the main-
stream media, as well as members of the political opposition, said that after the
mensalão, Lula would be out of play for the 2006 presidential election and that the
PSDB’s Geraldo Alckmin would be victorious. But Lula was reelected. One clue to
how this was possible lies in a study coordinated before the election by the PT’s
Perseu Abramo Foundation. The survey, published in Theory and Debate magazine
in the first semester of 2006, found that while the party had lost its reputation for
ethical integrity, the rate of Brazilians who considered it the party that was most
open to participation rose to 10%, and the rate that considered it the party that most
stood for social justice rose to 6%. The rate that ranked it the party that defended the
poorest rose 10%, reaching 57% (Venturini, 2006).
Another factor that positively impacted the PT’s image was its link to the figure
of Lula, who was becoming more predominant within the party (Paiva et al., 2007).
Even though the PT was becoming less distinguishable in terms of ethics, its other
attributes were emphasized. This helps explain Lula’s reelection, especially consid-
ering that in 2006, unlike in 2002, Lula’s victory was mainly based on votes from
poorer Brazilians (Balbachevsky & Holzhacker, 2007; Singer, 2012). According to
political scientist André Singer (2012), the change in electoral pattern in 2006
revealed a realignment in which the poorest voters shifted to politically and ideo-
logically support the platform headed by Lula, birthing a new phenomenon in
Brazilian politics: Lulism.
Lulism was defined as a political movement in which the then-president served
as a mediator of social and political conflict, combining measures that simultane-
ously benefited the poorest, through income transfers, and large capital holders,
through the maintenance of orthodox economic policies. That is, it fostered social
change without breaking with the socioeconomic order. In Singer’s view, it coin-
cided with an ideology of change among the poorest Brazilians, whom he called the
“subproletariat.”29 In this line of thinking, the appeal of Lula himself was stronger
than that of mere approval of the federal government at the time, triggering an elec-
toral realignment in which the subproletariat, which since 1989 mostly voted for
more conservative presidential candidates, shifted to vote for Lula and the candi-
dates he supported, while most of the middle and upper classes shifted to systemati-
cally vote for the opposition.
If the phenomenon of the “ashamed right” was still in effect during Lula’s first
term, it became even more pronounced after his reelection, as remembered by Fábio
Ostermann and Renan Santos, activists from what became the main movement of
the new right years later, the Free Brazil Movement (MBL):
People who are engaged today in spreading libertarian ideas have no idea what public opin-
ion was like years ago. I realized that I was a libertarian between 2004 and 2005, and I
remember very well how I felt at the time. Lula’s approval rating was something like 90%.
Even after the mensalão, he was able to get reelected. (Fábio Ostermann) (Rocha,
2019, p. 119)
Being on the right in 2004 in a university setting was a much bigger taboo than it is
today, especially considering that we were students of a law school [at the University of São
Paulo] that had been actively engaged in the fight against the military dictatorship. So we
tried to show that we were the right that made jokes, acting like independents, anarchists...
(Renan Santos) (Rocha and Vrydagh, 2018)30
29
The idea that the subproletariat was ideologically oriented based on “change within the order,”
that is, change that did not fundamentally alter the social order, was proposed by Singer (2000)
based on a compilation of various opinion surveys.
30
Interview conducted on November 21, 2016, by Fanny Vrydagh, Ph.D. in Political Science from
the Free University of Brussels.
Due to the “taboo” of right-wing identification, in the words of Renan Santos,

Rightward Brazil members were even advised to change their group’s name, as
being explicitly linked to the right in Brazil “left a bad impression.” With this in
mind, we could say that the height of Lulism, between 2006 and 2010, coincided
with the height of the ashamed right.31 Rightward Brazil chose not to change its
name, but in light of the failed push for Lula’s impeachment, its members opted to
restrict the circles in which they appeared and focus on active participation in cer-
tain digital forums, where they would be protected from skepticism they might
encounter with public exposure.
The Internet was a refuge for PT opponents, the right, and anyone who simply
did not feel represented by the Lulist bonanza. Feeling targeted in dominant publics,
these people found in digital realms a chance to sympathize and exchange ideas by
31
Even those who were not explicitly identified as right-wing had difficulty organizing anti-PT/
anti-Lula demonstrations amid the height of Lulism without being ridiculed in the public debate.
That was the case for leaders and supporters of the movement I Got Tired, created in 2007 after an
accident with a TAM airplane in order to protest what was viewed by its members as an “air chaos”
provoked by poor management from the PT government. The movement—which attracted nearly
5000 people to the Sé plaza in São Paulo, where they prayed the Lord’s Prayer, sang the national
anthem, and cried “Out with Lula” and “Lula is a thief, his place is in prison”—said it was nonpar-
tisan and peaceful, in spite of having threatened PSDB activists who unfurled party flags with cries
of “No flags,” “The PSDB is also guilty,” “Bums, opportunists,” and “Traitors of the people’s
conscience.” Led by employers’ unions and high-profile figures from the São Paulo elite, such as
businessman João Doria, who would later become São Paulo governor, and Luiz Flávio D’Urso of
the Brazilian Lawyers’ Association of São Paulo, and supported by artists such as Seu Jorge, who
criticized the country’s rulers and cited the mensalão, I Got Tired also included the participation of
six other civic entities: Citizen, Responsible, Informed, and Active (CRIA Brasil), Laugh to Not
Cry Campaign, House of Zezinho, SOS Atlantic Forest Foundation, Brazil Truth Institute, Rukha
Institute, and Movement Our São Paulo: Another City. However, because many of its members
belonged to the country’s elite, it quickly became an easy target for harsh criticism. Former São
Paulo governor Cláudio Lembo of the party Democrats (a new name given to the PFL in 2007) said
that I Got Tired was a movement of dondocas, slang for rich ladies who do not work. News portal
UOL, which sent reporters to cover the Sé plaza demonstration, critiqued it in the headline “‘I Got
Tired’ Movement Gathers Designer Brands and Cries of ‘Out With Lula’ at Sé.” The report empha-
sized that it had been “a different kind of protest, with photographers from the celebrity magazine
Faces, producers from the program TV Fame, Prada bags and Dior glasses for women, and blazers
with cufflinks, hair gel, and white collars for men,” saying also that the demonstration did not offer
transportation for family members of victims of the plane accident, who arrived late and were
blocked from going onstage. This information was also reported by Folha de São Paulo. Due to
countless similar critiques, the consul general of the United States in São Paulo, Thomas White,
who left his position in 2010, sent an official document to Washington on September 18, 2007,
which said that “interviewed by Veja magazine, João Doria Jr. complained that public opinion
discriminated against successful and rich people [...] and that his image of someone who never
smoked, drank, or used drugs, does not fight, does not swear, and uses hair gel makes it different
for common Brazilians to identify with his cause,” concluding that “[...] the leaders of the move-
ment, for all their sincerity and seriousness, became easy targets for caricature,” and that former
president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, in conversation with White, poked fun at the name of the
movement, saying that I Got Tired is not something that Martin Luther King Jr. would have chosen
to inspire his followers. By 2011, there were no more traces of I Got Tired, and the movement’s
webpage had been taken offline.
interacting on forums, blogs, sites, and online communities. The social network
Orkut, founded in 2004, was especially important. Among the Internet’s discursive
arenas, it became the principal space of development that would give rise to the new
Brazilian right.32
The first step in this direction had been in the late 1990s, with the 1998 creation
of the previously mentioned blog by writer and journalist Olavo de Carvalho,
Sapientiam Autem Non Vincit Malitia (Wisdom Is Not Defeated by Malice). Media
Without a Mask, the site Carvalho founded in 2002 with other critics of Marxism
and the Brazilian left, published articles by various authors about politics, econom-
ics, and philosophy, making Carvalho better known among Brazilian users of
Internet forums. At the dawn of Orkut in 2004, it was possible to find two communi-
ties formed by Carvalho’s readers and admirers, “Olavo de Carvalho” and “The
Philosophy of Olavo de Carvalho,” in addition to one made up by his detractors,
“Olavo de Carvalho hates us” renamed later “I hate Olavo de Carvalho.”
Initially geared toward Americans, Orkut became so popular in Brazil that in
September 2006, nearly 75% of its users were in the country (Fragoso, 2006), sig-
naling Brazilians’ early engagement with this type of social network in comparison
with other nationalities. But that did not mean all Brazilians could access Orkut. On
the contrary, between 2005 and 2007, during Orkut’s peak in Brazil, Internet access
in the country was restricted to groups formed mostly by highly educated adoles-
cents and young adults from the country’s top two socioeconomic tiers,33 located
primarily in the country’s South and Southeast, who had computers at home and/or
frequented paid access centers (lan houses and Internet cafés)34 and who used the
network mainly to communicate, to seek information, and for leisure. Orkut offered
these activities in a unified way.
On Orkut, communities could be formed around extremely diverse issues, with
users creating different conversation topics in which they interacted. Fake profiles
and anonymous accounts were not uncommon and contributed to discussions
32
Downey and Fenton (2003) predicted at the beginning of the twenty-first century that the rela-
tionship between radical political protest and Internet communication would become increasingly
relevant. They pioneered the argument that it would be wrong to focus attention only on training
and action within digital counterpublics of the left and ignore the construction of right-wing coun-
terpublics: they pointed to conservative dominance in the 1990s political chats, neo-Nazi sites, and
thousands of other radical right sites “constructed by individuals and groups who see themselves
as excluded from the mass-media public sphere and as engaging in counter-publicity” (Downey &
Fenton, 2003, p. 198). They wrote that some sites and online discussion groups were enclaves and
radical ghettos that allowed users to forego more moderate and balanced expression in mass media.
The Internet thus allowed the construction of counterpublics for radical groups on both the left and
right at practically no cost, offering a way for them to communicate with their supporters as well
as the potential to reach beyond the “radical ghetto.”
33
From classes A and B in a five-tier classification system. Between 2005 and 2007, these two tiers
accounted for less than 10% of the population, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography
and Statistics.
34
This and other more detailed information about Internet access in Brazil during this period was
published by the Management Committee of the Internet in Brazil and can be seen at http://www.
cetic.br/media/docs/publicacoes/10/pal2007ofid-11.pdf
developing in an extremely free-form and sometimes violent manner (Fragoso,

2006), analogous to what Angela Nagle (2017) describes with respect to American
alt-right forums. Orkut’s highly free environment attracted exactly those people
who did not feel represented in discussions occurring in dominant publics.
Furthermore, if people felt unrepresented in a certain Orkut community, they could
create their own new communities, as did philosophy professor Marcus Boeira dur-
ing this period. Boeira, who was then working toward a postgraduate certificate in
law, had spent time in the pro-market think tank circles in the 1990s, taken a course
from Olavo de Carvalho in Porto Alegre in the early 2000s, and wanted to distance
himself from the shallow and sometimes aggressive political analysis of communi-
ties where he initially participated:
When I moved to São Paulo, I already knew Alex Catharino, the CIEEP people, and it was
around the time that Orkut was born. With that opportunity, I created a group on Orkut
called “Ethics and Political Philosophy” that aimed precisely to establish debates about
controversial themes that would be reasonable debates within the limits of the tolerable
about certain topics that at the time were very minimized in the Brazilian academy and
cultural scene. At the time, it seemed to me like there was a much stronger Gramscian
hegemony than there is today. Today, we are more widespread, but not then. It was really
difficult. We were practically 20 people working in these areas, and the rest was practically
90 and then some percent of people saying the same thing. I remember the time, 2004 to
2005, when I and a friend started two communities. My community was “Ethics and
Political Philosophy” and this friend’s community was “Philosophy of Law and Ethics.”
When we started these two communities at the same time the idea was, without ideological
or theoretical dressage, to start from the point of view of an author, be it Olavo or anyone
else, so that we could submit the topics to a more rigorous debate. (Rocha, 2019, p. 122)
The “Gramscian hegemony” to which Boeira refers is related to an argument

developed by Olavo de Carvalho about a supposed Gramscian revolution captained
by leftist intellectuals and the PT. This appropriation of Gramscian theories of hege-
mony and counter-hegemony is not exclusive to Brazil’s new right. According to
Nagle (2017), “The French New Right or Nouvelle Droite adapted the theories of
Antonio Gramsci that political change follows cultural and social change.”
Subsequently, in the United States, the emergence of the alt-right in the early
twenty-first century brought together several alternative media sites and social
media celebrities that shared a hatred of the mainstream media. In this line of think-
ing, media such as The Guardian, the BBC, and CNN are criticized as spreaders of
so-called “cultural Marxism” (a notion that Brazil’s new right also adopted), and the
alt-right starts to introduce itself as a “new anti-establishment right.” Ironically,
although the new right criticizes Gramsci, their diagnosis—that mainstream media
is culturally dominated by the left—is inseparable from an equally Gramscian polit-
ical and cultural strategy of counter-hegemony, in which they aim to spread their
ideas through online alternative media, such as Breitbart, Infowars, and others.
Over time, Carvalho’s argument, which can be summarized in the claim that
there is a “leftist cultural hegemony,” spread on the Internet to a wider public in
Brazil, and a simplified version of it became the cornerstone of the new right’s dis-
course. An overview of the original argument can be found in the preface of the first
edition of The New Era and the Cultural Revolution: Fritjof Capra and Antonio
Gramsci, written in June 1994. It was the last year of Itamar Franco’s presidency
and shortly before Fernando Henrique Cardoso was elected to his first term:
[...] the intelligentsia in this country is going downhill, while at the same time, on the streets
and in the fields, a shadowy rumor is rising of a revolution on the march. Yes, Brazil is
unequivocally entering an atmosphere of communist revolution. [...] The generation that,
defeated by the military dictatorship, abandoned their dreams of taking power via the armed
struggle and silently dedicated themselves to revising their strategy, through the teachings
of Antonio Gramsci. What Gramsci taught was to give up overt radicalism to widen the
margin of alliances; it was to renounce the purity of visible ideological schemes to win
efficiency in the art of luring and jeopardizing; to retreat from direct political combat to the
more profound zone of psychological sabotage. With Gramsci, it learned that a revolution
of the mind should precede the political revolution; that it is more important to undermine
the cultural and moral bases of the adversary than to win votes, that an unconscious, uncom-
mitted collaborator, for whose actions the party can never be held responsible, is worth
more than a thousand enrolled party activists. [...] Leftist intellectuals’ conversion to the
strategy of Antonio Gramsci, formal or informal, conscious or unconscious, is the most
relevant fact in national History of the past 30 years. It is there, as well as in other concor-
dant and convergent factors, that the origin should be sought of the psychological mutations
of incalculable reach that launch Brazil into a clearly pre-revolutionary situation, that until
this moment only two observers, in addition to the author of this book, knew to flag, and for
that matter, very discreetly. [...] For some time, I nourished the foolish hope that the PT
would expel the Gramscian poison from itself and transform into the great socialist or labor
party that Brazil needs in order to offset, in defense of the interest of the small, the appar-
ently irreversible neoliberal advance in the world, and bring about, through the healthy play
of forces, the regular and harmonic movement of transfer of power that is the normal pulsa-
tion of the democratic organism. Moved by this illusion, I voted for Lula for president.
Today, I wouldn’t even vote for him for city councilor in São Bernardo. The fact is that,
through the succession of events since the impeachment campaign [in 1992 against presi-
dent Fernando Collor], the PT showed its vocation, surprisingly to me, of being a manipula-
tive and putschist party, capable of taking the country down the fraudulent road of the
Gramscian “passive revolution,” using the most cowardly and illicit methods—political
spying, psychological blackmail, the prostitution of culture, the boycott of remedial mea-
sures, the hysterical agitation that appeals to the lowest sentiments of the population—, and
through adorning this package of filth with a moralist discourse that smells of the sacristy.
[...] If the PT does this, it is because it lost its confidence in the majestic future which was
destined to our democracy in formation, and, excited by signs of a momentary success that
it fears it will never repeat again, it resolved to bet everything on the voracious and suicidal
game of “it’s now or never.” It no longer wants only to elect the president, govern well,
submit its performance to public judgement five years from now, to make History in its slow
and natural rhythm of the windmills of the gods: it wants to take power, carry out a
Revolution, dismantle the adversaries, expel those who could defeat it in future elections
from politics forever. [...] What matters is taking advantage of the moment, carrying for-
ward “Lulalá” [Lula’s slogan in the 1989 presidential election, which he lost to Fernando
Collor] at any price, carried on the shoulders of angry, insolent, and illiterate boys, and,
before the “passive consensus” of the population has time to evaluate what is happening, tie
the country irreversibly to the car bomb that rushes downhill on the road to Revolution.
(Carvalho, 1994)
According to Boeira, there were three main types of Orkut users who circulated
in communities dedicated to appreciating Carvalho’s work. The largest was a group
that consistently positioned itself against the left, especially in the more market vs.
more state debate, and included people ranging from anarcho-capitalists to
neoliberals. The second, more dispersed group supported more conservative posi-
tions, such as monarchy and the military regime. The third group, smaller and less
participative than the other two, was composed of Catholics. What united people in
all three groups, despite their differences, was their feeling of not being represented
in dominant publics that functioned based on the parameters of the 1988 pact. Those
dominant publics were perceived as being hegemonized by the left, as Carvalho
wrote. In Boeira’s words:
He said what everyone wanted to say to the journalists, university professors, people from
media outlets, people who worked at NGOs, et cetera. [...] He said everything that a lot of
people wanted to say and did not have a voice. So he, in a way, channeled all of these voices.
Because he could access space in Folha de São Paulo, he could access space in [newspaper]
Zero Hora, he wrote in the big newspapers, he wrote in magazines, he participated in televi-
sion programs, gave interviews on [television channel] GNT, to [talk show host] Pedro Bial,
and things like that. So he was a voice that channeled many voices that were scattered
across Brazil, but that were not organized, you could say. It seemed to me like his success
was due to that at the time, and, of course, that doesn’t even begin to talk about the intel-
lectual brilliance he has, and that is undeniable. A really impressive person, from that point
of view. (Rocha, 2019, pp. 124–125)
Boeira’s perception about right-wing people’s isolation and lack of representa-

tion in some dominant publics of the period—especially in humanity circles within
academia, book publishers, and the mainstream media—was shared by other visi-
tors to the Orkut forums. Free marketeers, who Boeira said were the most predomi-
nant visitors to Orkut groups devoted to Carvalho, also had their own communities
where they exchanged and translated writing that practically did not circulate in
university environments at the time. Examples of these free marketeers were Cibele
Bastos and Rodrigo Constantino, members of the Rio de Janeiro Liberal Institute
(IL-RJ), and Filipe Celeti and Joel Fonseca, who wanted to create the Brazilian
Libertarian Party (Líber), which was never formally registered. They all recall those
early experiences in Orkut communities:
In 2005, I was in the second semester of an economics degree, and there was a course called
“Evolution of Social Movements,” which was basically Marxism I and Marxism II. So I
chose to do a seminar on neoliberalism, and in the complementary booklist there was a
book by Hayek, The Road to Serfdom. That changed my path, and I started to want to
deepen my knowledge a little more. Then, in the era of Orkut, I started to enter communities
about liberalism and exchange ideas with the people there. People swapped material [...]
There were a lot of people, at the time, who were translating things that didn’t exist in
Brazil, a lot of articles. (Cibele Bastos) (Rocha, 2019, p. 125)
In the last year of college, I started to discover this new universe that, in a way, didn’t
show its face here in Brazil. The majority of the writing was in English, so it was difficult
to access the information. And that period [2005–2006] was a moment when, due to peo-
ple’s interest, several movements started to occur to translate the work on their own. Several
people set up blogs to translate shorter pieces, articles. So this necessity of sharing ideas
that we didn’t have in Portuguese was boiling up a little, and this is what brought people
together: “Look, we’re going to share these ideas, because we need this.” Even more so with
Orkut. You typed the name of the author that you found and there were communities there
with 20 or 30 people. Most of them were not people from Brazil, [but] the Brazilians were
trying to invade these spaces also in order to dialogue. So Orkut, with its communities,
made possible the encounters among people, the exchange of information, and it fostered a
big debate too about the ideas. (Filipe Celeti) (Rocha, 2019, pp. 125–126)
I went to work in the financial sector and I had a boss who was a well-known liberal in
Brazil, Paulo Guedes, with a Ph.D. from Chicago. And he started to really give me some
tips, “Look, read this thing here, you’ll like it,” and this thing here was the Austrian School.
So I discovered Mises, Hayek, those guys, really early. So I started, in parallel, working in
the financial sector, which already is a conducive environment to confronting socialist
ideas, [...] to go opening my horizon to theoretical readings, and with this, at 20,
20-something years old, I was already a liberal who was, let’s say, radical. And I always
liked a good controversy too, right? [...] I created some email groups and sent around con-
troversies or things that I wanted to combat that I had read in the newspaper. So I had this
need to debate, but I didn’t have very much feedback from my friends. So when I discov-
ered Orkut and these communities where everyone spent the day debating, for me this was
a big help, and I really had unending debates there. It was an impactful time. I loved this
back-and-forth, all those controversies, I loved it. And at the same time, this trained me in
terms of debate. Orkut was really a life learning experience. Debating turned me on. I was
turned on defending the ideas that I believed in, which was liberalism, and I found echoes.
I found people ready to debate. (Rodrigo Constantino) (Rocha, 2019, p. 126)
In high school, I was already a little more liberal than the rest of the class, but without
many points of reference, and at college I discovered the American Mises Institute, and
from there I got to know Mises’ work, which I think is even better than the activist dimen-
sion that all of this took. And I started to become really interested. A group of friends also
became very interested, and thanks to social media, Orkut at the time, I could meet more
people who also participated in the communities “True Liberalism,” “Capitalism versus
Socialism,” various discussion communities. And I think that they did have a role of putting
people in touch who individually knew some points of reference. (Joel Fonseca) (Rocha,
2019, p. 127)
In the words of Bernardo Santoro of Rio de Janeiro, a frequent participant in

online pro-market debates, “[...] we were having a discussion, and someone turned
around and quickly saw that everyone there was very radical. Everyone there was
more libertarian than liberal, strictly speaking” (Rocha, 2019, p. 127). It was exactly
this radical nature—the defense of libertarianism, known in Brazil as ultraliberalism
because it stood for more market freedom than did neoliberalism—that led the dis-
cussants of Orkut’s liberal communities to identify with each other and elect the
Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises as their main symbol. Mises is the Austrian
economist considered to be the most radical by free-market capitalists, such that if
Hayek and Friedman usually are classified as neoliberals and “Chicago-ists,” Mises
can be considered a libertarian (Doherty, 2009) or, in the pejorative term used by his
colleagues, a “paleoliberal,” that is, a Jurassic liberal, for defending nineteenth-
century laissez-faire policies (Boas & Gans-Morse, 2009).
In Brazil, references to the intellectual legacy of Mises usually occur when
defending ideas summarized by the slogans “less Marx, more Mises,” “tax is rob-
bery,” “there is no such thing as a free lunch,” and “privatize everything!” Olavo de
Carvalho considers Mises his intellectual guru, which also helped spread the econo-
mist’s ideas through the country,35 considering the discussions in the counterpublics
35
The description text of Episode 78 of the Mises Institute Brazil podcast, featuring Carvalho,
reads “In a recent past, many liberals and libertarians arrived at Mises’ work, especially at the book
that gave rise to Brazil’s new right, above all on Orkut. The ultraliberals, as well as
regular visitors to Carvalho-focused communities, were not represented in domi-
nant publics, where defense of free-market logic was mostly carried out by neolib-
erals36 (Guiot, 2006) who were more or less aligned with the PSDB.
The PSDB, founded at the time of Brazil’s Constitutional Congress (1987–1988),
was considered the PT’s main opposition at the start of the century and has a more
pro-market orientation than its rival. But the Orkut groups considered the PSDB a
leftist party that did not defend “true” free-market capitalism, a view also held by
the older generation of visitors to the pro-market think tanks founded in the 1980s
and 1990s. Even in neoliberal circles, Brazilian ultraliberals considered themselves
unrepresented between 2005 and 2006, when the ultraliberal Orkut communities
were created. Although think tanks like the Liberal Institute had worked to spread
Mises’s writing in Brazil, ultraliberalism was still a minority political ideology, vir-
tually nonexistent in the country until that point.
In addition to this, a significant number of the Orkut users linked to the emerging
new right attended public universities, where organized student activism was indeed
hegemonized by the left at the time. It did not take long for them to agree with some
of Carvalho’s ideas based on their own college experiences, which they felt were
characterized by exclusion and silencing (Rocha, 2019). Fernando Fernandes and
Luan Sperandio described this dynamic during their time as public university stu-
dents in the states of Rio de Janeiro and Espírito Santo, respectively:
Human Action, through the praiseful references in the writing of philosopher Olavo de Carvalho.
On his site, for some time, Mises has been part of a selected gallery of men of ideas identified as
his intellectual gurus (‘It is after you read Mises that you perceive how other economists are con-
fused’). In a 1998 article in the now-extinct magazine Republic, Olavo affirmed that Mises might
be the most philosophical economist that ever existed” (Garschagen, 2013).
36
The third way is a denomination created by British sociologist Anthony Giddens to designate a
position of “radical center” that implies “an attempt to demonstrate that the values dearest to the
left have some ‘validity’ in contemporary post-industrial society” (Power, 2010). Giddens consid-
ered the third way a form of modernizing European social democracy, because “even in its most
developed forms, the welfare state was never genuinely good. All of the social welfare states cre-
ated problems of dependency, moral hazard, bureaucracy, the formation of interest groups, and
fraud” (Giddens 2001 apud Guiot, 2006, p. 58). Giddens understood “moral hazard” as “a greater
tendency to request social assistance, more absences from work for alleged health reasons, and a
lower level of job search” (Idem ibidem); thus, “the new social contract, which links rights to
responsibilities, should be based on a reformed welfare system [...] that should offer help, not char-
ity” (Giddens 2001 apud Guiot, 2006, p. 61). Despite supporting a downsizing of the State to
remedy this “diagnosis” and claiming that neoliberal reforms were necessary for modernization,
Giddens wrote that “the third way identifies and aims to correct neoliberalism’s ‘Achilles heel,’”
which is the fact that the results of market deregulation seriously threatened “social cohesion,”
through a partnership between the State and civil society (Guiot, 2006, p. 59). This partnership
would imply “the replacement of the State, both in the production of public goods and services and
in the provision of social services [...], it is in this sense that the importance of the so-called ‘third
sector’ [of NGOs] arises, which has the role of substituting the welfare commanded by the State in
the direction of a ‘society of welfare’ in which civil society organizations would have a central role
in social service provision” (Idem, p. 62).
During college, we formed a group of five friends, and one thing was very clear. Four of the
five were not Marxists. Soon [...] through articles on the internet, I was introduced to Olavo
de Carvalho too. And that was when my vision of the world kind of opened. People didn’t
feel represented and started to draw away. It was a group of people that was silenced in the
decision-making process. The student movement did not care about welcoming them in. It
preferred that they stay out of decision making, because they were divergent. We were able
to discuss and promote debate, but we were not organized. Even though there was a large
group of supporters, actively we had five guys. (Fernando Fernandes, personal communica-
tion, 2017)
The discourse of intolerance exists. It’s very strong. People look at you with a lot of
prejudice without ever having spoken to you. People don’t care about debating. There is a
very strong myth that in the academy, you can discuss ideas. Last week, a professor who
taught me two years ago, in 2014, deleted me from his social media. He was a PT supporter,
a socialist, defended Cuba, criticized Aécio [Neves, 2014 PSDB presidential candidate] in
all of his classes, and I always respected him academically. It’s really sad to see this. I have
a lot of childhood friends who deleted me and I sincerely do not know why. Because as
much as people can disagree with me, as socialist as they might be, I don’t see them as
people who defend a certain ideology. I see them as individuals who deserve respect as
such. I’m in a federal university and studying there is very difficult, because you’re only
there wanting to learn, study, and debate ideas, but people don’t see it that way. They think
you should not be there because you disagree with them. (Luan Sperandio, personal com-
munication, 2016)
With time, the idea that there was a “leftist hegemony” in the country gained
more followers among the emerging new right, as pointed out by economist Joel
Fonseca and journalist and Liberal Institute director Lucas Berlanza:
A lot of people were influenced by him [Olavo de Carvalho]. Many liberals today have
profiles that are much more right-wing than left-wing, and he has a big part in influencing
this. I don’t have the smallest doubt.
Interviewer: What do you think is the main theme, where he influenced people more in
terms of content?
The thing about the leftist hegemony, about creating this combative instrument, I think
there’s a lot that is his there. Maybe it wasn’t just him, but I think he helped to foster this.
Without this kind of belief, maybe there would not be this excitement about growing and
doing things. Maybe, on a more practical level, a more important thing was this vision of
“we are a closed-off minority, somewhat educated, without representation, we have to fight
to go there, and everything.” (Joel Fonseca) (Rocha, 2019, p. 133)
Some voices, and me too, in spite of the disagreements that eventually appeared, recog-
nize Olavo de Carvalho as one of the first sources of concepts that everyone uses today.
They’re on people’s lips, but the person who first emphasized them and exposed their pro-
paganda was Olavo de Carvalho. He was the one who made these concepts popular.
Interviewer: Which concepts, for example?
For example, the simple knowledge that the São Paulo Forum exists. Olavo was not the
first one to say that it existed, but he was the first, in my understanding, to take that knowl-
edge to the public about the importance of that institution, about the general design of poli-
tics, in ideological and structural terms, in Latin America. The person who brought this to
more popular knowledge was Olavo de Carvalho. People sometimes want to say “Ah, it
doesn’t have anything to do with him,” but they use these ideas. I, personally, do not deny
that these ideas started to truly spread with him. He was one of the first people to have these
ideas. They were taken up by some groups of intellectuals, especially among young people,
who were open to encountering a different bibliography than what they had before. (Lucas
Berlanza) (Rocha, 2019, p. 133)
As the notion of a “leftist hegemony” spread, the emerging new right also spread
a counter-hegemonic discursive strategy to combat it: the politics of shock, or coun-
terpublicity. Counterpublicity is a mode of address that is necessarily disruptive,
indecorous, and shocking that seeks to call attention to and amplify certain counter-
discourses that oppose a supposedly dominant cultural horizon. This shock politics
is used in discursive arenas called counterpublics, given their radical opposition to
dominant publics. The counterpublics question the premise of a supposedly univer-
sal rational-critical language that structures certain publics as dominant
(Warner, 2002).
In the Orkut communities dedicated to Carvalho’s work, users often expressed
themselves in an aggressive way and used acid humor and exaggeration. This can be
seen in the following excerpts from posts in the community “Olavo de Carvalho,”
which contain criticism of the “leftist cultural hegemony” users claimed was present
in schools, in the media, and even on the collaborative site organized by Carvalho,
Media Without a Mask (MSM):
MSM yields to Newspeak and leftism
Sérgio Marcondes – October 29, 2004
MSM yields to Newspeak and leftism
Not even in the formerly uncontaminated Media Without a Mask do we have a refuge
from the terrible Gramscian intellectuals and their rhetorical distortions. An article was
published there talking about hunger, poverty, social exclusion, social inequality, problems
of capitalism. [...] How is this possible? I expect indignant protests from the members of
this community against an evidently leftist article that taints MSM! After so many members
here have said that concepts like “social inequality” are part of Newspeak, and the world is
increasingly better with capitalism, this cannot go unmentioned!
Fernando Chiocca37 – October 29, 2004
[...] I didn’t think that article was yielding to leftists and Newspeak. It’s more that it cites
existing problems in the world. I don’t know...the world is increasingly better with capital-
ism, but capitalism is increasingly less present in the world. It’s obvious that this would
result in catastrophic problems. (Rocha, 2019, p. 128)
Brainwashing in schools
Breno Toledo – May 10, 2005
[...] Marxists, the owners of the truth, every day gain more control of education and the
media. [...] That’s how our country, from north to south, has a powerful Marxist army doing
brainwashing on young Brazilians. [...] The applause for the illustrious Hugo Chavez came
from drugged people, lunatics, and failures who went to the communist MECCA [World
Social Forum] to experience a kind of Brazilian Woodstock where no one belongs to any-
one, Coca-Cola cannot be served, the main appetizer is marijuana and advertising paid for
by a private bank. (Rocha, 2019, p. 129)
The new 7 p.m. novela: one more communist show
Antonio Luiz Ribeiro – January 6, 2010
The new 7 p.m. novela [soap opera]: one more communist show. The person who wrote
it is that guy Brosco Brasil.
G.B. Schmitt – January 7, 2010
The last novela that I looked at was KING OF CATTLE. Look, that served as an argu-
ment in favor of the MST [Landless Workers’ Movement].
Fernando Chiocca was a founding member of the Mises Institute Brazil (IMB) and of the
37
Libertarian Party (Líber) in 2007.

[...]
DORIAN ## – January 7, 2010
Bosco José Fernando Lopes Rebello da Fonseca Brasil
I haven’t researched it, but from the size of the little girl’s name, he is probably a dad-
dy’s boy from some traditional family, maybe related to bankers, whose “high sensitivity”
kept him from taking over his daddy’s business. Because it wouldn’t work, he decided to be
a communist. It’s the same profile as Walter Salles, Buza Ferraz, Fernando Cardoso.
(Rocha, 2019, p. 129)
While violent expressions were not uncommon in Orkut groups, the typical kind
of performativity of the discourses in the “Olavo de Carvalho” community was
similar to Carvalho’s own positioning on his blog and on forums and social media.
In 2009, Carvalho responded to a reader:
[...] A good swear word shot in public at the face of a Tarso Genro, a Marco Aurélio Garcia
[both high-ranking Lula administration officials], is worth more than 1,000 constructive
words shot into the wind. [...] Brazil, at the moment, does not need good ideas, it needs
action that is vigorous, unrelenting, opposed to the empire of evil, lies, and stupidity. [...]
When nothing is done against evil, the defense of the good turns into mere disengage-
ment—the affable and passive form of a lie on which evil sustains itself. (Carvalho, 2009)
Carvalho’s articles and comments online routinely used expletives and aggres-
sive and caustic discourse, especially against his adversaries. In 2006, Carvalho said
he was directly inspired by the police reporter Luiz Carlos Alborghetti,38 who had
an active Orkut community called “Alborghetti/Prison Without Censorship” where
he used profanity and crude expressions to defend the return of the military regime
and anti-corruption measures that included shooting politicians and drug traffickers
(“put them up against a wall”).
According to Carvalho, vulgarities and an aggressive approach should be used
consciously and are justified for the following reasons:
THE USE OF SWEAR WORDS
==================
I use these swear words because they are NECESSARY.
They are necessary in the Brazilian context in order to demolish this polished language
that is a straightjacket that traps people, obliging us to respect what does not deserve
respect.
So, sometimes, when you disagree with someone, but disagree respectfully, you are giv-
ing him more strength than if you agreed with him. Because you are going against his idea,
but you are reinforcing his authority. Authority is respectability.
The problem with these people, these thugs that I’m talking about, is not their ideas. It
is precisely the fact that they are scumbags.
They are scumbags, they are thugs, they are thieves.
G-O F-U-C-K Y-O-U-R-S-E-L-V-E-S!
(Media Without a Mask, September 2, 2013)39
38
“[...] The only language which is still suitable for talking about this country and the people who
inhabit it is that of police reporter Luiz Carlos Alborghetti, an admirable guy, but, unfortunately for
me, impossible to imitate” (Carvalho, 2006).
39
Post from August 25, 2015, on Carvalho’s public Facebook profile, in which he refers to a post
that was originally published on Media Without a Mask on September 2, 2013. Accessible at
h t t p s : / / w w w . f a c e b o o k . c o m / c a r v a l h o . o l a v o /
posts/o-uso-do-palavr%C3%A3oeu-uso-esses-palavr%C3%B5es-porque-s%C3%A3o-
necess%C3%A1rios-s%C3%A3o-necess%C3%A1rios-n/535327239952688/
In Carvalho’s view, the use of polished language that is conventionally understood

as more correct reinforced the authority and respectability of his adversaries. Thus,
he was disinterested in debating ideas and consciously chose to use unconventional,
disruptive language that emphasized the performative character of discourse to the
detriment of rational-critical argument, viewed as more legitimate in dominant
publics.
A deeper discussion on this topic is developed in Arthur Schopenhauer’s book
The Art of Being Right: 38 Ways to Win an Argument, the Brazilian version of which
has a Critical Introduction and Supplementary Comments written by Carvalho. The
book is a sarcastic catalog of (pseudo-)argumentative methods for winning a discus-
sion at any cost. In Carvalho’s understanding, Brazilian readers can appropriate this
“eristic dialectic” to protect their beliefs against the culturally hegemonic left’s rhe-
torical and discursive strategies, which he describes as false, malicious, and dishon-
est and mere “gibberish and trickery.” In this sense, the translation of Schopenhauer’s
book could serve not only to clarify or vindicate this pseudo-argument but also to
denounce it, especially when targeting a certain group of thinkers (Schopenhauer
was aiming his critiques at Hegel and Hegelians; Carvalho at leftist and Marxist
intellectuals). Carvalho also wrote that there was a line of continuity between Hegel,
Marx, Lenin, the critical theories of the Frankfurt School, and Gramsci, who aimed
to carry out a revolution “through subtle persuasion of all of society,” a Machiavellian
strategy with rhetorical and psychological processes that repeat, “on a monstrously
amplified scale, the stunts denounced in this book by Schopenhauer” (Carvalho, 1999).
Two elements, however, complicate Carvalho’s self-understanding. In the first
place, Carvalho’s normative horizon is not rational-critical argument but rather a
call for protecting intimate, traditional beliefs against the pressures of the public
sphere, a posture that appears very skeptical toward any kind of public debate
whatsoever:
Having inverted the natural and just hierarchy, making public opinion—queen of gibberish—
the judge of human interiority, is perhaps the original sin of contemporary culture, where
each man is obligated, by external pressure, to erase from his heart all that is not confirmed
by the chattering of his neighbors [...]. (Carvalho, 1999)
Carvalho practically equates the public sphere with an original sin of modernity.
His traditionalism (Teitelbaum, 2020), opposed to the public sphere, seeks to pre-
serve what he calls the “primacy of interiority”: supposed private truths of the heart.
If public debate has only false and catastrophic consequences, if public argumenta-
tion leads nowhere and truth is only that which the heart intuits as sincere, how
legitimate is Carvalho’s own strategy of participation in the Brazilian public debate,
supposedly oriented by the eristic dialectic and hegemonized by a dishonest and
mal-intentioned left?
This leads to the second point: the public discourse practiced by Carvalho fol-
lows exactly the strategies that he and Schopenhauer aim to denounce rather than
reproduce, especially strategies number 8 (infuriate the adversary by treating him
with insolence and disrespect so that he cannot think straight), number 27 (provoke
the adversary’s anger using arguments that leave him upset, hitting his weak spot),
and number 38 (the final strategy, which says that if the adversary is superior, the
object of discussion must be abandoned in favor of ad hominem attacks, including
rudeness and personal insults and offenses).40
If, on the one hand, Carvalho’s adherence to counterpublicity and aggressiveness
toward his adversaries made it difficult for him to attract institutional financing
between the late 1990s and early 2000s, on the other hand, his adoption of that
rhetoric was crucial for the nascent new right. It was above all through Carvalho’s
influence and through the growing use of counterpublicity that debates within mar-
ginal publics—forums dedicated to conservative and/or ultraliberal perspectives on
philosophy and economics with a predominantly rational-critical discursive style—
could amplify their reach, as right-wing counterpublics took shape on and off the
Internet.
Carvalho’s influence extended beyond just shaping the positions of activists and
supporters of what would become the new right. His site Media Without A Mask
opened space for other voices to express themselves and eventually become, like
him, writers in traditional media outlets. Such was the case of Rodrigo Constantino:
Already, in this era of Orkut debates, I started to write things that were a little longer, that
were more or less in the format of an article. [Then] I went to an event that was related to
politics, organized by the Federalist Party. They had an Orkut page and Thomas Korontai41
[leader of the Federalist movement] was there. A friend of mine said “Man, let’s go there,
to Rio,” and I said, “Let’s go.” I met Thomas. We went to dinner afterward, and I liked him,
and at this launch event I met a guy called Heitor de Paula, who is a pretty radical psychia-
trist, linked to Olavo de Carvalho and company, and he told me about Media Without a
Mask, which [until then] I [only] knew by name. And I said, “Hey, I write some anti-
communist pieces,” and he said, “Woah, want to send them to us?” I said, “I’ll send them.”
40
The American communication studies scholar Whitney Phillips considers this Schopenhauer
book a blueprint for modern trolling, as it was recommended by one of the trolls with whom she
interacted in her field research. In her words: “Most trollishly, Schopenhauer urges his readers to
push against any and all resistance, since anger almost always indicates insecurity and therefore
argumentative weakness. The goal is to aim for the lowest possible personal blows, not just in rela-
tion to an opponent’s argument but in relation to his person, family, friends, income, race, or any-
thing that might appeal to what Schopenhauer calls the ‘virtues of the body, or to mere animalism.’
Regarding this last tip, perhaps the sharpest tool in the rhetorician’s arsenal, Schopenhauer warns
that an opponent is likely to respond in kind and begin hurling his own insults. If and when that
happens, one must remind one’s opponent that personal insults have no place in a rational discus-
sion and request that he or she consider the issue at hand—at which point one may return to one’s
own insults and prevarications” (Phillips, 2015, Chap. 7). Given Carvalho’s importance to the
semantics and rhetoric of the new Brazilian right and his pioneering role in the Brazilian reception
of this book by Schopenhauer, it is not surprising that the cultural logic of trolling—initially politi-
cally mobilized by the US alt-right—has found a home in the Bolsonaro government (about the
controversy surrounding Bolsonaro’s former secretary of culture, who flirted with Goebbels’s Nazi
aesthetic and discourse to the sound of a Wagner opera, cf. the analysis of Nunes, 2020).
41
In 1996, Thomas Korontai, a leader of the Federalist Movement of Curitiba, started to make
efforts to found the Federalist Party, which was registered in a notary’s office in 1999 but has still
not been made official at Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court (TSE). The main aim of the Federalist
Party is “the reduction of interferences of the Central Power in people’s lives and in autonomic
state and municipal structures, independent of the regime or system of government.” For more
information, see http://www.federalista.org.br/index.php
I sent the first, which I remember to this day. It was “Flight of the Chicken,” the first piece
that I published that was a little more official, which was for Media Without a Mask, about
Brazil’s bonanza. This was maybe in the beginning of the PT [government]. And I remem-
ber an email that he sent me, saying, “The chicken flew,” that is, it was published. It was my
first piece for Media Without a Mask. And then I published more, in the format of articles,
on Media Without a Mask, and an editor of a magazine from the state of Minas Gerais called
Just Read asked permission to use some of my writing in a book of an author of theirs,
called Le Grand, which was a pseudonym. The name of the book was Utopia of Brazil. And
then I said to him, “OK, you can use the excerpts, but I have a lot of writing that I’ve already
done. If you want, we could publish a book of mine.” He said “Woah, it’s OK by me.’
Prisoners of Liberty [published in 2004] was born, which was my first book, a collection of
articles, a lot of them from Media Without a Mask. (Rocha, 2019, p. 134)
In the middle of the 2000s, around the time that Constantino published his first
book, some small publishers began to take interest in releasing titles related to right-
wing ideas, as translator Márcia Xavier de Brito recalled:
Edson [Jr.] was arriving in Brazil, wanting to open a publishing house to do something for
Brazilian culture, and he launched It Is Achievements. I was at Olavo’s house when I saw
the publisher’s first logo. At the time, Olavo was more “cultural” [in the early 2000s]. Edson
was kind of financing Olavo, who suggested one thing or another and gave “It Is” its really
reactionary tone at that first moment. It was exactly at the phase when Olavo was turning
anti-left. But Edson thought, “No. It’s not this that I want.” He wanted a focus, not neces-
sarily conservative, but a focus that was more academic and different, that had not yet come
to Brazil, a lot of stuff that we could call right-wing. So he started to buy a lot of stuff along
those lines.
Interviewer: This was more or less when?
2005, 2006, around then. He started to buy slowly, to abandon this radicalism of books
“against-against-against,” “the left is evil,” he kind of stopped with this. He started to dis-
cover those Brazilian philosophers that Olavo [publicized] and Edson got in touch and
brought [books from Russell] Kirk, right? So an [admirer of Carvalho] called César Kim
created Vide Editorial, and when Olavo left [publisher] It Is, [he became] Olavo’s editor.
And then César started to enter this little world. His wife did a course with us. There is a
whole background connection in the sense of how these people got to know each other.
(Rocha, 2019, p. 135)
It Is Achievements published several books by authors that Carvalho referenced

in his work, such as Roger Scruton, Eric Voegelin, Theodore Dalrymple, and
Christopher Dawson, which were among the publisher’s bestsellers as of late 2020.42
Vide Editorial, in addition to publishing Scruton and Voegelin, also started to release
titles that were more explicitly critical of Marxism and communism, such as The
Leftist Mind, the Psychological Causes of Political Madness, The True Che Guevara,
The Black Book of Communism, and Marxism Unmasked, as well as publishing
books by Brazilian right-wing authors.43 During this period, the outline emerged of
a small editorial circuit, populated increasingly by some members of old pro-market
think tanks, such as Xavier de Toledo, and of counterpublics of the nascent new
right, such as Carvalho and Constantino.
42
See https://www.erealizacoes.com.br/mais-vendidos
43
See https://videeditorial.com.br/index.php?route=product/category&path=9&limit=36
2.3 The Institutionalization of the Nascent New Right 43
Even so, in spite of Carvalho’s growing popularity in these spaces and online, his
followers were unsuccessful in formally organizing themselves, and Carvalho’s
own measures to publicize his ideas were intermittent.44 The activities in the coun-
terpublics would spread to wider audiences by other means: through the actions of
ultraliberal activists who, beginning in 2006, created new civil organizations, study
groups, and electoral slates for student government, as well as seeking out the cir-
cuits of the old pro-market think tanks.
2.3 The Institutionalization of the Nascent New Right
Actions by members of the counterpublics gained more sustainability as new orga-

nizations, more connected with the type of engagement that occurred on Orkut,
were founded. Hélio Beltrão Jr. and Rodrigo Constantino, active participants in the
Orkut debates who already had contact with important figures in previously existing
pro-market organizations,45 participated in the founding of the Institute of National
Reality in 2005, soon renamed the Millennium Institute. It was publicly launched in
2006 at the Liberty Forum, according to Constantino:
Paulo Guedes, who was my boss at my previous job, called me, “Rodrigo, I have something
here that I think you will like, from an Institute linked to the people there in the South [of
Brazil] that I know you already know, the IEE, wanting to do the same thing in Rio. Want
to go?” I said, “Definitely.” I went to an event at the university, that was there on the Lagoon,
in Rio de Janeiro [...] It was [with] Patrícia Carlos de Andrade,46 and they didn’t know very
well what they were going to do. The original idea was to replicate IEE, [to create] the
Institute of Business Studies in Rio. But at this meeting, which I attended without really
knowing what [was going] to come of it, they said, “Who is interested in supporting, in
taking the lead, of an idea like this?” and I was the first to raise my hand and say, “I’m in.”
And then Paulo Guedes even joked. He told Patrícia: “I said that I was bringing the right
guy.” And then I went, “What are we going to do?” Because in Rio, we thought that it
44
In 2008, a proposal to create a virtual conservative forum was announced in the “Olavo de
Carvalho” community, and in 2010 an Olavo de Carvalho Institute was created. However, the
Institute only lasted for a short while, and its activities ended in 2012, after 2 years and 7 months,
as announced by Emanoel de Araújo in the community “Olavo de Carvalho.” In 2012, the trans-
mission of Carvalho’s podcast “True Outspeak” by the site Blog Talk Radio also came to an end.
45
Hélio Beltrão is the son of the former planning minister of the same name who ran in the circles
formed around the Rio de Janeiro Liberal Institute, according to an interview with Arthur Chagas
Diniz, who was vice president of the Institute for 20 years. Constantino worked in the financial
sector under the direction of Paulo Guedes, a University of Chicago-trained economist who in the
1990s had drawn up a platform for the Liberal Front Party (renamed Democrats in 2007) with col-
leagues including Paulo Rabello de Castro, the founder of the Atlantic Institute.
46
Economist Patrícia Carlos de Andrade was one of the main founders of the Institute of National
Reality. At the time, according to a source interviewed by Camila Rocha, she was a reader of Olavo
de Carvalho’s work. She is the daughter of journalist Evandro Carlos de Andrade, who served as
editorial director of newspaper O Globo for 24 years and on the editorial council of Globo Group.
In June 1995, he became director of the Globo Center for Journalism, as can be seen at http://
memoriaglobo.globo.com/perfis/talentos/evandro-carlos-de-andrade.htm
wouldn’t catch on, at the beginning, this thing of meeting every Monday to debate ideas
with business owners. And from there, a project emerged that is much more in the style of
the Millennium Institute. So I’m a founding member of the Millennium Institute, because I
was there at that meeting. (Rocha, 2019, p. 137)
Initially conceived as an affiliate of the Institute of Business Studies,47 the

Millennium Institute (IMIL) was founded by a group of academics, executives, and
other professionals, among them university professor Denis Rosenfield and econo-
mists Patrícia Carlos de Andrade, Gustavo Franco, and Paulo Guedes (whom Jair
Bolsonaro introduced as Brazil’s future economy minister a year before he was
elected president—cf. Caleiro, 2017). The institute aimed to spread pro-market
ideas to a wider audience and was financed by several business groups and large
media organizations, including the Abril Group, Globo Organizations, the Ultra
Group, the Gerdau Group, and the Évora Group (Silveira, 2013). However, like
similar organizations in the past, IMIL did not totally meet the desires of those in
the Orkut communities, who called for a more radical free-market capitalism. They,
in turn, made efforts to found new organizations that could better represent them.
For his part, Hélio Beltrão Jr. claimed it was necessary to have a utopian horizon
so that he could win more people over to the causes he defended. He said that it was
necessary to win hearts and minds, going beyond mere participation in complex
public policy discussions. According to Beltrão, the idea that market logic is always
the best solution to any social or economic problem because it is morally superior
was much more simple, coherent, and easily understandable than excessively tech-
nical discussions with neoliberal intellectuals and technocrats. Imbued with that
purpose, on June 2, 2006, he created what became one of the main forums for dis-
cussing economic liberalism on Orkut, the community “(True) Liberalism,” where
47
During this period, new affiliates of IEE were founded in other Brazilian states; however they
soon began to act autonomously from the main office in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, as recounted
in the IEE commemorative E-Book released in 2014: “The first opportunity occurred in 2005.
After participating in an IEE event [University-Business Forum], the then-president of [car rental
company] Localiza, Salim Mattar, wanted to take the model to the state of Minas Gerais. In 2006,
after more than 20 years of existence, IEE opened its doors outside of Rio Grande do Sul. Breaking
with tradition, the first Liberty Forum outside of Porto Alegre was held in the city of Curitiba. That
same year, after a lecture for members, the São Paulo businessman David Feffer also showed inter-
est in taking IEE to São Paulo, which occurred in 2007. In 2009, there were two chapters. The one
in Belo Horizonte, already well structured, and the one in São Paulo, still organizing itself. In the
subsequent years, they grew, and the first Liberty Forum happened in the capital of Minas Gerais.
At this point, the chapters already were preparing to act independently. Linked to IEE, they would
have to preserve everything that had been constructed over the years in the capital of Rio Grande
do Sul and would have less autonomy. In addition, with time, it became difficult for the IEE direc-
tors in Porto Alegre to administer them. All of this resulted in the independence of the chapters in
São Paulo and Belo Horizonte. They adopted the name Institute of Leader Formation (IFL) and
they remained important partners of IEE, sharing the same values and principles, in addition to the
priority of leadership training. Reference is due, as well, to Leaders of Tomorrow, an institute cre-
ated in 2011, in Espírito Santo, which established itself very quickly, consolidating the importance
of supporting liberty and of training people. IEE in Rio Grande do Sul was a kind of benchmarking
for the young people of Vitória, who created their own model, absolutely autonomous” (IEE,
2014, p. 53).
he called for the establishment of a new think tank inspired by the Mises Institute in
the United States.48 In 2007, only a year after the creation of the digital community,
the Mises Institute Brazil (IMB) was born with the help of brothers Cristiano and
Fernando Chiocca,49 who were among the community’s most active members. It
was the first ultraliberal think tank in the country, and Beltrão became its chair. In
its first years, IMB had neither a headquarters nor paid staff; it was a webpage fed
by contributions from members of the Orkut communities, forums, and blogs who
were eager to spread their ideas to a wider public. Beltrão thought this was excel-
lent, as it avoided the risk of the organization employing people who did not truly
believe in the causes it defended.
Beltrão argued that there were two big ideological currents competing for hege-
mony in Brazilian society, namely, social democracy and neoliberalism. The first
included the positions of economists, such as Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira and Luiz
Gonzaga Belluzzo, who supported state enterprises; industrial policy; import tariffs;
active exchange rate policy; state banks such as the National Bank for Economic
and Social Development (BNDES), Banco do Brasil, and Caixa Econômica Federal;
government support for companies understood to be “national champions”; public
pensions; unemployment insurance; labor laws; and income redistribution policies.
The second current, neoliberalism, included the ideas of economists, such as Marcos
Lisboa, Armínio Fraga, Pérsio Arida, and Samuel Pessoa.
Ultraliberalism, according to Beltrão, differentiates itself from neoliberalism by
calling for the abolition of several policies and institutions that neoliberals support,
such as the government’s monopoly on issuing money, the Central Bank, an active
monetary policy, organs that protect competition (antitrust measures), state regula-
tory agencies, state investment in essential infrastructure such as roads and ports,
public basic health and education, minimum income policies, and alignment of laws
and taxes between states. In addition, some ultraliberals also call for a liberalizing
approach to social mores, such as permission for common citizens to carry guns,
abortion, same-sex marriage, illegal substances like marijuana, and liberalization of
patents and copyrights, without any state regulation.50 Between 2006 and 2010,
these positions led to significant tensions with the conservatives who ran in pro-
market circles. Still, despite their differences, the conservatives united with the
ultraliberals to defend the free market and to oppose the leftism perceived as char-
acteristic of the pact of 1988. Eventually, some of them were able to advance
48
Founded in 1982 by Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., with the help of Margit von Mises, Murray
N. Rothbard, Henry Hazlitt, and Ron Paul, the Mises Institute defends an order based on “a free-
market capitalist economy and a private-property order that rejects taxation, monetary debase-
ment, and a coercive state monopoly of protective services.” For more information, see https://
mises.org/about-mises/what-is-the-mises-Institute
49
A few years after IMB was founded, the Chiocca brothers stopped being part of the Institute,
mainly for ideological and strategic reasons, and decided to found their own organization in 2015,
the Rothbard Institute.
50
It is important to note that there are also many disagreements among ultraliberals, given the vari-
ous strains that all radically defend the free market but have significant differences from each other.
specific initiatives related to their own agendas. Such was the case of Joel Fonseca,
who was identified as Catholic and took more conservative positions in the late
2000s, but later minimized his emphasis on religion and took a more liberalizing
point of view when it came to social mores.
In 2008, while a philosophy student at the University of São Paulo, Fonseca
formed a study group about Plato where the idea of publishing the magazine Dicta
& Contradicta emerged:
I published a magazine with a more conservative profile called Dicta&Contradicta. It had
ten issues. There was literature, philosophy. It was more directed toward philosophy and
less toward discussing the political agenda of the day. Initially, we started with a group
about Plato that we formed. [...] [We had] a concern of restoring, a little bit, the high-level
cultural discussion in Brazil, which wasn’t academic, but also wasn’t low-level, vulgar. We
wanted to recuperate the idea of a public that reads, that is cultured, intelligent, to elevate
the debate. I wrote and thought with college-educated people in mind, a little more oriented
toward the area of humanities, but trying to also reach people from the sciences, or those
who were also interested in those themes, people who wanted more cultural information in
their lives. That was the idea. (Rocha, 2019, p. 140)
Like Fonseca, other college students in the nascent new right formed study
groups. The largest at the time was founded in the city of Fortaleza and dubbed
“Dragon of the Sea,” as mentioned by Cibele Bastos:
In our little Orkut group, in these communities, I got in touch with some guys from
Fortaleza. One of them had just entered the economics program at the Federal University of
Ceará (UFC), Raduán Melo, [and the other was] Bruno Aguiar, and the [last one] was Jeová,
who was studying law, but at UNIFOR, a private university in Fortaleza. Then we [thought]:
“Hey, Fortaleza,” and so on, “Let’s get together, let’s make a group.” Because we didn’t
have the knowledge. Funny, right? I didn’t know where to look for things. And we put
together the study group, the Dragon of the Sea study group, in 2008, and our first focus was
on [the book] Human Action by Mises. (Rocha, 2019, p. 141)
In addition to forming study groups at their respective colleges, Fonseca, from

São Paulo, and Bastos, from Ceará—as well as people across Brazil—were able
through Orkut to participate in a bold collective initiative that was born on the social
network: an attempt to found an ultraliberal Brazilian political party inspired by the
U.S. Libertarian Party.51 Its name, Líber, was an abbreviation for “libertarian”:
Brazilian Libertarian Party – Help found it
Alex – February 12, 2007
For those who don’t know, a project is ongoing to create a political party that represents
us. The first step for the founding of this new political group is to get 101 founders in nine
states. At the time this message was posted, 35 names are still needed. Stop complaining
about the leftists and move into action! Participate! (Rocha, 2019, p. 142)
Two years after the announcement on Orkut, Líber had an official site, a plat-
form, Twitter and Facebook accounts, and 500 members who paid annual dues of
100 Brazilian reais (around $50 at the time). But its members had immense
Founded in 1971 by David Nolan in the US state of Colorado, the Libertarian Party exclusively
51
defends libertarian ideas.

difficulties gathering the 500,000 signatures required for it to be officially regis-

tered, according to Cibele Bastos:
We formed a study group in 2008 and one more person joined, Maris, who was more linked
to the political aspect. He participated in the founding of the Libertarian Party and then we
became a cell of Líber there in Fortaleza. I remember that we always had strategy meetings
to collect signatures to officialize the party. We spent from 2008 to 2012 on that extremely
gradual work, signing up people on Orkut, trying to attract people to the study groups. We
didn’t have money, right, it was a bunch of students doing things paid out of their own
pocket. (Rocha, 2019, p. 142)
Because Líber emerged from Orkut and its members were mostly college stu-
dents and professionals who lacked the money and expertise needed to found a
party, even with nuclei spread throughout the country, the initiative did not prosper.
Nor did its activists feel comfortable participating in other Brazilian parties, accord-
ing to Líber’s first president, Juliano Torres of Minas Gerais. At the time, Torres was
a journalism and public relations student and defined himself as anarcho-capitalist:
A few of them tried to enter DEM [Democrats, the name the PFL took beginning in 2007],
but they stayed for less than a month. There was no freedom. The statutes were very closed.
They guarantee power to certain groups. The model of the parties is very centralized in the
national leadership. We could have been expelled. When we defended an idea that was
against the party platform, the ethics commission could have expelled us. And I think that
they would have expelled us. Our methods are moderate, but the ends are radical. (Torres
apud Jelin, 2009)
Still, the Líber activists created important bonds of friendship during this attempt
to create a party, which played a significant role in the institutionalization of the
counterpublics that was in course, as Filipe Celeti explains:
There was a lot of discussion, which led to the point where people met up, in an assembly,
to approve the platform and the statute. So it was several years of gathering people, raising
money, gathering ideas, formalizing this. Overall, due to Brazilian law, it is very difficult to
found a party. A lot of people didn’t even want to formalize it. They wanted to have an
organization that acted politically, but not necessarily a political party that participated in
elections, exactly because a lot of people didn’t even agree with elections. But this got a lot
of people together and various regional groups formed because of this, mainly in São Paulo,
Rio, Belo Horizonte. Those cities had a lot of people who attended. Here in São Paulo,
generally we met up at a café on Paulista [Avenue] for discussions. Some people got to
know us at the café, hearing us debate about politics, and ended up joining the group. And
one friend would bring another, and share an article, bringing more, and adding to the
group. [Most were] entrepreneurs, professionals, law students, economics students, people,
for example, from the tech sector, programmers, web designers, people from this autono-
mous professional universe, and people who were a little bit more revolted with politics,
with more of a punk profile. I was the São Paulo coordinator, and I was active until last year
[2015], and we would have meetings monthly here in São Paulo, generally a happy hour,
and so forth. So on a weekday, at night, we’d get the group together to chat, discuss issues,
discuss projects, discuss participating in something. This meeting always had a little of that.
In a way, what keeps us together is this relationship of friendship that was formed over the
years. (Rocha, 2019, pp. 143–144)
The online and offline meetings aimed at founding a new party led to a series of
other new initiatives. YouTube videos and channels were created, as well as new
communities on social media and new pages dedicated to spreading the activists’
ideas, attracting increasingly more people to their causes. As IMIL and IMB con-
solidated, members of the emerging new right also sought out older Brazilian and
international pro-market organizations, such as the Liberal Institute, the Institute of
Business Studies, and their affiliates, the Institute of Leader Formation,52 the
Friedrich Naumann Foundation,53 the Foundation for Economic Freedom, Atlas
Network, and the Cato Institute. This helped them reach new levels of exposition
and support and the ability to act more continuously. As an example, Rodrigo
Constantino began writing a weekly column for the newspaper O Globo between
2009 and 2010 and increasingly dedicated himself to activism. Fábio Ostermann, a
regular on the digital forums, made contact with US pro-market think tanks and
started to act more organically in defense of the free market:
The Millennium Institute was born, and I started to become closer to the founders, among
them, the Marinho family, of Globo. They put me in a showcase, so I went from Facebook
to something where people from the media were watching, and then I received, one beauti-
ful day, a call: “Rodrigo, I’m the editor of [newspaper] O Globo, how would it be for you
to write some columns for us?” I said, “Man. Marvelous.” So things started happening. I
was an activist for the liberal cause on the instruments that were available. Orkut, then
Facebook, then the Millennium Institute, lectures appeared at IEE, in Porto Alegre, and
things started to happen. One thing led to another, and I was more and more in the limelight.
I was invited to more and more things, based on something that had been a hobby. Until the
day that I made the decision. I talked to them and said “Look, I want to live off of this. Let’s
make this viable.” And I went 100% to activities of liberal activism. (Rodrigo Constantino)
(Rocha, 2019, p. 144)
I was always online looking up things, and in 2007 the Free Order site emerged, which
was the Cato Institute’s Portuguese language platform for spreading liberal ideas. From
there I went, in the middle of 2008, to two seminars, one organized by Cato and the other
by FEE, the Foundation for Economic Education. I met people who were starting to orga-
nize themselves in the U.S. under the name Students for Liberty. When I returned, I had
deeper contact with Students for Liberty, and I was an intern for Free Order for two and half
months through an internship program called the Koch Summer Fellow Program.54 (Fábio
Ostermann) (Rocha, 2019, p. 145)
52
For more information about the Brazilian pro-market organizations founded in the 1980s and the
1990s, cf. Gros (2002), Casimiro (2011), and Rocha (2017).
53
The Friedrich Naumann foundation, a German organization founded in the 1950s to spread eco-
nomic liberalism, since 1992 has kept an office in São Paulo from which it acts together with the
main Brazilian liberal think tanks, such as the Liberal Institute, the Institute of Business Studies,
and the Millennium Institute, promoting and financing activities to spread pro-market ideas in civil
society. See http://brasil.fnst.org/
54
Libertarian oil billionaires David and Charles G. Koch’s actions alongside the main US pro-
market organizations and the Republican Party are public and notorious (Doherty, 2009; Moraes,
2015; Skocpol & Hertel-Fernandez, 2016). Charles Koch financed and helped structure several
pro-market think tanks in his country mainly during the 1970s and the 1980s. They included the
Cato Institute, created in 1977 with libertarian activist Ed Crane and which included Murray
Rothbard, a well-known libertarian intellectual, and Sam Husbands Jr., a businessman who partici-
pated in the Reagan administration. As of late 2020, Cato worked in conjunction with Atlas
Network, founded in 1981 in the United States with the goal of facilitating more than 400 pro-
market think tanks across the world (Rocha, 2015). It is the eighth-most important think tank in the
Based on the Free Order platform, which was linked to the Cato Institute,
Ostermann helped create the Free Order Institute in Brazil in 2009. That same year,
the Institute facilitated a lecture series called Liberty on the Highway which was
financed by Localiza Group55 and took place at universities across Brazil. In its first
five editions, Liberty on the Highway held events at almost 50 universities in 30
cities, connecting pro-market activists across the country even more, according to
Cibele Bastos:
In 2009, we started to be more active, because there was a project from Free Order, in Rio
Grande do Sul, called Liberty on the Highway. The idea was to do lectures across Brazil, in
each state capital, carrying out lectures about economic liberalism, and [then] they got in
touch for us to organize Liberty on the Highway in Fortaleza, in 2009. That was when we
organized the first liberal event here, and it was really cool. When we started to organize
Liberty on the Highway, we organized it as Líber Ceará. The event was at the School of
Economics, and its organizer was Lucas Mafaldo, who is from Rio Grande do Norte. He
had this idea of traversing Brazil. He said that he got a car and was traversing Brazil. There
was even a considerable audience. We filmed it and everything. But in 2010, we repeated it,
but it didn’t work out. There was not as big of an audience at UFC [the Federal University
of Ceará], but there was a successful audience at another college [because] we did it at
another time of day. (Rocha, 2019, p. 146)
Between 2009 and 2010, in addition to organizing lectures for the Liberty on the
Highway project and study groups, the university students active in the Orkut com-
munities, such as Rodrigo Neves, Lourival de Souza, and Fernando Fernandes, also
started to mount electoral slates to dispute leadership positions in student govern-
ment. They aimed to compete with leftists in the student movement:
I launched the ticket Reconquest [in 2009 as part of the leadership elections for the
University of São Paulo’s (USP) student government]. It wasn’t a clearly right-wing pro-
posal, it was just an anti-strike proposal. We won the election. We had something like 700
more votes than the ticket from the PSOL [Socialism and Liberty Party], [but] there was a
fraud orchestrated by the majority of the academic centers [smaller student unions corre-
sponding to individual courses of study] which were linked to the PSOL, in which they
contested some key polling places where we had won. And I, through Reconquest, started
[in 2010] a ticket called Liberty USP, which was a right-wing, conservative political
group.56 And I started to post writing on the internet. I had a series of online discussions.
Interviewer: Where did you publish your writing?
Orkut, everything via Orkut. Sometimes I published documentaries from Media Without
a Mask, sometimes I would send a blog link to one colleague or another. I even had a blog.
I got to the point where I wrote an article for the Rightward Brazil site, which no longer
exists today.
United States, according to the index Global To Go Think Tanks 2014 developed by the University
of Pennsylvania. For more information on the activities of the Koch brothers, cf. Doherty (2009).
55
Salim Mattar, who is from the state of Minas Gerais and owns Localiza Group, and the Ling
family, owners of Évora Holding, are said by ultraliberal activists to be their main financiers.
56
According to Rodrigo Neves, in an interview with journalist Reinaldo Azevedo, “since 2009 the
USP Liberty Movement maintains contact with the [group] Liberty UnB [University of Brasília],
and, since 2010, there is an alliance between the two groups, characterized by mutual support in
opposition to the partyfication of the student movement and by exchanging experiences and infor-
mation” (Azevedo, 2011).
Do you remember which communities you frequented?

“I’m right-wing, So what?” which was one of the biggest ones. The Olavo de Carvalho
community. There was a joke group called “Marx, Hegel, my ass.” That group was really
funny. I went straight there to post parodies of Marxism. I literally created a fake [profile]
and [thought], “Today I am going to simulate Trotskyism.” I went and wrote something
Trotskyist that contradicted itself in order to stimulate people to understand how idiotic that
was. Incidentally, during that period I met Flávio Morgenstern,57 who was the creator of that
page. (Rodrigo Neves) (Rocha, 2019, pp. 146–147)
At that time, a tool that started to get very famous was Orkut. Orkut introduced the pos-
sibility for people beyond just [elected] student representatives to take a position. People
who could previously only take a position in the context of a debate or student government
meeting, in an election, could now constantly give their opinions. At that time, you could
start to get to know the original groups, the Olavo de Carvalho community, the Liberalism
Community. I didn’t even participate in the Olavo de Carvalho community. I think I partici-
pated in the Liberalism Community, the first one, I’m old-school like that. But anyway, I
didn’t discuss politics too much on Orkut because I thought it was very tedious. As I’m kind
of old-fashioned, I prefer to be in the corridors, eye to eye, speaking to people. I got to the
point of participating in an election for student government, and I was successful. I was
elected in 2010. Part of the ticket was people linked to the PCdoB [Communist Party of
Brazil], [so I] kept my prudence, kind of Winston Churchill, aware that I was the minority
in there. (Lourival de Souza) (Rocha, 2019, pp. 147–148)
I got to know some friends who mentioned Olavo and also Rodrigo Constantino to me.
So I started to read some of their writing, and we discussed it. We started to read the bibli-
ographies, not just what they recommended, but things that were our own initiative. I think
I started to have contact with this around 2009 and 2010, which also coincided with my
getting involved in politics at college. As soon as I saw that there was a single discourse, and
as I was getting to know these other guys, we started to be more confrontational. “No, but
wait, this here is wrong,” or, “Wait up, you’re speaking in the name of the student move-
ment, but the decisions are not being presented to the students.” You see that people don’t
feel represented, and they start to withdraw. After we went to Facebook, there started to be
debates. Before, it was [on] Orkut, and you had X number of people who did not agree with
a certain type of thinking, whether it was in terms of ideology, or pragmatic terms. It was a
group of people who were totally alienated in the decision-making process.
Interviewer: And then how did you guys deal with it? Did you create your own ticket to
run for student government?
We created a ticket, we made a ticket. There were lots of supporters, but there were only
five people who really organized it. It’s impossible to mount a strong electoral dispute with
five people without money, right? It was funny, because we passed around a sack [for dona-
tions] and it was a huge cost, a huge difficulty to get money to make some black-and-white
material, really basic, and all of a sudden you looked to the side and there was a guy with a
super material, in color, huge type, with a bunch of stickers. And then [you thought], “Man,
where did they get the money for that?” (Fernando Fernandes) (Rocha, 2019, pp. 148–149)
Aiming to provide more organizational support to the study groups and student
government slates that were forming, Juliano Torres, who had served as Líber’s first
57
Flávio Morgenstern was a literature student at the University of São Paulo, where he was part of
the “Reaction” ticket alongside Rodrigo Neves, in 2011, running for leadership of student govern-
ment. A reader of Olavo de Carvalho, currently he is a political analyst, speaker, and translator. He
writes for newspaper Gazeta do Povo, as well as sites like The Tease, Uncommon Sense, and the
sites of the Millennium Institute and the Liberal Institute. His first book published with Record was
Behind the Mask, about the 2013 protests. See more at https://www.institutoliberal.org.br/autor/
flavio-morgenstern/
president, assumed the presidency of an organization that had been created in 2009
by Fábio Ostermann. Called “Students for Liberty” in Portuguese, abbreviated
EPL,58 it was inspired by the US organization of the same name, according to
Ostermann:
During the July 2008 holidays, I went to FEE’s Freedom University and got to know people
who were starting to get organized over there in the United States under the name Students
for Liberty, and I met Alexander McCobin, who was the president of Students for Liberty.
They said they had recently done their first national meeting and everything, that it had
snowed, and they said, “Come to New York,” and even so, they were able to gather, like, 50
people from so many states. So I thought: “Man, interesting, I think in Brazil we need
something like this.” So I returned here, and I mentioned it to everyone, and they said:
“Man, cool, cool,” but it didn’t end up evolving. [...] In January 2012, I went to participate
in Free Order’s first summer seminar. At this seminar, the participants were divided into
groups based on theme. One group was going to talk about ways to develop liberal thought
in the academy, another about how to develop it in the press, another in politics through
political parties, and another via student activism. I went to the student activism group.
With me were Juliano Torres and Pedro Menezes, and I said, “EPL is a cool idea, but it
needs people to organize it, are you available?” And Juliano, who had recently left the presi-
dency of Líber, decided to lead it. And I became president of the advisory council. At the
time, I was at the end of my directorship of IEE and I had been invited by Free Order to be
the manager of operations here in Brazil. (Rocha, 2019, p. 149)
With EPL’s founding, the spread of pro-market ideas within universities became
more institutionalized. By 2018, EPL had carried out 650 events in public and pri-
vate universities and created around 200 study groups. In 2014, it had 600 volunteer
leaders,59 such as Luan Sperandio, Cibele Bastos, and Gabriel Menegale, who began
to coordinate the organization’s activities in their respective states:
In the mid-2010s I was reading several books, mostly by Luiz Felipe Pondé, and later, I
participated in the Liberty and Democracy Forum in Vitória, in October 2013. Paulo Guedes
and Rodrigo Constantino were speakers. What they said about economic liberty made a lot
of sense to me, as I was already in the process of becoming liberal. At that event, I bought
some books from the Mises Institute Brazil, and I started to study. In the first semester of
2014, I started to write frequently for the [site of the] Liberal Institute, and, in the middle of
August, the network Students for Liberty (Brazil) was trying to organize here and we ended
up creating the Domingos Martins group, which is the largest group of liberal studies here
in the state of Espírito Santo. (Luan Sperandio) (Rocha, 2019, p. 150)
In the middle of 2012, Raduán said: “Look here, there was a Free Order winter seminar
in Petrópolis, and they created an institution called Students for Liberty (Brazil). The idea
is to create a network of students, with local nuclei, and I said that they could count on us.”
Because the first study group in Brazil, like, in institutional terms, was ours. And then
Raduán [said]: “You’ll carry out this idea, right?” and me: “What do you mean, I’ll carry it
out?” “Yeah, you’ll coordinate it,” [and] I [responded], “OK.” Then, they got in touch with
me, and I became the local coordinator of EPL in Fortaleza. (Cibele Bastos) (Rocha,
2019, p. 150)
Although I was a super novice liberal, EPL had a goal of dissemination, and Juliano is
a guy who chooses the right people. At the time, I was in a vibe of the youth wing of the
party [Democrats]. I was up for it. And for me, it was a really good experience in several
58
Henceforth referred to as Students for Liberty (Brazil) or EPL
59
Information from the site http://www.epl.org.br/sobre/, accessed February 2, 2018.
aspects. I hadn’t met him [Juliano Torres] in person, and the first mission was to organize
an event in Rio, if I’m not mistaken, in April 2013. When I assumed the state coordination
of EPL, that’s when I got to know a lot of people. At the conference that we organized here
in Rio, 50 people came, [and as] I had dealt a lot with creating websites for a long time, at
the time, we also created the EPL site. We had an event in April at the Millennium building.
There, I met Juliano in person. (Gabriel Menegale) (Rocha 2019, pp. 150–151)
While former Líber president Juliano Torres became a well-known leader among
ultraliberals through EPL, a subsequent Líber president, Bernardo Santoro, began to
stand out in pro-market circles. In 2012, Santoro ran for Rio de Janeiro city council
as part of the Social Liberal Party (PSL), earning 1200 votes. Despite not being
elected, the candidacy attracted attention, and Santoro was invited to be part of the
Rio de Janeiro Liberal Institute:
In 2012, I was invited to be Director of Institutional Relations of the Rio de Janeiro Liberal
Institute. The IL was dying, and I was a guy who knew everyone in all of Brazil from the
point of view of the liberal world. I knew everyone from the Institute of Business Studies,
from the Institute of Leader Formation, from the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, from the
ongoing attempts to form liberal parties, the NEW Party,60 the Federalist Party,61 Líber. I
was the president of Líber at the time. [...] My first event as president was a Friedrich
Naumann Foundation event that gathered everyone from liberal institutes in Brazil to have
a chat, to do a workshop about how to raise money and all that. And so I went as a represen-
tative of the Liberal Institute, and I presented a restructuring plan for the Liberal Institute.
Everyone thought it was the best, but no one gave a cent. Later, I presented that plan to local
businesspeople in Rio de Janeiro, and to Rodrigo Constantino, and he liked it. Afterward,
there was another liberal event in Rio Grande do Sul [Liberty Forum], and he brought the
plan, spoke with some more people, and came back to me and said: “Bernardo, the plan is
approved. We have funds.” So I left my job. I had passed an exam to be a legal advisor at the
Development Agency of the State of Rio de Janeiro, and I went to the Institute. [Afterwards]
a close friend of mine, who also knew everyone, became the new Director of Institutional
Relations, Fábio Ostermann. (Rocha, 2019, pp. 151–152)
In 2013, the Rio de Janeiro Liberal Institute officially transferred its directorship
from Arthur Chagas Diniz to Bernardo Santoro. Rodrigo Constantino became the
organization’s president. From that point on, Santoro began to bring people he knew
from Líber, the Orkut communities, and other recently founded organizations to the
Institute, such as Fábio Ostermann, Gabriel Menegale, and Cibele Bastos. In a
departure from the centralized operating style of the first Brazilian pro-market think
tanks, the new organizations formed beginning in 2006, with the exception of the
Millennium Institute, started to operate in a more horizontal and decentralized
way.62 In part, this is because most lacked physical headquarters, more than two
60
The NEW Party’s main leader is João Amoêdo, a former executive from the financial sector who
ran for president of Brazil in 2018. The party was founded in February 2011 and officially regis-
tered in September 2015. It stands for a liberalizing platform based on more autonomy and liberty
for individuals and reduction of the areas of state activity. For more information see https://novo.
org.br/partido/quem-somos/
61
See note 44.
62
So much so that in 2015, the need was felt to create a device linking the organizations and
groups, the Freedom Network, presided over by lawyer Rodrigo Saraiva Marinho.
employees, and significant funding. They were normally created by professionals,

small and medium-sized business owners, or even college students. As such, the
founding of new liberal institutes in other cities, such as São Paulo and Fortaleza,
did not follow a centralized model and occurred in a more autonomous and sponta-
neous way than the style of precursors in the 1980s, according to Bernardo Santoro
and Rodrigo Saraiva Marinho:
Now, the Liberal Institutes started to blossom again, in a totally autonomous way, not linked
to the IL-RJ. [Before it was] really centralized. There was even a Council of Liberal
Institutes. Now the Institutes are there, autonomous, free, light, and loose. Today, we have
an organization that we call the libertarian network, which is just a way to help with com-
munication, but without any management, just through the internet. [...] I don’t know how
much money a guy is raising, what he spends it on, where his headquarters is. Sometimes I
don’t know, if people ask me, where the Liberal Institute of the Central-West is. I’ll say: “I
don’t know, I’ve never been.” (Bernardo Santoro) (Rocha, 2019, pp. 152–153)
They [the old think tanks] were centralized. That is, Hélio’s idea of a starfish that grows
several arms, goes, and works independently, is the big advantage of this third-generation
movement. They think a lot like a starfish. Like, the Liberal Institute of the Northeast, when
I created it, people called me crazy at the time, and it worked out, you know? It’s a strong
and consolidated brand today, but at the time, it was craziness. It was done completely
independently of any kind of big center. The Mises [Institute] didn’t arrive and say: “We’re
going to start the Liberal Institute [of the Northeast],” nor did IEE. No one. That did not
happen. Before, the ILs were formed as if they were branches of IL Rio, and Donald was
really rich, so people built homes, structures, they backed them, they published them. But
it’s really expensive to maintain structures. So much so that the Liberal Institute of the
Northeast was in my office. The Mises Institute is in Hélio’s office. The big advantage of
the IL is that the IL published a lot, so much that it has various copyrights, some of which
were bought by the Mises [Institute]. There are two problems with this earlier generation,
the centralization of the Rio de Janeiro Liberal Institute and of the Liberal Movement of São
Paulo, which was very criticized at the time because it shifted to being Social Democrat. As
the PSDB in São Paulo was very strong, you had strong influence from the São Paulo
PSDB. And the people from Rio Grande do Sul said: “The Liberal Institute of São Paulo is
no good, because it’s a Social Democrat Institute.” And with the money running out, this
generation dies with their centralization, which is a serious problem that you will have in
the IFL [Institute of Leader Formation] later, right, because of the centralization of spend-
ing and the centralization of content. Because IEE builds chapters, but it does not allow
people to grow. They break with this idea of thinking in a decentralized way and permitting
the free market of ideas to truly function and each one to establish themself with their local
position, which is the great advantage of today’s liberal movement. (Rodrigo Saraiva
Marinho) (Rocha, 2019, p. 153)
To describe the work of today’s network of liberal organizations, Hélio Beltrão

Jr., as ILIN founder Rodrigo Saraiva Marinho pointed out, aptly refers to the meta-
phor of a starfish. With an extremely high capacity for regeneration, a starfish can
lose one of its “arms”, and not only can it grow it back, but also the separated “arm”
can spontaneously generate another starfish. Contrary to the pro-market think tanks
that existed before the mid-2000s, which centralized their actions around specific
businesspeople and depended on them in order to function—well illustrated by the
effect of Donald Stewart Jr.’s death on the Liberal Institute’s decline—today, activ-
ists organize in a decentralized way and can mobilize without high initial costs,
making intensive use of their networks on and off the Internet.
This decentralized organization style is not unprofessional, on the contrary. The

activists who first became involved through the counterpublics professionalized
themselves through political education courses and specific training offered by US
organizations, such as Atlas Network and Cato, among others. They also began to
adopt forms of intervening in the public sphere that are completely different from
those of previous generations of free-marketeers, such as protests and street demon-
strations aimed at winning everyday people’s hearts and minds, paving the way for
actions beyond the Internet and opinion-shaping roles in public policy discussions.
References
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Chapter 3
The Conservative Reaction and the June
2013 Revolts
The new right that began to take shape during Lula’s second term, between 2006
and 2010, found fertile ground on which to flourish during his successor Dilma
Rousseff’s first term, between 2011 and 2014. It was during this period that the
deepening of a post-bourgeois public sphere in Brazil, begun with the pact of 1988,
profoundly impacted public opinion. In 2011, the National Truth Commission was
established to investigate crimes committed by the State during the military dicta-
torship, and in the same year, the Supreme Court (STF) recognized same-sex civil
unions. The following year, the Court approved the right to abortion in cases of fetal
anencephaly and ruled that racial quotas for affirmative action in public universities
were constitutional. In 2013, a constitutional amendment widened the labor rights
of domestic workers, and in 2014 came the “Spanking Law,” which prohibited the
use of corporal punishment and cruel and degrading treatment of children and
adolescents.
Those measures, perceived by conservatives as a “progressive shock,” resulted
from the institutionalization of demands amid Brazil’s redemocratization and from
the development of a post-bourgeois public sphere in the country. Here, it is impor-
tant to note that with “bourgeois,” we are referring not to social class alone but
rather to an intersectional meaning that includes class, race, gender, sexuality, and
age. After all, who were the central participants in the previous model of the public
sphere? Bourgeois meant not only someone who came from the social class of prop-
erty owners but also someone who had cultural capital (an education) and a certain
race (white), gender (male), sexuality (heterosexual) (Fraser, 1997), and age (adult).
As such, the “progressive shock” simultaneously represented the growth and radi-
calization of a post-bourgeois public sphere in Brazil.1
1
It is possible to interpret through an intersectional approach the “progressive shock” as evidence
of part of the population’s repressed demand for a strong reformism, substituting what political
scientist André Singer (2012) called the weak reformism provided by Lulism.

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79653-2_3
60 3 The Conservative Reaction and the June 2013 Revolts
The tension resulting from clashes between progressives and conservatives soon
gave rise to a new cycle of protests in the country, beginning in 2011. Over the
years, conservative reactions were fueled by cultural collectives’ disruptive perfor-
mances online and in public spaces and, later, by democratic anti-corruption
demands that grew within society at large, especially after June 2013. However, this
does not mean that a turn to the right was an inevitable consequence of the protest
cycle, or of the June 2013 protests in particular. Rather, it resulted from the political
system and its leaders’ inability to respond to the demands of the streets. The dis-
connect between institutional politics and society triggered a profound political cri-
sis that later, together with the conservative reaction in course, served as a trampoline
for the rise of the new right and of far-right congressman Jair Messias Bolsonaro.
With this scenario in view, we divide this chapter into two sections: the first ana-
lyzes the “progressive shock” and the conservative reaction, and the second ana-
lyzes the anti-corruption demands and the June 2013 protests.
3.1 The “Progressive Shock” and the Conservative Reaction
During the Lula government (2003–2010), the nascent new right was pervaded
by a “liberal-libertarian hegemony,” in the words of Rodrigo Neves from Rightward
Brazil. This likely occurred because the conservatives were less successful at orga-
nizing themselves in civil society than were the young free marketeers. Thus, a
1980s-era trend of conservatives seeking out the circuits formed by pro-market
organizations and think tanks continued, as Neves described:
I arrived at the Liberty Forum already having a reputation of being conservative, being a
guy from Rightward Brazil, being a guy who had started the conservative movement at
USP. People would talk to me, and I talked more about conservatism. So on the first day of
the Forum, I was already mister conservative. Actually, before that, [because] that year the
warm-up to the Forum had been the First Conference of the Austrian School. I received an
invitation from Hélio Beltrão to go for free due to [our work on] Tax Freedom Day. So I got
to the conference as mister conservative. That whole bunch of anarcho-capitalists, libertar-
ians—and big conservative me there, conservative from the root, together with Marcel Van
Hattem who was also conservative. Marcel calls himself liberal, but he always had a con-
servative streak, because he has a strong religious foundation. He has a strong degree of
conservatism, although his activity has more economically liberal optics.
Interviewer: At the time, who else would you say was conservative, who was a regular?
It was me and Ricardo Salles. It was us, swimming against the current of the Brazilian right.
Because this new Brazilian right was hegemonically libertarian and liberal. Ricardo himself
said he was liberal right; if not, he wouldn’t be able to sell his product. But I declared
myself: I am conservative. I was one of the guys who started to change this panorama.
Marcel held out, because he always was more focused on bringing the debate toward eco-
nomic liberalism, even while he had some conservative values. Ricardo, same thing.
(Rocha, 2019, pp. 176–177)
3.1 The “Progressive Shock” and the Conservative Reaction 61
However, soon the “liberal-libertarian hegemony” of Brazil’s nascent new right

would begin to cede space to the conservatives. While in the 1960s, organizations
such as the Brazilian Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property
(better known as TFP) and other conservative groups played an important role in
civil society mobilizing anti-communist discourse and supporting the 1964 civil-
military coup (Motta, 2002), after redemocratization and the decline of communism
in Europe, organizations and leaders that were both older, linked to the Catholic
church, and newer, linked to evangelical churches, started to turn much of their
attention to feminist and LGBT+ agendas.
During the two presidential administrations of sociologist Fernando Henrique
Cardoso (PSDB), advances in those spheres had been significant, although they far
from mirrored the full demands of progressive social movements, especially with
regard to legalizing abortion. As such, conservative leaders and organizations
remained on standby until Lula’s election in 2002, keeping in mind that Lula was
first elected with the help of conservative voters. At the time, there was still a dis-
sociation between taking conservative positions on social mores and voting for a
leftist presidential candidate (Nishimura, 2004). However, during Lula’s second
term, signals that more substantial changes could be on the way came in the form of
a 2006 law that strengthened measures against domestic violence (the Maria da
Penha Law, proposed in 2004) and a 2006 bill to criminalize homophobia.
Accordingly, it was over the course of Dilma Rousseff’s administration that the
emerging new right started to flirt with Jair Bolsonaro.
On November 18, 2011, during the first year of Rousseff’s term, the National
Truth Commission (CNV) was established to investigate crimes committed by the
Brazilian State between 1946 and 1988, a period that included the military dictator-
ship. Rousseff’s personal history gave the Commission an even larger symbolic and
emotional weight. In her youth, she had been part of the guerrilla group Revolutionary
Armed Vanguard Palmares (VAR-Palmares), founded in 1969, which aimed to take
down the dictatorship and was directed by a military defector, Carlos Lamarca. For
this, Rousseff was arrested and underwent torture sessions commanded by coronel
Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, an official in an army intelligence and repression
unit called the Task Force of Information Operations – Center of Internal Defense
Operations (DOI-CODI). The Commission’s establishment threw salt in old army
wounds and provoked opposition, above all from those who defended the dictator-
ship’s legacy and repressive methods. Among that group, Jair Bolsonaro stood out.
Bolsonaro began his political career after having been publicly charged and dis-
missed from active military duty during the redemocratization period for planning
to explode a bomb inside the barracks as a call for higher military salaries. In 1990,
only 2 years after becoming a Rio de Janeiro city councilman, he was elected to
federal congress as part of the Christian Democrat Party (PDC). His votes came
primarily from a military neighborhood of the city of Rio de Janeiro and from part
of the city of Resende, in Rio de Janeiro state. In 1994 he ran for reelection; his
platform included military pay raises, the end to special labor rights for public
employees, a program to control birth rates, and a review of the area demarcated for
the Indigenous Yanomami people, which he considered absurd. After being reelected
with 135,000 votes, more than double what he earned in his first election, he
switched parties in 1995 to join the Brazilian Progressive Party (PPB, renamed from
PDS), the main successor of ARENA, the government’s party during the
dictatorship.
In 1998, Bolsonaro staged an unsuccessful run for president of the Human Rights
Commission of the Chamber of Deputies, Brazil’s lower house of congress, provok-
ing enormous controversy due to his positions on the topic. In an article published
in the media the month his candidacy was announced, he defended the death pen-
alty, life prison sentences, forced labor regimes for prisoners, lowering the age at
which teens are tried as adults from 18 to 16, and a rigid birth control program as a
method of combating extreme poverty and violence. Later that year, he was reelected
with 102,000 votes,2 and from then on, he continued to be reelected with similar
levels of support. In 1999, in an interview for the program ‘Câmera Aberta’, on
Bandeirantes Network, Bolsonaro said that the National Congress should be closed
and that the then president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, should be shot. In 2003,
Bolsonaro became involved in a controversy with a PT congresswoman, Maria do
Rosário, when he said during a television interview, responding to Rosário’s descrip-
tion of him as a “rapist”: “I only don’t rape you because you don’t deserve it.” In
2006, after switching parties for the third time, Bolsonaro was reelected for the
fourth time with 99,000 votes and in 2010, for the fifth time, with 102,000 votes.
In May 2011, Bolsonaro initiated another controversy. He had been criticizing
the work of the National Truth Commission to little public repercussion, but he
gained wide attention with another unrelated attack: “denouncing” educational
material aimed at preventing homophobia that the Ministry of Education planned to
distribute in public schools. The material had been drawn up in 2004 according to
guidelines from Brazil’s Human Rights Secretariat and was titled “Schools Without
Homophobia,” part of the program “Brazil Without Homophobia.” To call attention
to its distribution, Bolsonaro started to pass out pamphlets in Rio de Janeiro schools
alleging that the education ministry and LGBT+ groups “incentivize homosexual-
ity” and “turn our captive children into easy targets for pedophiles,” calling the
material against homophobia a “gay kit” (G1, 2011).
The dispute about the anti-homophobia kit, which caused the government to
reverse course and block its distribution, occurred during exactly the same month
that the Supreme Court ruled same-sex civil unions legal.3 One year later, the Court
ruled that racial quotas for affirmative action in public universities were constitu-
tional. It also approved, based on a 2004 lawsuit brought by the National
Confederation of Health Workers, the decriminalization of abortion in the case of
fetal anencephaly. Religious and anti-abortion groups held vigils during the trial,
2
This information comes from the biographical entry for Jair Bolsonaro composed by the Center
for Research and Documentation of Contemporary History of Brazil (CPDOC-FGV), cf. Monteiro
et al. (2010).
3
In 2013, the National Justice Council published a resolution authorizing registry offices to per-
form the practice, which granted LGBT+ people rights such as inheritance and alimony.
though rules to implement the decision and measures to carry out the procedure in
the public health-care system had yet to be established.
These judicial decisions mainly resulted from actions by organized civil society,
rather than pressure from the Rousseff government. A month after the legalization
of same-sex civil unions, the country’s LGBT+ community displayed their capacity
to mobilize at São Paulo’s Gay Pride Parade, which has occurred since 1997. On
June 26, 2011, it gathered on the streets what would have been the largest number
of participants in its history according to the event’s organizers. Even so, the advance
in LGBT+ rights occurred alongside extremely high rates of violence against
Brazil’s LGBT+ community, a phenomenon analogous to those alongside advances
in racial and gender equality, given the continuation of the genocide of the young,
Black population, femicides in the country, and the difficulty of advancing on
decriminalization of abortion, an issue that would soon cause controversies in the
new right.
During this period, people opposed to legalizing abortion began to more openly
voice their beliefs, strengthening the position of conservative visitors to pro-market
organizations, according to José Carlos Sepúlveda, an aide to Prince Dom Bertrand
de Orleans e Bragança4 and member of the Plínio Corrêa de Oliveira Institute
(IPCO), heir of the TFP:
Of course the people who directed the liberal movements supported liberal ideas, but there
were a lot of people—and I noticed this a lot in the Northeast—there were a lot of people
who were there taking refuge, but who were not exactly liberal. And this is what I think was
the outline, the broad outline, of the liberal movement that was conservative. For example,
I’ll give you a concrete case of what happened. I don’t remember if it was during the Third
Liberty Week in Fortaleza [which occurred in 2015], which had to do with the problem of
abortion. The problem of abortion for a liberal. For a coherent liberal, it should be free, but
this was not accepted by the liberal movement in the Northeast. And the professor Ubiratan
Iório even gave a really interesting talk at this meeting, showing the libertarians quotes from
other libertarians, that they had no reason to support this, and this point was settled. We
cannot support it. Life is sacred. And this is much more of a conservative position. This is a
phenomenon that I notice. Even Rodrigo [Saraiva Marinho], he said the following: “Look,
really, we can’t do something that is closed. We have to adapt ourselves to the realities, and
the reality here in the Northeast is this one.” Because many of Rodrigo’s collaborators
would later found conservative and Catholic groups. There was a multiplication that was
born from the liberal movement itself. This is something that I really fight for, even with
conservative people. People pay little attention to mentalities and lots to labels. Inside the
liberal movement, they ended up gathering lots of conservative people. Some ended up
breaking off. Others continued on the inside, but with ideas that tended more toward con-
servatism. […] It’s something that Doctor Plínio [Corrêa de Oliveira] always argued for in
his books. If you take a simple woman, who does not have academic training, she has her
interior world. And if we go talk with her, she probably has conservative ideas, but she
doesn’t even know what the conservative movement is, nor does she know what a liberal
movement is, or any of that, but her mentality is a conservative mentality. Even the Perseu
Abramo Foundation did a study, which came out a few days ago, saying that even people on
the peripheries of large cities are all conservative. Well, they’re discovering the obvious,
4
A descendent of the family that ruled Brazil when it was a monarchy and a prominent advocate
for the restoration of a monarchy in the country.
right? And it appears to me that, to the contrary of other countries, things here are more
fluid, and sometimes I see that people want to ram a straightjacket on to talk about the
Brazilian reality as if it were American, for example. (Rocha, 2019, pp. 182–183)
The IPCO, the organization to which Sepúlveda belonged, is part of the arc of
anti-abortion movements and organizations that have been active in the country
since redemocratization, at which point feminists began to institutionally advocate
for the practice’s decriminalization. This made feminists the chief adversaries of
anti-abortion activists. The possibility of legalizing abortion had begun to slowly
advance during the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, whose wife, anthro-
pologist Ruth Cardoso, made public comments supporting the change.5 During
FHC’s government, in 1998, health minister José Serra edited a regulation that
allowed women who legally terminate pregnancies (in cases of rape or when a
woman’s life is at risk) to access medical assistance through the public health sys-
tem. However, as the PSDB had made an alliance with conservative political groups,
there was no further signal that abortion or other related measures might be legalized.
Lula’s first term similarly brought no advances in this arena. However, during his
second term (2007–2010), in 2009, the third edition of the National Program of
Human Rights (PNDH 3) was decreed. Its goals included “consider abortion a pub-
lic health issue, with the guarantee of access to health services,” “support a bill
related to civil unions between people of the same sex,” and “promote actions
related to the guarantee of the right to adoption for same-sex couples.” It was soon
interpreted by anti-abortion activists as an advance against what they called “the
culture of life,” and it was strongly attacked by lawmakers, jurists, and other anti-
abortion activists and/or sympathizers.
Here, it is necessary to call attention to anti-abortion activists’ understanding of
what they describe as the “culture of life.” To them, supporting the “culture of life”
refers to the maintenance of a conservative order that goes beyond the question of
abortion alone to include opposing birth control, stem cell research, legalization of
euthanasia, and advances in women’s and LGBT+ rights, among other related
issues, which are characterized as belonging to a “culture of death.”6
After what was viewed as a significant step forward by the “culture of death,”
anti-abortion activists began to join forces for what would be a critical confrontation
5
“I think that women should be guaranteed the right to use or not use this possibility. This is a right
that women have, but [it should] not [be] an imposition.” Ruth Cardoso, who died in 2008, gave
this response in 1999 to a question about abortion posed on the television show Roda Viva.
6
It must be emphasized that, despite the fact that many Brazilian anti-abortion groups receive
significant direction from actors linked to the Catholic church, as is IPCO’s case, which import the
majority of their repertoire of action from the US movement, it is incorrect to reduce their actions
to a group of Catholic and/or evangelical actors seeking to influence the legislative, judicial, or
even executive branches. Ultimately, the anti-abortion movement acts as a wider conservative
social movement and does so based on a discourse of conservative support for the universality of
“natural law” and defense of human dignity, based on the idea that humans exist from the moment
of conception. This allows anti-abortion groups to gain support from parts of society that do not
define themselves by religious action in the public sphere. The movement’s discourse seeks to
reach believers and non-believers alike (Rocha, 2020).
during the 2010 presidential elections. Abortion became central in the public debate
between the leading two candidates, who both opted not to take a position in favor
of legalization (Machado, 2012; Cervellini et al., 2011; Jordão & Cabrini, 2012).
But even as actors in institutional politics chose not to address the dispute, after the
2010 elections, a new feminist activism emerged in 2011 that began a period of
open offense against anti-abortion leaders and activists.
The case of the feminist movement is particularly key to understanding the his-
torical dynamic of Brazil’s public sphere, including how weak publics became
strong publics and the tensions between subaltern publics and subaltern counterpub-
lics. If Brazil’s bourgeois public sphere had its selectivity decisively challenged by
the conquest of labor rights between 1930 and 1964, beginning in the 1970s—while
the dictatorship was still in course—feminists; LGBT+, Black, and Indigenous
Brazilians; and other subaltern social groups began to create new alternative discur-
sive arenas in which counter-discourses were created and spread. Those groups,
despite having few material and organizational resources compared with elites
(Dreifuss, 1989), were influential in creating a new institutionality through the pact
of 1988 (Coutinho, 2011), resulting in specific public policies, new governmental
bodies, and new institutional arrangements under the democratically elected gov-
ernments that followed. In addition, many of them went through an important pro-
cess of institutionalization within civil society during the 1990s and 2000s (Lavalle,
2003; Dagnino, 2004; Alvarez, 2014; Rios & Maciel, 2017), which gave subaltern
populations a growing ability to impact the political system, mainstream media,
culture industry, market, and education system, to the extent that their publics
slowly transformed from weak (without decision-making power) to strong (with
decision-making power) (Fraser, 1997; Rocha & Medeiros, 2020).
Still, in spite of the undeniable advances caused by the State and civil society’s
greater porosity to socially subaltern groups, the emergence and consolidation of a
post-bourgeois public sphere in Brazil was highly uneven and marked by advances
and retreats, ambiguities, and contradictions. Such was the case of the feminist
movement. In the late 1990s, much of the literature on the movement’s status con-
cluded that it had become institutionalized (Alvarez et al., 1994). Such an institu-
tionalization was documented both at the level of the State, where feminists
participated in legislatures, executive branches, and councils and bureaucratic bod-
ies of various levels, and in civil society, where informal groups became profes-
sional NGOs. The movement also increased its participation in international spaces,
such as political conferences and forums, and in both Brazilian and international
action networks (Machado, 2014). Black women’s activism followed an analogous
path (Rios & Regimeire, 2018).
Beginning in Lula’s first term (2003–2006), a new level of “institutional activ-
ism” was reached with feminist activists’ large-scale entry into State positions
(Abers & Tatagiba, 2015). In the first year of the new administration, the Special
Secretariat of Policy for Women (SPM) was created, with its own budget, ministe-
rial status, and direct link to the presidency, meeting a longtime demand of the
movement. Soon after came the Maria da Penha Law in 2006 and the creation of
policies and government bodies to implement it, in addition to advances on
comprehensive women’s health care, with a “Technical Area for Women’s Health”
acting within the health ministry.
Even so, feminist “institutional activism” faced tensions and difficulties, espe-
cially on the issue of abortion, one of the movement’s main demands. As a result of
the First Conference of Policies for Women, a Tripartite Commission was created to
draft a legalization bill. However, when the bill was introduced in the Chamber of
Deputies in September 2005, the executive branch reversed course due to pressure
from the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil (CNBB), the evangelical caucus,
and tensions originating from the mensalão scandal, which involved the highest
ranks of the PT government. As a result, the bill was shelved. Few voices spoke up
against the reversal of course on abortion. The issue would only advance one step
further toward legalization in 2012 at the Supreme Court, in the specific case of fetal
anencephaly, and in the following years, it would awaken growing resistance from
conservatives (Medeiros & Fanti, 2019).
Pressures from social movements and the policies enacted over the years and
during the first Rousseff administration, while they unleashed increasing political
and social conflict, did not automatically entail a reduction in oppressive dynamics
in Brazil. On the contrary, the conquest of racial quotas occurred in parallel with the
continued genocide of Black youth; the Maria da Penha Law against domestic vio-
lence did not impede a rise in femicides in the following years; the unprecedented
recognition of rights for Indigenous and Quilombola7 territories occurred alongside
persecution of and intense violence toward these groups; and the right to same-sex
civil unions coexisted with high rates of violence toward the LGBT+ community.
Against this backdrop, demonstrations by subaltern counterpublics began to
increasingly spread quickly. This occurred primarily due to a combination of grow-
ing political and social polarization (Solano et al., 2017) and growing Internet use
in Brazil, which exponentially boosted the potential reach of alternative individuals
and groups that were connected with the international political scene. Such was the
case of Brazil’s SlutWalk movement, inspired by the Canadian SlutWalk, which
spread throughout Brazil between 2011 and 2012 (Medeiros & Fanti, 2019). During
those same years, a variety of movements, including Occupy São Paulo—directly
inspired by Occupy Wall Street—and Brazilian anti-corruption movements gave
rise to a new cycle of protests that called for an accelerated deepening of the 1988
democratic pact. It would culminate, as we address in the next section, in massive
mobilizations in June 2013.
What set the protests from new feminist activists apart was the use of a politics
of shock to draw attention to their demands. While in the previous chapter, we dis-
cussed the use of counterpublicity by part of the new right, here we highlight how
subaltern social groups mobilized the same strategy to call attention to their own
ethical and political projects. Based on considerations by anthropologist Carla
Gomes (2018), it is possible to say that the big difference between institutionalized
7
Descendants of escaped enslaved Afro-Brazilians who live on the same land as previous
generations.
feminism and the new feminist activism lay in the form of publicly communicating
demands. The former used a communication apparatus structured around the idea of
the victimization of women, whereas the latter called attention to demands through
acts of transgression aiming to shock in the public sphere.
Adopting the idea of the woman as a victim was fundamental to the long process
of politicizing violence against women (especially domestic violence, which occurs
in the private sphere of the home). This process culminated in the enactment of the
Maria da Penha Law in 2006 and in the establishment of services to assist female
victims of violence.8 To that end, the arguments mobilized in the public sphere were
based on communicating feelings of pain, suffering, passivity, and reparation with a
goal of women’s empowerment. To gain legitimacy in the eyes of dominant publics,
institutionalized feminism based itself mainly on “the politics of respectability”
(Brooks-Higginbotham apud Gomes, 2018, p. 123) in a manner similar to one strain
of the LGBT+ movement,9 taking into account a goal of destigmatizing women and
the LGBT+ people. Discourse from institutionalized feminism was based on
rational-critical argument oriented toward official State policy (Warner, 2002) and
toward convincing traditional leaders through emphasis on ideas of “normality,”
“seriousness,” “dignity,” and “respect.”
The new feminist activism, on the other hand, bets on transgression of gender
norms that is expressed through celebrating activists’ bodies and sexuality.
Presenting themselves in public with bare breasts, lingerie, and high heels in a
hyperbolic and celebratory theatricality of sexuality, the SlutWalk participants aim
to resignify “slut” to mean something beyond an insult. According to Gomes, the
exaggeration of the performances pointed out the fact that some bodies are excluded
from public space, which, in turn, attracted other kinds of protestors for whom pub-
lic exposition of bodies is denied and punished, such as the LGBT+ people and sex
workers.10 With this, Brazilian feminist activism reclaimed its countercultural char-
acter of the 1970s and 1980s, which had progressively softened with the institution-
alization of the movement alongside redemocratization and later in the PT
governments. Traditional and rational-bureaucratic leadership figures were sur-
passed by charismatic leadership figures (Gomes, 2018, pp. 190–191).
The return to transgression led to tensions, dilemmas, and paradoxes that are
inherent to counterpublicity. After all, counterpublicity generates conflicts not only
between the feminist movement and the dominant public sphere or between
8
For a territorial analysis of where these services were implemented in the city of São Paulo’s
peripheries, cf. Medeiros (2017b).
9
The mobilization of the “politics of respectability” by part of the institutionalized sectors of the
feminist and LGBT+ movements occurred in both Brazil (MacRae apud Gomes, 2018, p. 110;
Alves, 2020) and in the United States (Warner, 2000).
10
Gomes (2018) uses the idea of a “frame,” common in social movement analysis, to refer to dif-
ferences in communication styles within Brazilian feminism. A “frame” is an interpretive scheme
that allows for collective action through condensing a simplified read of the social world. Gomes
wrote that institutionalized feminism was structured by a “victimizing frame” and the new feminist
activism launched by the Slut Walks by a “transgressive frame.”
right-wing publics and counterpublics but also inside the feminist discursive field
itself—generating conflicts not only with institutionalized feminists but also with
radical and Black feminists, as Carla Gomes (2018) notes. A paradigmatic example
of this is what became known as the “performance of the saints.”
The performance occurred during the Rio de Janeiro SlutWalk on July 27, 2013,
as the city also hosted World Youth Day, a Catholic gathering attended by Pope
Francis. From the start, the choice of the day showed the SlutWalk activists’ desire
to problematize the Catholic church’s conservatism and call attention to the need to
defend the Brazilian State’s secularity. What distinguished this protest from others,
however, was a performance by a cultural collective called Coyote Collective in
which members kicked crucifixes, one of them inserted an image of Our Lady of
Aparecida—the patron saint of Brazil—into her vagina and then shattered it on the
ground, and, finally, a crucifix encased in a condom was inserted into the anus of
one participant.11 As the organization of the SlutWalk is, as a rule, open and horizon-
tal, both during preparations and on the day of the event, the activists did not expect
that particular performance to attract the attention that it gained in the following
days, when it became the focus of mainstream press coverage of the Walk and
images of it went viral on social media, taking the focus entirely away from the
demonstration’s other performances and demands (Gomes, 2018).
The more conservative spheres of public opinion soon began to consider the
SlutWalk activists and even feminism as a whole as synonymous with violence,
immorality, aggressiveness, and disrespect, and some SlutWalk organizers received
rape and death threats. At that moment, the SlutWalk split: some participants sup-
ported a distancing from the Coyote Collective performance in order to preserve
their own security, whereas others remained faithful to the transgressive ethos of the
protests, saying that any type of condemnation would be counterproductive to the
Walk’s own aims. In view of this second group, there was a continuum of transgres-
sive practices at Rio de Janeiro’s SlutWalk, including a gay pope, a queer baptism,
women dressed as nuns with their breasts exposed, and other deeds that simply did
not gain the same dimension as the “performance of the saints” in public opinion.
Carla Gomes, who was present at the marches as both an anthropologist and an
activist, identified both continuities and discontinuities among the performances
and repertoires. She wrote that while the SlutWalk was based on emotional and
corporal work, oriented by happy and festive celebration of sexuality and by carni-
valized choreography, the Coyote Collective was based less on humor and irrever-
ence and more on terror, on “aesthetic shocks” that wager on repugnance and
visceral reactions, which the collective itself called “pornoterrorism” (cf. Gomes,
2018, pp. 143–144).
In any case, independent of normative evaluations of feminist strategies, it is
noteworthy that counterpublicity is used both on the right and on the left. On the
right, counterpublics adopted language that was sarcastic, acid, filled with curse
For a detailed description of the performance based on observations, reports, photos, videos, and
11
writing on the internet, cf. Gomes (2018, pp. 137–139).

words, and sometimes violent, causing hostile reactions. On the left, groups such as
the SlutWalk and the Coyote Collective also mobilized counterpublicity in their
performances: the former aiming to transgress gender norms with playful choreog-
raphy, the latter aiming to cause reactions of horror and repulsion, thus radicalizing
subaltern counterpublicity, whatever the consequence. What all of these rhetorical
strategies share is a deliberate aim to attract attention in the public sphere through
the use of shock. Given that counterpublicity has become so widespread, it is pos-
sible to affirm that the recent history of the entire public sphere is permeated by
conflicts and tensions between publics and counterpublics, be they subaltern or not.
One of these tensions comes when content is spread out of context, which
occurred in the case of the “performance of the saints,” triggering what sociologist
danah boyd (2020) calls “contextual collapse.” This dynamic, when content is taken
out of its original context and resignified a priori, is particularly common on social
media. In spite of the SlutWalk having emitted a note condemning the “performance
of the saints,” the entire feminist movement started to be identified with it, espe-
cially by people who would go on to vote for Jair Bolsonaro in 2018, as we identi-
fied in qualitative research conducted in 2019 and 2020. The words of one Bolsonaro
voter reveal how, in addition to generalization, the performance was taken out of its
spatial and temporal context of Rio de Janeiro’s 2013 SlutWalk and supposedly
repeated in other unconfirmed contexts, like a demonstration on Paulista Avenue in
the city of São Paulo:
I feel attacked and even offended when I see the feminist movement attacking another per-
son due to their religion, their political party, or what side they’re on. This is not valid. It is
a movement on behalf of women and not to attack other women or society. I saw on televi-
sion, in a feminist movement on Paulista Avenue, that they put crucifixes in their anus […].
I think that this is attacking other people’s religion. (Woman, São Paulo)12 (Fundação Tide
Setubal, 2019, p. 78)
In addition to describing their shock caused by images of performances by sub-

altern counterpublics, which occurred in parallel with subaltern publics’ advances
in the institutional arena, Bolsonaro voters said in interviews that they also felt
attacked due to the increase in LGBT+ people in traditional media, such as in the
previously mentioned Globo television novelas, which Olavo de Carvalho readers
called “leftist”:
There are a lot of gay people that like to confront. That’s the problem. They want the media.
Put it in the novela, in [teen-oriented soap opera] Malhação, impose it. They get empow-
12
All of the interview excerpts that appear in this chapter were obtained in qualitative studies coor-
dinated by Camila Rocha and Esther Solano between 2019 and 2020 for the Tide Setubal
Foundation, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Brasil, and Update Institute. Complete information about
methodology, goals, and target audience is available in the full research reports on the websites of
the respective foundations, with the exception of Update Institute, which did not publish the results
but approved their use for academic purposes. The study for Update Institute was conducted in
2020 and was based on two small focus groups, each of six evangelical women, in Brazil’s
Southeast and Northeast. All of the women voted for Bolsonaro in 2018 and identify as conserva-
tive. The research objective was to understand their positions on topics related to gender, family,
work, sexuality, politics, and women’s empowerment.
ered. They think they are the owners of the truth. They walk through malls holding hands,
while you’re there with your child. It’s alright to do it between four enclosed walls. The
home is theirs, but society is not obliged to put up with it, to watch it. (Man, Rio de Janeiro)
(Fundação Tide Setubal, 2019, p. 85)
In the specific case of people from working-class backgrounds and above all men
over the age of 40, intolerance of affection between the LGBT+ people and even of
the mere presence of same-sex couples in public space—as well as discomfort with
women and Black people’s greater protagonism in the public sphere—came accom-
panied by another specific resentment:
If we say fag to a fag, he will defend himself, and we can’t. If you say Black to a Black
person as well. Touch a woman, and she has Maria da Penha. And what about us? Isn’t it
equal rights? The rope always snaps for the weakest, and the weakest are us. There should
be a law to protect us too. (Man, Porto Alegre) (Fundação Tide Setubal, 2019, p. 89)
Anxiety and a sense of disposability in a rapidly transforming job market, as well

as the fear of losing an already reduced economic power, appeared consistently in
these testimonies. Thus, the statement, “the rope always snaps for the weakest, and
the weakest are us.” Still, unlike what occurred in the Anglo-Saxon context, there
was no reference to anything similar to the figure of a “welfare queen” (Nunes,
2020), though people would later criticize supposed fraud in anti-poverty income
transfer programs such as Bolsa Família, conceived during the PT years. A desire
was voiced for social protection for subalternized groups to reach more people and
include labor rights: “there should be a law to protect us too.” The feeling of lack of
protection was coupled with feelings of betrayal and abandonment by the Workers’
Party and by the left in general, which, in the eyes of interviewees, left workers to
their own fates while concentrating their energies on other kinds of oppression:
I’ve voted for the PT for as long as I’ve been a voter, and I felt misled. They promised they
were going to govern for the people, for the poor, and they simply distorted the left. They
took the left that was the Workers’ Party and transformed it into a left that is the party of
women, of gay people, of LGBTs. Everything that is on the margin teamed up with the PT,
and it all became the same anarchy. Instead of them carrying out things in a way that would
build up society, they wanted promiscuity. (Man, Rio de Janeiro, personal communication,
April, 2019)
The interviewees did not necessarily reject people who fought non-economic
oppressions, or reject most of those people’s demands. What was common, rather,
was a perception that certain characteristics of leaders were being prioritized to the
detriment of their concrete demands, well illustrated by the words of a working-
class Rio de Janeiro voter about Marielle Franco, the sociologist and activist from
his city who was elected city councilor in 2016 as part of the Socialism and Liberty
Party (PSOL) and assassinated in March 2018, becoming an icon of the Brazilian
left and progressivism:
Ah, because Marielle was a heroine, but why was she a heroine? Because she was a woman,
Black, and lesbian. Fuck, the woman did so many important things, but they put that first.
They reduce it to woman, Black, and lesbian. (Man, Rio de Janeiro) (Fundação Tide
Setubal, 2019, p. 86)
Interviews with Bolsonaro voters, as well as opinion polls on topics related to

gender and sexuality, reveal that people who identify as evangelical are more sup-
portive of discourses that Nancy Fraser (1989) classifies as reprivatization dis-
courses. It is important to note that, given the scarcity of intermediary discursive
arenas where working-class Brazilians can form, reflect on, and share their own
discourses beyond social media and digital forums, neo-Pentecostal churches—
abundant in peripheral neighborhoods of large cities—often end up being the work-
ing class’ only spheres of sociability where those themes are more frequently dealt
with and discussed (Valle, 2020). In any case, while the most assiduous faithful
tended to be the ones who most emphatically rejected progressive discourse, which
they saw as attacks on the church and on their ways of life, many of our interview-
ees, independently of their professed religion, reported feeling cornered. On one
side, the State was producing progressive policies and educational material without
discursive mediation to include the working classes. On the other, they encountered
the shock of subaltern counterpublicity, which they received as aggression. This
yielded the sensation that certain discourses were being imposed on them.
Those perceptions were soon echoed by the emerging new right and by Jair
Bolsonaro and his sons, also politicians. In 2012, the new right’s flirtation with the
Bolsonaro family began to consolidate in several online and offline meetings. That
year, Flávio Bolsonaro, then a Rio de Janeiro state legislator, participated in an
event that was livestreamed on YouTube in which he delivered the Tiradentes
Medal13 to philosopher Olavo de Carvalho.14 During the event, both of them said
that institutional reactions would be insufficient to combat the advances of what
they viewed as a “leftist hegemony” in Brazil. After all, those advances were occur-
ring in arenas that also included civil society, both due to dominant publics’ greater
porosity to the discourses of subaltern publics and due to actions of subaltern
counterpublics:
Flávio Bolsonaro: Those demonstrations today are the decline of the human being.
Television showed in its intimacy what the Gay Pride Parade of São Paulo is like. It’s fright-
ening. It’s explicit, open-air sex.
Olavo de Carvalho: Why do they do this? They could have defended their cause in a dis-
creet, calm way, showing gay people as well behaved. Why didn’t they do that? Why did
they choose the contrary? Why did they choose scandal? Anarchy? Everything-goes, carni-
val style? Because they know that this will shock religious and evangelical people, who will
have an emotional reaction. They will invest against homosexuality. So then what do they
do? “Do you see that? Homophobia!” They use this as proof of homophobia, and the evan-
gelicals and the Catholics take the bait. They go on a crusade against homosexuality. And I
say: this is nonsense, my son. Homosexuality exists since the fall of Adam, and you guys
are not going to end it. What we have to fight for is against the existence of this legislation,
and not put homosexuality itself into question. That is foolishness. Also because there is a
An honor awarded by the state of Rio de Janeiro for special service
13
The video can be seen on Flávio Bolsonaro’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb0JGA80iLo)

14
or Media Without a Mask’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5S47UfPF1g) YouTube

channels.
marvelous site called “Right-wing Gays.” They denounce this entire idea that homophobic
persecution exists. So these people are on our side, and I believe that the majority of gay
people would be on our side the moment they understand the essential lie from this move-
ment and these people’s psychotic ambitions.
In spite of criticizing subaltern counterpublics’ use of counterpublicity, both

Flávio Bolsonaro and Carvalho emphasized the importance of similarly, and con-
sciously, using the politics of shock as a radical counter-hegemonic strategy. In their
understanding, it was necessary to call attention to what they perceived as an immi-
nent threat to expressions of certain worldviews and ways of life. They also believed
that the nascent new right lacked sufficient space in dominant publics, as Flávio
Bolsonaro stressed:
Flávio Bolsonaro: I, who am opposed to this, do not have any space, no space at all, in the
press. And there is an explanation that—many people criticize us, and certainly they also
criticize Olavo, for the way we phrase certain discussions. Because it is necessary to create
the fact, to call attention, to shock, about some issues, so that this has space in the press,
and so the population as a whole has access to this discussion. The biggest proof of this is
the famous “gay kit.” If not for a more blatant intervention by congressman Jair Bolsonaro,
[…] we would never have known that there was this incitement of sexuality, be it on the
homosexual or heterosexual side, Olavo, for six-year-old children.
Olavo de Carvalho: They want to make a customer base for pedophiles. Who doesn’t
see this?
As Bolsonaro and his sons became better known in the emerging new right’s
discursive arenas, the formation of Bolsonarist counterpublics based on the idea of
a need for order and maintenance of a traditional social hierarchy accelerated.
Among conservatives that started to identify in some way with Bolsonaro’s state-
ments, there was a shared perception that order was lacking inside families, schools,
public space, and politics. The topic of children’s education became central:
Children’s education shifted to be at the mercy of the schools, and there is a lack of disci-
pline, because this, you learn in the family. (Woman, São Paulo) (Fundação Tide Setubal,
2019, p. 24)
If you take them to school, they will not absorb anything. Because today in school, the
teacher told her, “Come to school for me to give you material, and if you have questions,
Google them.” At school, it was not going to work, because there are no values. We have the
principle of the word of our Father. Sons and daughters who follow Biblical principles are
able to excel. At school, away from his presence, they will learn other things. It’s where they
get lost. (Man, São Paulo) (Fundação Tide Setubal, 2019, p. 24)
Before, children were healthier. They had more respect, discipline. Now, they have a moral
crisis. People invent values. For example, in my day, a homosexual teacher could not teach
a class. Today, he can. (Man, Porto Alegre) (Fundação Tide Setubal, 2019, p. 24)
Today, parents don’t have short reigns with their children. They lack authority and rigidity.
I am in favor of raising children like my parents taught me, which was a very rigid educa-
tion. Rigidity is character. (Woman, São Paulo) (Fundação Tide Setubal, 2019, p. 25)
Today, children don’t respect their parents anymore. I am from an earlier era. You have to
obey. If not, I spank my child. (Woman, Porto Alegre) (Fundação Tide Setubal, 2019, p. 25)
And education also [should be] inside the house. It’s the family, father and mother, who
shapes the child’s character. In my day, it was unacceptable to say something to the teacher.
Today, the teachers are taking a beating. Today, a father will go fight with a teacher because
he scolded his son. Before, it was the opposite. (Man, Rio de Janeiro, personal communica-
tion, December 05, 2020)
I had to get up when the teacher entered the room. I had respect. Education takes time. It’s
a labor-intensive process. We can’t fault the parents, because they also had a bad education.
It will take generations for people to respect teachers. (Man, Rio de Janeiro, personal com-
munication, December 05, 2020)
Education changed for the worse. Before, it was more rigid. You can’t even speak loudly,
because a child will immediately say they will call the government agency for children’s
protection. (Man, Porto Alegre) (Fundação Tide Setubal, 2019, p. 25)
My grandmother would look at me, and that was it. I was already trembling. The girl hit her
father on the face and the father laughed […]. It’s the rotten fruit generation. (Woman,
Recife) (Fundação Tide Setubal, 2019, p. 25)
This is a generation that is weak on the psychological and emotional side. The young people
are depressed. They pity themselves. (Man, Recife) (Fundação Tide Setubal, 2019, p. 25)
This is a crybaby generation that gets offended at everything. (Woman, Porto Alegre)
(Fundação Tide Setubal, 2019, p. 26)
These comments about the education of children and young people and what the
interviewees interpret as a “moral crisis” can only be understood if we take a histori-
cal perspective to consider the place children and adolescents took in Brazil’s post-
bourgeois public sphere. The cornerstone of the change is, once again, the Federal
Constitution of 1988. To analyze the new legal treatment for children and adoles-
cents that came with redemocratization, sociologist Ângela Pinheiro (2005) identi-
fied four social representations of them in Brazil’s sociopolitical history: (1) as
objects of social protection, (2) as objects of control and discipline, (3) as objects of
repression, and (4) as subjects of rights.
The first social representation developed during the colonial period and was
largely based in Christian values, centering on the life and survival of small chil-
dren, who needed protection from extreme poverty, hunger, or abandonment by
means of charity or assistance on the part of families, philanthropies, or the State.
After the abolition of slavery (1888), children and adolescents became objects of
control and discipline as a way to incentivize working-class children’s social inte-
gration via state-offered education and professional training, both to make them part
of the labor force and to prevent their marginality and delinquency. For its part, the
social representation as an object of social repression emerged during the New State
dictatorship (1937–1945) and connected poor children in a general and irreversible
way with a notion of dangerous and delinquent “minors” who aroused hostility and
fear in “upstanding citizens” and received treatment of coercion, confinement, and

segregation by the State. The last depiction represented a fundamental rupture, see-
ing as the three previous ones treated children and adolescents from subaltern
classes as objects. Instead, this innovative social representation considered all chil-
dren and adolescent citizens, with an unprecedented, universalist concept of citizen-
ship, linked to notions of legal equality, respect for difference, and an orientation
toward emancipation. Each of these social representations emerged in different his-
torical periods but eventually coexisted with conflicts, connections, and overlaps,
always engaged in a symbolic dispute for hegemony in Brazilian political culture
(Pinheiro, 2005).
While the dominant concept in the 1988 constitutional text ended up being the
representation of children and adolescents as subjects of rights, during the debates
between participants of the 1987–1988 Constitutional Congress, the representation
as objects of social protection predominated, amalgamated with the representation
as objects of control and discipline.15 The more conservative representations failed
to prevail, thanks to the participatory structure of the Constitutional Congress
(Pilatti, 2008), which made it possible for children experiencing homelessness to
participate in a working group’s public hearings as well as for child, adolescent, and
human rights defense groups to propose amendments (the groups were in large part
linked to the Catholic church’s liberation theology strain and also included NGOs,
university nuclei, and other progressive social movements). Those amendments
facilitated a juridical translation of a social representation (or, we could say, of a
counterdiscourse) in which children and adolescents were for the first time recog-
nized as subjects rather than objects. We can interpret the groups that produced and
spread this oppositional code as subaltern publics that decisively contributed to the
emergence of a post-bourgeois public sphere in Brazil, in which children and ado-
lescents become subjects—not only subjects of rights but also political and histori-
cal subjects (Pinheiro, 2005). The same legislature that drafted the 1988 Constitution
also drew up the Statute of the Child and Adolescent (ECA), enacted in 1990, which
institutionalized, regulated, detailed, and deepened the social representation of chil-
dren and adolescents as subjects and citizens.
The eruption of children and adolescents on the public stage and the form in
which they were treated and confronted by the public sphere of adults revealed the
true nature of the dominant public sphere, as cultural theorists and critics Oskar
Negt and Alexander Kluge wrote (Negt & Kluge, 1993, p. 283). The significant
change in position for children and adolescents beginning with redemocratization—
from which other provisions were created, like the 2014 Spanking Law—is directly
related to the questioning, attacks, and attempts at control and restriction of auton-
omy by parents, religious figures, and politicians, as evidenced in the above
statements.
15
The representation as objects of repression was practically absent during the Constitutional
Congress debates due to the context of exit from the military dictatorship and repudiation of
repressive practices (Pinheiro, 2005).
The perception that children and youth are ill-behaved is related, according to the
interviewees, with the sense of a generalized moral decay. That decay, in their view,
is linked to the expansion of women’s protagonism in the public sphere, leaving
small children no longer in the exclusive care of mothers.16 Interviewees also linked
this decay to what they called “gender ideology,” a phrase used by conservatives in
several countries that attributes a negative meaning to the idea that biological sex
does not determine gender, as it amounts, in their view, to inducing children to be
homosexual or transsexual:
Before, the man was a man. Women did not have to work, go out, because men were obliged
to pay for everything. If I had a ton of money, I would not want my girlfriend to go out and
work and leave her daughter with her mother. I would want her to take care of her, because
the girl is little and she needs her mother. I really wanted to have monitored my son’s grow-
ing up, and I want her to monitor, but she said that unfortunately she has to work. She gets
back from work, and her daughter is sleeping. She’s not monitoring the child’s growth.
(Man, 43, Black, evangelical, Rio de Janeiro) (Fundação Tide Setubal, 2019, p. 22)
Women, when they leave their space, have important roles in society, but they have to be
under the grace of God. “I’m going to go out to work to help my husband.” But then, “femi-
cide” tripled. Strange? Women today are beating their chest with assertion. A husband says
two words, she says ten. And there are some guys who are from the Northeast, who are
16
In a classroom of a private college in a peripheral neighborhood, where one author of this book
was a professor during 2012 and 2013, women students repeatedly referred to “work outside the
home” as almost an original sin from which all problems of contemporary society derived: “A
construction that consistently appeared in my female students’ writing was the narrative of a
vicious cycle: primary school students ‘these days’ have lots of learning difficulties, in addition to
schools being very violent environments; education does not start in school, but rather, in the fam-
ily; the difficulties and violence were due to a ‘destructured family’; basically, that destructuring
was fruit of the absence of mothers, obliged to work outside their homes to financially contribute
to family’s maintenance; and therefore, the solution to the poor quality of education in schools was
not in the school itself nor via initial or continued teacher training, much less in increased invest-
ments in public education, but rather, in ‘the home’ and in the educational responsibility of women
as mothers. Speaking simply, what amazed me about this framing is that the female students (rang-
ing between ages 18 and 70, with most over 30) never spoke about themselves explicitly, but rather
about women ‘in general,’ in a distanced and impersonal way (while most of their choices of
research topics and hypotheses were very familiar and personalized). Moreover, they could fit
perfectly into the framing they described: several were mothers, all were workers, and the addition
of a ‘third workday’ (many were trying to exit occupations like domestic work and telemarketing
to become teachers and had begun college late, after completing programs to earn the equivalent
of high school degrees) could certainly be described as one more obstacle to the idealized exclu-
sive dedication to the moral education of their children. It seemed to me, in an implicit and indirect
way, like a discomfort with their own conditions as mothers and workers, supposedly incompatible
with their educational missions as mothers. I also became very intrigued by a phrase the female
students referenced, semester after semester, in different classes and with different research topics,
to summarize the vicious cycle (and which referred to factors beyond the education crisis): the
notion of ‘inversion of values.’ This concept was used to explain many processes (social, psycho-
logical, moral). Finally, in the second semester of classes, I discovered the phrase’s origin online:
the preaching of Silas Malafaia (from the Pentecostal evangelical church Assemblies of God
Victory in Christ) and several other evangelical pastors (repeated by conservative politicians)”
(Medeiros, 2017b, pp. 24–25).
outlaws, who don’t accept it. What do they do? Kill! Like I said, I go to my wife, and I give
her a lesson. “I can’t lay a hand on you, but I can take my things and leave.” It’s to help their
spouse, but unfortunately some go out to go out, while others go out to [during the inter-
view, it was implicit that the interviewee would have completed the sentence with “cheat on
their husband”]. As I said, there are women who arrive and hit their guys in the face. So it’s
not working out. It’s like giving a cell phone to a child who doesn’t know how to use it. The
number of adulteries rose. (Man, São Paulo) (Fundação Tide Setubal, 2019, p. 69)
A five-year-old child is going to be gay? I am more conservative in this sense. I didn’t want
to pose this to a child. I don’t think this is normal, and I will never think it’s normal, wanting
to put this into a child’s head. If she grows up, she will have the right to choose. And then
you see children cursing their teachers, saying what they can say or not. (Man, São Paulo,
personal communication, November 11, 2020)
A child having the power to choose if they will be a girl or a boy? So genetics has collapsed.
It matters little. Because a person will be what they want to be. This is absurd. Civility and
education are missing. (Man, São Paulo, personal communication, November 11, 2020)
I discovered that in Rio, there are schools with policies in which you can’t discriminate: “If
he picks up a doll, all OK.” Until that point, it’s all child’s play, but I asked about the age.
“Four, five, seven, ten, and we can’t reproach them, to the contrary, we have to support
them,” and she, as a Christian, said “What a battle I fight.” […] You have to have decency,
because the child is forming a personality. Ideology enters the picture to say that you are a
girl, but you can be a boy, or you are a boy, and you can be a girl. This is absurd. This is
violence. Because you are mischaracterizing identity. Because if she is a girl, she is a girl,
and she has behavior that is very different from those who are boys. I had a son, a boy, and
now a granddaughter, a girl, and it’s completely different. Ideology seeks to impart this in
children’s heads, that she can choose what she wants to be. And from there, people start to
preach a total liberty which yields promiscuity, and then come a series of factors that later…
everything is freed up, everyone drinks, everyone smokes, drugs are freely allowed. So
people will have free access, people will do it, and nothing will happen. […] Who is it who
seeks to spread this? Well, there is the issue of the New Age, of several things that unfortu-
nately will come to pass, and parents and teachers need to have their positions defined,
because if you are on the fence, you’re running the risk of attack. It’s kill or be killed. […]
Gender ideology, to me, is an evil creation. I think a child can’t suffer this damage on the
psychological level, because she is still being shaped. (Woman 1, Rio de Janeiro, personal
communication, October 17, 2020)
I have a four-year-old daughter, a girl, Isadora. And she puts on a baseball cap. She wants
to put on a baseball cap, and when she puts it on, she transforms. She says that she is a boy,
that she is going to grow a wee-wee, she says. But then I say: “No, you are a girl. You are
not a boy. Your brother is a boy,” but she says she wants to be a boy. But I try to work on this
with her, you know? Say no, that she is not a boy, that she is a princess, that she has long
hair. So until she is 18, she will be a girl to me. Afterward, whatever she wants to be, I will
accept, because I am her mother. But she has to be a girl. Because they are children. They
don’t know what they want. They think it’s cute, to put on a hat, to put on a baseball cap.
Because they see their brother’s wee-wee, it’s little bitty. She is going to see the wee-wee,
there’s no way you can’t let her, because she is raised in the same house. But it’s compli-
cated. You have to work a lot with their head, exactly as I told you about my daughter. I
think this is unacceptable, a child saying she wants to be a boy, if she is a girl. When she
grows up, she will figure out what she wants to be. But a child, no. I don’t support it. […]
There are many children who are influenced, who think it’s cool to use jewelry, to put on
lipstick, and they will grow up like that if their mother and father aren’t overhead to edu-
cate. We have to keep an eye out 24 hours a day, to see what’s happening, who they are
spending time with, who the little friend is who is coming to visit at home. […] There are
people who are sick in the head who want to put [ideas] in their little heads. We have to be
alert, to keep an eye on cell phones, what they are doing, what they are saying to their
friends. We have to always be alert. (Woman 2, Rio de Janeiro, personal communication,
October 17, 2020)
I think that gender ideology is everything bad that could exist for our society. Because it
heavily influences children and young people to be transsexual, and I think it’s wrong. It’s
just like in school. It’s absurd to have this on an educational pamphlet in school, because it’s
in schools that you learn, that you gain a view of the world, of things, and I think it’s wrong.
You don’t have to have gender ideology. Girls have to be girls and boys, boys, I think. You
know what I mean? Starting from age 18, they have to see, and we who are mothers have to
accept, because we are mothers. But this gender ideology thing is wrong. I don’t accept how
something like that needs to be said in school, this and that […] It’s in style, but I think it’s
wrong. There’s no reason a child should be trans, be gay, right? He doesn’t know what he
wants for his life. He will know what he wants when he’s 20. And they are doing everything
possible to mess with children and adolescents’ heads, and we see this even in advertising,
this difference in gender. Even in commercials. There was a commercial on Facebook just
with trans people, right? And I see it also looking on Facebook at posts of people calling for
participants to record ads. There is a specific profile: only trans, gay, lesbians. So they want
to make this in style. I think that it’s in style, but I think it’s wrong. (Woman 1, Rio de
Janeiro, personal communication, October 17, 2020)
I think that children should learn religion in school, should learn values so as not to have
this confusion of values that we have these days. (Woman, Porto Alegre) (Fundação Tide
Setubal, 2019, p. 26)
What is in play in domains as apparently different as children’s and adolescent

education, women’s rights, and the visibility of LGBT+ people’s sexuality? Nancy
Fraser (1989) helps us respond to this question, writing that a central conflict in
contemporary societies is the definition, interpretation, and reinterpretation of the
boundaries between public and private. A post-bourgeois public sphere, like the one
that began to emerge in Brazil with the end of the military dictatorship, entails the
appearance of a new societal arena that both Fraser and Hannah Arendt call “the
social.” It is a discursive site where people’s needs break out of private spheres,
which previously contained them as private, nature-ruled topics that were vetoed in
the public debate; instead, the topics become contested and contestable, thanks to
social movements’ political and discursive action. However, the movements’ oppo-
sitional discourse does not circulate alone in this arena of the social. Some actors
respond to the politicization of women’s needs (in the paradigmatic case analyzed
by Fraser; our approach also looks at the LGBT+ people and children) by entering
the public arena to remove these topics from the debate, reprivatizing them. This can
be seen in the way our interviewees question the recent politicization of several top-
ics valued by progressive social movements, aiming to depoliticize them and restore
supposed laws of nature, bringing back, as much as possible, not only traditional
ways of life but also an authoritarian culture based on traditional hierarchies. They
are reactions to redefined frontiers between public and private and seek to revert to
previous frontiers which were fiercely contested by oppositional discourses of femi-

nist, LGBT+, and child and adolescent rights movements.
Thus, according to interviewees, the lack of structure in families and discipline
in schools caused children and youth who lacked solid moral guidelines to “boss
around” their parents and teachers, be isolated and unaffectionate, and drink and
have sex more precociously, initiating a generalized moral decay. Echoing both
prominent and grassroots conservative figures, Brazilians increasingly made an
association between moral decay and leftist political parties, leaders, and activists,
tying together immorality in the sphere of social mores, criminality, and political
corruption, the last of which was viewed as one of Brazil’s main problems during
the protest cycle that began in 2011 and 2012.
3.2 The Protest Cycle and the Revolts of June 2013
During 2011 and 2012, several anti-corruption demonstrations occurred in the wake
of offshoots of the mensalão scandal, which had hurt Workers’ Party leaders in
2005, as well as other corruption scandals. In 2011, 4 years after a first initiative was
made in Porto Alegre,17 calls went out on Facebook for nonpartisan demonstrations
against corruption in 34 cities across 17 states that would occur alongside Brazilian
Independence Day celebrations on September 7. Around 26,000 people said online
that they would attend. The protests—convoked under the title “Second March
Against Corruption and Impunity,” organized by the Movement to Combat Electoral
Corruption (MCCE), linked to the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil
(CNBB),18 and supported by the Order of Attorneys of Brazil (OAB), Brazil’s bar
17
In 2007, 1 month before the protest organized by the I Got Tired movement in São Paulo, the
Movement Against Impunity and Corruption was founded in the city of Porto Alegre. It was orga-
nized by the Rio Grande do Sul state chapter of the OAB and 70 other groups and drew hundreds
of people to the city. During their demonstration, directors of OAB chapters from the states of
Santa Catarina, Paraná, and Rio de Janeiro announced that similar protests would be organized in
their respective states, and the president of Rio Grande do Sul’s OAB chapter, Carlos Lamachia,
said the initiative by the Rio Grande do Sul chapter of the movement would include a large protest
in Brasília at an unscheduled future date, where an agenda would be presented to Congress and to
society that called for the end of a legal privilege in which sitting politicians can only be tried by
higher courts, the rejection of a proposed constitutional amendment (PEC) that would extend its
effects to former politicians, and new mechanisms that would prevent resignation from being used
to preserve these special political rights. In addition to lawyers, the demonstration included repre-
sentatives of business federations and unions that tended to oppose each other, such as the United
Workers Central (CUT) and Union Force; public employees; judges; students; activists from the
Green Party (PV) and the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL); and state lawmakers from the
Progressive Party (PP, formerly PPB) and the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB) (Ogliari, 2007).
18
“The MCCE was established during the 2002 electoral period. But it can be said that the 1996
Campaign of Fraternity, with its theme ‘Fraternity and Politics,’ helped the creation of the MCCE
flourish, because after the campaign, the Brazilian Justice and Peace Commission (CBJP), a body
linked to the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil (CNBB), launched the project ‘Combating
3.2 The Protest Cycle and the Revolts of June 2013 79
association—united thousands of people. Many of them wore black and carried

Brazilian flags and/or painted their faces with green and yellow in a style similar to
that of the 2007 I Got Tired demonstration, which was also supported by São Paulo’s
OAB chapter. Unlike at the I Got Tired protest, however, the focus was not rejection
of Lula and the PT. The march in Brasília, for its part, attracted around 25,000
people who protested against the pardoning of congresswoman Jaqueline Roriz
(from the Party of National Mobilization, representing Brazil’s Federal District);
against votes in Congress being kept secret; against recent corruption scandals in
the Rousseff administration; in favor of the application of the Clean Record Law19;
and against the president of the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF), Ricardo
Teixeira (Colon & Moura, 2011). In Rio de Janeiro, with the support of NGOs, such
as Rio for Peace and Greenpeace, the march took over the Copacabana waterfront
with around 2000 people, many of them wearing black and carrying green-and-
yellow brooms in an allusion to cleaning out the public sector.20 They called for the
Clean Record Law to survive a challenge at the Supreme Court and for corruption
to be classified as a heinous crime (ineligible for bail or pardon). Finally, in São
Paulo, 3000 people protested on Paulista Avenue with Brazilian flags and painted
faces, calling for 10% of Brazil’s GDP to be invested in education (Gama, 2011).
In 2012, anti-corruption protests that were organized online took place in various
Brazilian state capitals on another public holiday, April 21. Demonstrator demands
included the end to a special legal privilege in which sitting lawmakers can only be
tried by higher courts; a reversal to pay raises for city councilors; a requirement that
candidates to elected office have a clean criminal record; more resources for educa-
tion; and the departure of local politicians. The main focus of the rallies was not
open repudiation of the PT and/or Lula, though there was a demand for conviction
of the “mensalão people” (Roncaglia, 2012). The demonstrations drew an average
of 2000 people in each city and again featured black and the colors of the Brazilian
flag. However, unlike what had been occurring since 2007, in São Paulo, there was
a confrontation between demonstrators and police, who threw stun grenades to dis-
perse protesters on Paulista Avenue (G1, 2012).
With this backdrop, there was already a somewhat discontented feeling in the air,
though it had yet to be detected by public opinion polls, which said the level of con-
cern about corruption at the time oscillated around 5% (Singer, 2018). That indica-
tor, however, would grow progressively after the June 2013 demonstrations erupted.
electoral corruption’ in February 1997. Hence, in 1998 a seed of popular initiative was planted
against electoral corruption, leading to Law 9840. Founded during the 2002 electoral period, the
MCCE widened its activities and today operates in a permanent manner throughout the entire
country. In 2006, the executive secretariat of the national committee of the MCCE was created. On
April 27, 2007, the Executive Secretariat of the National Committee of the Movement to Combat
Electoral Corruption (SE-MCCE) was legally officialized as a nonprofit and Non-governmental
Organization (NGO)”; information available at http://www.mcce.org.br/quando-foi-criado/
19
This law bans people from running for office if they are found guilty of a crime by an appeals court.
20
Here it is important to recall the expression “ethical cleansing” that was used to refer to the min-
isterial “cleansing” that Dilma Rousseff carried out in 2011, her first year in office, which was
praised at the time by the middle classes (Singer, 2018).
According to mainstream media accounts, those demonstrations began with the

Free Fare Movement in the city of São Paulo. They then spread throughout the entire
country, soon drawing millions of people to the streets who had extremely diverse
agendas and who used varied styles and repertoires of activism (Alonso & Mische,
2017), denoting that a broad array of social sectors had been mobilized (Bringel &
Players, 2015) and revealing public rejection of several aspects of the political sys-
tem (Nobre, 2013a). Many analysts believe that the June 2013 protests are an impor-
tant dividing line in Brazilian political history. Multiple meanings were attributed to
the protests: the beginning of a crisis in the political regime of the New Republic,
which we describe here as the pact of 1988; the beginning of a legitimacy crisis for
PT governments; the seed of Rousseff’s 2016 impeachment; and even the harbinger
of the conservative wave or the rise of Bolsonaro. However, before going any further,
we believe that the 2013 revolts must be interpreted considering their fit within a
wider historical context. For this, and also in order to address the dynamics of the
public sphere at the time, we will draw on the concept of a protest cycle from social
movement theory developed by political scientist and sociologist Sidney Tarrow.
On the one hand, it is fundamental to understand that Brazil’s 2013 revolts are
part of a wider, global wave of protests: The Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia (in
2010), the Egyptian Revolution, Spain’s Indignados movement, Chile’s student
mobilizations, Greece’s anti-austerity movement, Occupy Wall Street in the USA
(all of these in 2011), Mexico’s Yo Soy 132 movement (in 2012), and Turkey’s Gezi
Park protests (in 2013), among other mobilizations. Those protests have been called
both “networked social movements”—given social media’s prominence in organiz-
ing and spreading word of the demonstrations as well as allowing demonstrators to
communicate with each other (Castells, 2012)—and “the movement of the squares”
(Gerbaudo, 2017), given that most included permanent encampments in public pla-
zas, horizontal popular assemblies for decision-making, and the use of large social
media companies to boost communication.
On the other hand, the dynamic of Brazil’s protests had its unique characteristics.
First, Brazil’s case diverges significantly from Gerbaudo’s blueprint for the move-
ment of the squares. Encampments in public plazas were not central to the 2013
revolts, and horizontal people’s assemblies occurred only in one city: Belo Horizonte
(Ricci & Arley, 2014). Second, the timing of the Brazilian protests was dilated.
While some mobilizations in the 2011–2013 global protest wave resulted in revolu-
tions (be they more successful, as in Tunisia, or failed, as in Egypt), authoritarian
shutdowns of political institutions (as in Turkey), the creation of new parties (as
with Podemos in Spain), the revitalization of existing parties (as with Syriza in
Greece or the Democratic Party in the United States, given Bernie Sanders’ 2016
and 2020 primary campaigns), or even profound transformations of political culture
that inspired new mobilizations (such as Chile’s 2019 “social outburst,” which led
to a new constitutional congress), Brazil’s 2013 revolts can only be adequately
interpreted by considering a “protest cycle” that began before June 2013 and kept
reverberating until, at minimum, 2016.
According to Tarrow, a protest cycle is an increase in disruptive collective actions
in a medium-term time frame and an extension of conflicts throughout the entire
social fabric that occurs “when the costs of collective action are so low and the
incentives so great that even individuals or groups that would normally not engage
in protest feel encouraged to do so” (Tarrow, 1989, p. 8). This creates an opening for
new coalitions between members of the polity and outsiders who can challenge and
destabilize previously dominant political coalitions, producing countermovements,
violence, political backlash, repression, demobilization, and, eventually, institution-
alization and integration of the protest into the State. In addition to it being funda-
mental to analyze where a protest starts (and who the “early risers” are), another
element that is consequential as the political process unfolds is the reaction of politi-
cal and economic elites. In the specific case analyzed by Tarrow, that of Italy in the
1960s and 1970s, political elites responded to protests by opening up to reforms. In
the Brazilian case, the political system failed to respond to the demands of the start
of the protest cycle.
Tarrow wrote that demonstrations become a protest cycle when disruptive collec-
tive actions spread through many different parts of society. This diffusion follows a
logic of competitive tactical innovation, as the entrance of “early risers” onto the
public stage encourages “latecomers”—be they aiming to imitate, show solidarity,
or react—and also leads actors from the polity to offer themselves as allies. The
“early risers” offer models of collective action and demonstrate that political elites
are temporarily vulnerable, such that social movements and other established inter-
est groups begin to compete for support and legitimacy in the eyes of citizens. This
causes not only the spread of disruptive collective action but also a quick and inno-
vative succession of different forms of collective action, such as routine petitions,
delegations, strikes, public marches, demonstrations, occupations, traffic obstruc-
tion, clashes with police, and organized violence (Tarrow, 1989, p. 62). In the
Brazilian case, the federation of autonomous movements that fought for free and
reduced-fare public transportation showed not only that organized street demonstra-
tions could issue demands and achieve victories but also that the political coalition
built around Lulism was not as stable and invulnerable as the 2010–2013 public
opinion polling suggested.
Ultimately, protest cycles encourage the expansion and spread of interpretive
frames that already exist (and are rooted in a country’s political culture) as well as
the production of entirely new frames.21 In Brazil’s case, the democratic political
culture institutionalized by the 1988 Constitution was mobilized countless times,
such as through demands for public transportation, education, and health, which
were understood as social rights that should be made effective via high-quality pub-
lic services. Nevertheless, a protest cycle is politically and ideologically pluralistic;
the structural factors that encourage the “early riser” movements—like the Free
Fare Movement and the issue of public transportation in big cities—are only the
beginning of a political process that unleashes relatively independent responses of
“latecomer” movements (like the Brazilian new right), incentivized by a change in
the structure of political opportunities.
21
See note 10 about the concept of “frame.”
The decline and end of a protest cycle come with exhaustion, repression, and
demobilization, as well as, eventually, reforms in the political system that may or
may not expand democracy in a country (Tarrow, 1989). In the Italian case, the main
consequence of the protest cycle between the late 1960s and early 1970s was
increased democratization; in the Brazilian case, the main consequence of the 2010s
protest cycle was a process of de-democratization.22
In the absence of our own database with protest events in Brazil collected and
systematized via newspaper reports (the most conventional method for this type of
sociological study of social movements), here, we propose visualizing the existence
of a protest cycle in the 2010s by observing the annual total of strikes23 in the coun-
try since the mid-1980s (see Fig. 3.1).
As can be seen, the years 2013 to 2016 saw quantities and a prolongation of
strikes that were unprecedented for the period since DIEESE (the Interunion
Department of Socioeconomic Statistics and Studies) began to collect data in the
1980s. In 2011 and 2012, there were already signals of a strike cycle gathering, just
as it can be seen here that strikes declined beginning in 2017–2018, though they
continued on a level above that preceding the protest cycle. In 2019 came a slightly
larger drop, and 2020 had the fewest strikes since the beginning of the new strike
cycle. A plausible hypothesis is that the Covid-19 pandemic and the dismantling of
Brazilian unionism in the wake of a 2017 labor reform acted together to end the
strike cycle. Thus, it is plausible to consider the years 2011 to 2018 (or, being more
restrictive, 2012 to 2016)24 as a period of intensification not only of strikes25 (and
therefore conflict on issues of resource distribution) but also of conflicts throughout
the entire social fabric, effectively signaling a protest cycle.
In many narratives, Brazil’s 2013 revolts began with the June 6 protest convoked
by São Paulo’s Free Fare Movement (MPL-SP). Undoubtedly, São Paulo was an
epicenter of the protests, but it is a mistake to begin the narrative with this first
MPL-SP centralized rally. The Free Fare Movement (MPL) had been founded in
22
In Tilly’s definition (2007, p. 14), de-democratization “means net movement toward narrower,
more unequal, less protected, and less binding consultation,” while “Consultation includes any
public means by which citizens voice their collective preferences concerning state personnel and
policies” (Tilly, 2007, p. 13).
23
In his analysis of Italy’s protest cycle, Tarrow (1989) found a significant correlation between
strikes and other forms of disruptive collective action. Regarding the Brazilian case, Tatagiba and
Galvão (2019) found relatively similar curves in the dynamics of strikes and other types of protests
through their database of protest events.
24
Identifying the exact year that ends this protest cycle is a controversial topic, as it deals with a
historical process still in course. Some historical distance will be necessary in order to know when
this cycle closed. Tarrow, for example, published his book about the 1965–1975 protest cycle in
Italy only in 1989, taking 14 years after the end of the cycle before concluding his analytic assess-
ment. Producing a similar portrait of the Brazilian case is a process that will take more time and
collective work of investigation and interpretation.
25
According to Noronha (2009), the last big strike cycle in Brazil lasted from 1978 to 1997 and had
three phases: beginning and expansion (1978–1984), explosion and peak (1985–1992), and, finally,
resistance and decline (1993–1997)—followed by a period of normalization and stability
(1998–2007).
Fig. 3.1 Strikes in Brazil (1984–2020)

Source: graph by authors using data from SAG-DIEESE (Strike Monitoring System of the
Interunion Department of Socioeconomic Statistics and Studies)
2005 as a federation of collectives at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, and
in the second half of the 2000s, it staged massive street rallies in other cities, such
as Brasília and Vitória, that sought to block increases in bus fares. Following that
trend, in the first half of 2013, several cities had already held campaigns against bus
fare increases that were themselves offshoots of protests about public transporta-
tion, such as the Buzu Revolt (2003, Salvador) and the Turnstyle Revolt (2004,
Florianópolis).
In addition to these historic antecedents to the June 2013 revolts, other events can
be read a posteriori as indicative that a protest cycle was gathering. They include an
occupation since 2010 in Belo Horizonte named Praia de Estação (Station Beach),26
in which people wore swimsuits to protest a city decree prohibiting leisure activities
in an urban plaza (Oliveira, 2012); the 2011 Freedom March that emerged after
strong police repression against São Paulo’s Marijuana March, asserting the right to
freedom of expression and demonstration; the “Big Barbecue of Differentiated
People,” a humorous protest against residents of a wealthy São Paulo neighborhood
Temporary occupation in Rui Barbosa Plaza, in central Belo Horizonte, also known as Station
26
Beach. The name Station Beach is a joke based on the fact that the city does not have seaside
access; the occupation playfully created a space of sociability in the form of an urban beach, in
addition to disputing the control that the city government sought to exercise over cultural and
political demonstrations in the plaza.
who objected to the construction of a subway station (Savazoni, 2016); an eruption

of autonomous and horizontal encampments in several state capitals at the end of
2011, inspired by Occupy Wall Street: OcupaBelém, OcupaBH, OcupaPortoAlegre,
OcupaRio, OcupaSalvador, and OcupaSampa; and the rally “Public Defense of
Happiness” in late 2012, at which Porto Alegre residents protested against the priva-
tization of a plaza from which street artists and vendors were expelled to make way
for an inflatable FIFA World Cup mascot sponsored by Coca-Cola (Kunsler, 2012).
Other signals that a protest cycle was gathering in this 2011–2012 period, though
they were not very institutionalized, were wildcat strikes at large public construc-
tion projects and the proliferation of SlutWalks in cities across the country (as
addressed earlier in this chapter). It is worth emphasizing that this initial moment of
the cycle was marked by offensive or proactive struggles—that is, for more rights—
and an openly humorous and carnivalistic protest style, with social actors showing
boldness and versatility in a manner very similar to that observed by Tarrow at the
start of Italy’s protest cycle between 1967 and 1969. Tarrow noted “the tactical cre-
ativity of the protesters” and “the disruptiveness of their actions” (Tarrow,
1989, p. 79).
Added to these events were the 2013 mobilizations against public transportation
fare hikes that occurred prior to June: in January in the city Recife and state of São
Paulo (both in the greater São Paulo metropolitan area and in smaller cities across
the state), from February to April in Porto Alegre, and in May in Goiânia and Natal.
At the beginning of June, four campaigns converged: Goiânia and Natal (already
ongoing) and the capital cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro (which began
that month).
MPL-SP’s campaign against the 20 Brazilian cent rise in bus and subway fares
was launched with calls to attend rallies on June 6, 7, and 11. But the significant
turning point in the protests’ dynamic occurred on June 13, 2013, due to police
repression. Until then, editorials from São Paulo’s two largest newspapers—O
Estado de São Paulo and Folha de São Paulo—had demanded that the Military
Police (PM) act with more rigorous repression toward what they viewed as growth
of “vandals” and “rabble rousers” at the protests.27 The PM heeded the press outcry,
though through their actions, even journalists who were covering the street rally
became targets of police violence (seven Folha de São Paulo reporters were
wounded, and rubber bullets hit the eyes of a Folha journalist and of a photographer,
who ended up losing vision in one eye). Soon, reports of brutal police repression
were being shared on social media, with a decisive contribution from alternative
media sources, such as Mídia Ninja.
Between June 14 and 17, a wave of indignation and solidarity with the targeted
São Paulo demonstrators formed both online and in the streets of several cities28,
27
For a qualitative approach to users of the black bloc tactic (among the chief targets of this main-
stream media strategy of stigmatizing protestors as violent) in the 2013 protests, cf. Solano
et al. (2014).
28
For a more detailed treatment of the unique dynamics of each city in Brazil’s 2013 revolts, cf.
Medeiros (2017a).
such as Curitiba, Vitória, Rio de Janeiro, and Belo Horizonte, in a very similar
nature to what Castells (2012) documented in cases from Turkey and the Arab
world. In parallel, the mainstream media began to change its evaluation of the pro-
tests. Folha de São Paulo, for example, reported critically on the PM abuses against
its own employees—and also contributed to the spread of the protests’ demands.
As police repression of the protests momentarily lost all social legitimacy, the
demonstrations grew exponentially in scale: 100,000 people participated in the June
17 rally in São Paulo, 50,000 people in Recife (June 17), 100,000 in Vitória (June
20), 300,000 people in Rio de Janeiro (June 20), and 125,000 people in Belo
Horizonte (June 22).
It was precisely during that period, the second fortnight of June 2013, that
MPL-SP lost its protagonism on social media to other actors, such as Anonymous,
the Movement Against Corruption, and others (Pimentel & Silveira, 2013), and the
demands of the protests expanded beyond the issue of public transportation. Among
the many messages of the demonstrations were an association between spending on
sporting mega-events, corruption (between large civil construction companies and a
political system that was considered poorly representative), and underfinancing of
public services (which made the social rights to high-quality public health and edu-
cation precarious); a call for freedom of expression and opposition to police repres-
sion; resistance to a “Gay Cure” bill proposed by a religious federal congressman;
and a reaction against a proposed constitutional amendment (PEC 37) that would
strip the public prosecutor’s office of its investigative authority.
Unlike the mobilizations analyzed by Gerbaudo (2017), Brazil’s 2013 revolts did
not unfold exactly like a movement of the squares. The predominant form of collec-
tive action was not the occupation of urban spaces, such as plazas (Tahrir, Puerta del
Sol, Syntagma, Zucotti) and parks (Taksim Gezi), but rather street rallies (including
marches, processions, and blockages),29 at least if we consider the protests until the
29
As in the 2011 revolts (especially in Spain and the USA), there was a continuity between the
2011–2013 global protest wave and the so-called anti-globalization or alter-globalization move-
ment. Gerbaudo (2017) points out continuities and discontinuities between the 1999 Seattle pro-
tests and Occupy Wall Street: from what he calls anarcho-autonomism (with a minoritarian and
countercultural appeal) in the 1990s up until the development of an anarcho-populism (with a
majoritarian and popular appeal) in the 2010s. However, a history of Brazilian autonomism that
points out its unique qualities has yet to be written. In the Brazilian case, the “going to the people”
to which Gerbaudo refers did not play out in the direction of the horizontal assemblies that occurred
in Spain and the USA (inspired, in turn, by Egypt’s Tahrir Square) but rather in the direction of the
popular revolt against fare hikes (some elements of this story can be found in Vinicius, 2014). This
concept of popular revolt was fully developed in an article by two former MPL-SP activists
(Martins & Cordeiro, 2014). The movement uses this phrase to conceptualize the political lessons
from their struggles against fare hikes from Salvador (2003) and Florianópolis (2004–2005)
onward. The lessons center around the need for an autonomist collective that impedes any hijack-
ing of the struggle (e.g., by political groups more accustomed to negotiating with institutional poli-
tics), staying faithful to the concrete agenda, and continuing the protests up until the threshold of
disorder, a kind of dialectic between control and chaos. Public authorities, they wrote, only would
retreat if the population massively adhered to the collective’s call, creating a situation akin to a
blackmail based on revolt via disorder—that is, in which only the authorities’ retreat would restore
month of June. One exception was the city of Belo Horizonte, where anarchist col-
lectives proposed the creation of a Popular Horizontal Assembly, a self-managed
space that permitted a continuity of social struggle and collective action, oriented by
principles of horizontality and autonomy and inspired in the experience of the
Spanish Indignados, Occupy Wall Street, and OcupaBH (an encampment in front of
the Minas Gerais state legislature in late 2011 inspired by the US movement). The
sessions of this Horizontal Popular Assembly occurred every 2 weeks, with partici-
pation ranging from 50–100 to 2000 people (Ricci & Arley, 2014). It may have been
the most innovative experiment that emerged in the different cities that experienced
the Brazilian revolts of 2013.
Beginning in July, some groups of demonstrators left the streets and began to
occupy not plazas and parks, but city and state legislatures. In Belo Horizonte, city
hall was occupied for more than a week by people making demands related to pub-
lic transportation (Ricci & Arley, 2014); in Vitória, demonstrators occupied the state
legislature for 10 days to protest a lawmaker’s attempt to block the cancellation of a
toll on a bridge to the neighboring city, Vila Velha (Losekann, 2014); in Porto
Alegre, the city hall was occupied by the Bloc of Struggles for Public Transportation,
comprised of anarchists and activists from different leftist parties, demanding trans-
parency on bus company contracts and legislative bills to grant free fares to stu-
dents, the unemployed, and Indigenous and Quilombola Brazilians (Segarra, 2015);
and in São Luís, the city hall was occupied by demonstrators calling for better urban
transportation, land regularization, transparency on public contracts related to bus
company costs, and a pay raise of more than half of what city councilors granted
themselves (Castro & Rogens, 2014). City halls were also occupied in Rio de
Janeiro (in August) and Curitiba (in October). Although there are no complete lists
of how many occupations of legislatures occurred in the second half of 2013, a
media report in late July counted at least 23 city halls in all of Brazil’s five regions
(Carta Capital, 2013). These occupations made it clear that the 2013 revolts raised
a wide-reaching and profound critique of the Brazilian political system
(Nobre, 2013b).
In all, the June 2013 revolts gathered more than a million people, most of them
young university students from the middle and working classes, who took to the
streets in hundreds of cities across the entire country (Singer, 2013). Their main
demands had to do with the poor quality of life in big cities due to the urban ques-
tion; the poor quality of public services (starting with public transportation—awful
and expensive—but also encompassing public health and education); a political
order. Finally, it is interesting to note that urban revolts about public transportation have a century-
old history among Brazilian people’s movements, including the 1880 Vintém Revolt, the 1947 São
Paulo riots, the 1956 shutdown of the Rio de Janeiro trams, the 1959 Boats Revolt in Niterói, the
1981 Salvador riot, and many other episodes. This type of long-lasting moral economy (Thompson,
1991) around public transportation in Brazil is a theme that still remains to be studied in more
depth. Through a kind of historical sensibility, the MPL perceived this tendency and sought to
accumulate experiences and lessons until they arrived at the June 2013 revolts that decisively
began Brazil’s protest cycle of the 2010s.
system that was not very democratic or representative (in addition to being corrupt)
and that did not listen to citizens, who, when they decided to demonstrate, were
violently suppressed by Military Police sent by governments with low legitimacy
and trust; and, finally, against a developmentalist economic model that disrespected
the environment, violated Indigenous communities, and failed to alter the privileges
of the upper classes, even when it sought to distribute some income. That junction
of calls for social and civil rights with denunciations of corruption resulting from
the economic system’s capture of the political system suggests that the 2013 revolts
(as well as the new feminist activism that emerged in 2011 with the SlutWalks, the
strike cycle of 2012–2016, and Brazil’s high school occupations of 2015–2016,
among other social mobilizations) expressed the desire for a deepening of the post-
bourgeois public sphere in Brazil.
At the same time, as demands of the protests broadened over the month of June
2013, political and ideological heterogeneity among demonstrators also grew. This
caused conflicts, tensions, and violence between “reds” and “green-and-yellows”
and eventual calls for “military intervention” in the political system from far-right
sympathizers who were a minority at those rallies. According to research by
Datafolha, the ideological profile of the demonstrators (at least in the city of São
Paulo) was mostly centrist and leftist, with a right-wing minority (Datafolha, 2013).
That minority included mobilized pro-market activists and, above all, those con-
nected to Líber, such as Filipe Celeti and Joel Fonseca:
My activism was with Líber. I went to participate in the demonstration here. We made lots
of noise in São Paulo. We participated when the Marijuana March was prohibited, and they
changed the name to the Freedom March. We went with our posters. We did lots of demon-
strations at the Taxometer30 also. When it would break records, we were always there. We
always supported Tax Freedom day. We had [protests] at the gas station where we sold
gasoline at the price that would exist if not for taxes. And we participated in June, in the
demonstrations for 20 cents. There was almost a fight. We gathered some 100 people there,
and so when the people arrived calling for public transportation, we were at the MASP [the
São Paulo Museum of Art, located downtown] yelling for freedom in transport, calling to
end the contracts and have more companies providing services to make them cheaper. So,
in a way, there was a confrontation there, a principle of a fight, which didn’t happen. Líber
did it and organized it. It was Líber that called people to the street. (Filipe Celeti) (Rocha,
2019, pp. 158–159)
In 2013, we were able to organize, during the June protests, a libertarian demonstration
there too. So when the march was passing by Paulista Avenue, we were gathered at the
entrance to the MASP. The big protest began due to the issue of public transportation fares,
and we defended freedom of concurrence and competition in public transportation, and
even for cars, before Uber existed. Afterward, Uber emerged, this thing of a private driver
who offers transportation, but it was cool that the idea already existed there, without any
app. It was already present there. That was a very rich moment, a moment that had a lot of
optimism, also in relation to the project of the party itself. Líber was a really cool period.
I’m glad I dedicated myself to it. I was the one who really helped organize this demonstra-
tion that we had at the MASP, I and some other people.” (Joel Fonseca) (Rocha, 2019, p. 159)
Electronic ticker displayed in front of a downtown São Paulo building showing how much
30
Brazilians pay in taxes

In addition to the ultraliberals, a São Paulo businessman and enthusiast of the

military dictatorship, Marcello Reis, also took part in the June 2013 demonstrations.
Reis was the administrator of a Facebook community called “Revolted Online,” cre-
ated in 2010, the origins of which date back to an Orkut community founded in
2006 and used to search for pedophilia suspects on the Internet. The grandson of
members of the military, Reis was raised by his cousin’s husband, a Spanish anti-
strike metalworker who complained about the stoppages led by Lula in the 1980s,
calling him a “bearded toad” and a “tramp,” which Reis would call Lula from child-
hood (Pavarin, 2017). Revolted Online, unlike the communities that formed in the
mid-2000s, became part of the digital counterpublics linked to the new right’s for-
mation only after 2010, when its members began to express their disagreement with
corruption in politics and with the PT in a more explicit and aggressive way.
It was starting with the June 2013 demonstrations that discourses about anti-
corruption and opposition to the PT, which had already circulated on the Internet
since the mensalão scandal, became central to the new right’s formation, and
Revolted Online (ROL) was fundamental in this process. Reis was no novice on the
streets in 2013, having participated in anti-corruption protests in São Paulo, Brasília,
and Rio de Janeiro between 2011 and 2012. In 2012, after participating in a rally at
São Paulo’s city hall against the donation of a plot of land to the Lula Institute, he
became more popular online and started to organize small protests against Lula and
the Workers’ Party at the entrance to the MASP. In April 2013, for example, he
organized a protest of two dozen people who displayed a banner reading: “Lula, the
cancer of Brazil. Investigate the head of the gang.” Soon after, the banner would
spark an episode of violence after Reis decided to film the Free Fare Movement’s
June protest on Paulista Avenue, summoning his Internet followers to the streets.
Still, during June 2013, the ultraliberals united around Líber had yet to mix with
Reis’ followers. While the ultraliberals were more concerned with spreading the
message that pro-market reforms could resolve Brazil’s problems, Reis called for a
drastic solution, analogous to that supported by the police reporter Alborghetti in
2006: an army intervention “to wash out all of the corrupt and communist politi-
cians who occupy congress,” as an ROL member told Belgian researcher Fanny
Vrydagh in November 2015. Those differences between ultraliberals and interven-
tionists such as Reis traced back to earlier encounters on the streets, according to
Filipe Celeti, Líber’s coordinator in São Paulo:
We organized another demonstration, at the peak of that discussion about revisiting the his-
tory of the dictatorship. We did a march, but some people who had nothing to do with it
showed up, some crazy integralists, some fascistoids, lost skinheads, who started to say a
bunch of nonsense into the megaphone. So at one point, I took the megaphone and spoke
against them, too, and they ended up leaving. (Rocha, 2019, pp. 160–161)
In spite of those tensions, the June protests yielded an initiative that would later
become crucial for the ultraliberals: the idea to gather activists in a broader move-
ment that would participate in demonstrations and be unrestricted by the limitations
of other organizations created until that point. It was baptized the Free Brazil
Movement (MBL), a name mirroring the Free Fare Movement (MPL), and started
to take shape in June 2013, according to one of its founders, Fábio Ostermann:
I was discussing this idea with Juliano [Torres]: to create a movement exclusively focused
on activism, and to gather people who support the cause of liberty to mobilize, to do pro-
tests, petitions, demonstrations, that kind of thing that the media likes and which has the
potential to boost liberal ideas. I had seen lots of liberals out there who wanted to do some-
thing, but the current institutions end up not allowing active participation of so many peo-
ple, because each organization has its own directors. Free Order and Students for Liberty
(Brazil) couldn’t do this, because it wasn’t their focus, nor was it the focus of other institu-
tions like Líber, which was a party in formation at the time and also shouldn’t get involved
in order to avoid accusations of partyfication. There were people who wanted to participate,
and we needed to find a way of channeling this enthusiasm. So from there, we started to
work on this on June 16 and 17, 2013. (Rocha, 2019, p. 161)
Through the fledgling MBL, the ultraliberal activists were able to organize them-
selves better in order to participate in the many protests that June in all of Brazil.
But at the end of the year, the movement’s Facebook page, which had around 20,000
likes, was abandoned by its founders, who moved on to dedicate themselves to other
activities. Fábio Ostermann, for example, became engaged in the Rio Grande do Sul
state legislative campaign of his personal friend, politician Marcel Van Hattem,31
and Juliano Torres turned his attention back to Students for Liberty (Brazil). In any
case, the June 2013 demonstrations made it clear to members of the nascent new
right that it was possible to gather large numbers of people at street protests for
demands that were not left-wing, given demonstrators’ growing ideological hetero-
geneity over time. Furthermore, the protests opened a political opportunity for
right-wing movements in that they magnified the perception that corruption was
Brazil’s main problem, according to research by Datafolha. They also caused an
abrupt popularity drop for Dilma Rousseff, who until then had a positive rating from
around two-thirds of Brazilians (Datafolha, 2013). These factors would become
important contributors to a legitimacy crisis for the pact of 1988.
All this considered, while June 2013 may have allowed for a significant advance
in the new right’s formation, it is undoubtable that their crucial political opportunity
came afterward: in the 2014 electoral process and the reelection of Dilma Rousseff,
as we will see next.
31
Marcel Van Hattem has master’s degrees in political science and journalism and, in 2004, at the
age of 18, was elected a city councilor of Dois Irmãos, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. He ran
for state legislature and in 2014 was named the first alternate for the Progressive Party (PP), serv-
ing from February 2015 to March 2018. As of late 2020, he was affiliated with the NEW Party, and
in the 2018 elections, he was the highest-voted state legislature candidate in Rio Grande do Sul
with more than 394,000 votes. He became known in the legislature for his speeches in favor of the
ideas of liberty and against statist and collectivist ideologies. See https://novo.org.br/processo_
seletivo/marcel-van-hattem/
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Chapter 4
Bolsonaro’s Rise
Signs that a new protest cycle had begun in Brazil dated back to 2011 and 2012,
when there were disruptive strikes, SlutWalk rallies, demonstrations against corrup-
tion, and protests organized by the Free Fare Movement (MPL) federation of collec-
tives. But those demonstrations were locally based, and so only in 2013, when new
demonstrations against fare hikes gained mass support, did the protest cycle truly
develop, catalyzed by the MPL’s tactic of popular revolt seeking to antagonize
established political actors.
Perceptions of the protests changed as they expanded. While some in society first
perceived the intensification of conflicts as the spread of “disorder,” this shifted.
Demonstrations can expand as a protest cycle unfolds and spreads; whereas first
protests are carried out by social groups with less influence in the political-
institutional arena, known as early risers, they might later be joined by latecomers
who are better organized and better socially situated. The early riser of the Brazilian
cycle, the MPL, linked to Brazilian autonomism, defended concrete demands (the
reduction of urban transport fares) through direct action (a repertoire of street pro-
tests) and the tactic of popular revolt (the threat of chaos). The movement paved the
way for latecomers by demonstrating that the political system was vulnerable and
could be challenged through disruptive tactics, resulting in palpable gains.
At first, many leftist groups that opposed the Workers’ Party—autonomists, anar-
chists, Trotskyists, environmentalists, and feminists, among others, grouped in an
“autonomous field”—were highly visible in their calls to deepen Brazil’s post-
bourgeois public sphere. However, as time passed, parties linked to the so-called
“democratic-popular” field such as the PT and the Communist Party of Brazil
(PCdoB), unions such as CUT and the Center of Workers of Brazil (CTB), student
groups such as the Brazilian Union of Secondary Students (UBES) and the National
Union of Students (UNE), and feminist organizations such as the Brazilian Union
of Women (UBM) and the feminist group of the Union of Socialist Youth (UJS)
assumed protagonism within progressive forces, and leftist opposition groups were
repressed, isolated, or reintegrated. Once the democratic-popular field recomposed

Switzerland AG 2021
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96 4 Bolsonaro’s Rise
itself, it created coalitions like the Brazil Popular Front and the People Without Fear
Front, drawing the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) closer to the PT once again,
despite the fact that it was originally founded by splitting off from the PT. As the
protest cycle continued, partisan youth collectives challenged autonomists for
space, and after 2013, political parties were more present and protagonistic in street
rallies convoked by the left. Unions, for their part, had an important role in organiz-
ing a national “general strike” on April 28, 2017. As the cycle progressed, the auton-
omous field and the democratic-popular field started to compete for support from
the same constituency.
According to political scientist Sidney Tarrow (1989), the dynamic of a protest
cycle necessarily includes a diversification of issues and claims. As the demands
diversify and claims become less proactive and more reactive, competition among
different sociopolitical actors intensifies, resulting in ideological polarization and
radicalization with a spiral of violence, and/or institutionalization of the groups
mobilized during the protests.
This chapter will address the period of the Brazilian protest cycle that went from
2014 to 2018, focusing on demonstrations related to the right. It bears remembering,
however, that different strains of the left were also active during the same period.
Occupation as a form of unconventional and disruptive collective action gained new
momentum after having been used at the start of the cycle, with 2011 encampments
inspired by Occupy Wall Street in Brazilian capital cities and, beginning in June
2013, occupations of city and state legislatures. In 2015 and 2016, public schools
and state secretariats of education were occupied to protest regressive education
reforms (Campos et al., 2016; Medeiros et al., 2019). State headquarters of the
National Arts Foundation were occupied in the first half of 2016 to protest the
Michel Temer government’s abolition of the Ministry of Culture, followed by fed-
eral high schools and public universities later that year. Thus, we can view 2016,
which was also marked by a historic defeat for the institutional left in Dilma
Rousseff’s impeachment, as the peak of the protest cycle.
During the 2014 to 2018 period, the spread of a culture of protest throughout
Brazilian society was evident. As in the Italian case analyzed by Tarrow (1989), it is
possible to identify latecomers: old and new middle class groups entered the scene
upon perceiving, based on the early risers’ actions, that the political system could be
challenged without major punishment. In addition, Tarrow’s hypothesis that middle
class, more educated latecomers tend to be less disruptive was also confirmed, con-
sidering pro-impeachment demonstrators’ practice of taking selfie photos with mili-
tary police during rallies, something unthinkable for left-wing activists.
The Brazilian case also confirmed theoretical predictions regarding an increase
in ideological conflict. After all, it was possible to observe not only growing antago-
nism and radicalism among mobilized groups and inside ideologically similar fields
but also an increase in political violence. Examples of this in 2018 included the
assassination of socialist city councilor Marielle Franco on March 14; the armed
attack on Lula’s presidential campaign bus as it passed through the state of Paraná
on March 27, before the presidential campaign had officially begun (Krakovics &
Roxo, 2018); and, finally, the attempt to assassinate far-right presidential candidate
4.1 The Impeachment Campaign (2014–2016) 97
Bolsonaro with a knife in the city of Juiz de Fora on September 6, during the official
campaign period.1
Starting in 2017, the protest cycle declined, especially considering the phenom-
enon of the 2012–2016 strike cycle. The decrease in strikes, with the exception of
the 2017 general strike, is likely related to the Temer administration’s labor reform,
which left unions and their federations more fragile through a vast withdrawal of
labor rights. Despite this, Brazil saw relevant protests in 2018, including a large
truck drivers’ strike in the first half of the year and #NotHim protests in the second
half, convoked by autonomous women, collectives, and feminist organizations
opposed to Bolsonaro’s candidacy and which had unprecedented reach and popular
support (Rolnik, 2018).
Having acknowledged this diversity of protests, in this chapter, we will focus
above all on actions by the right. In the first section, we will use interviews, field
observations, and surveys to trace how demonstrations in favor of Rousseff’s
impeachment combined anti-PT sentiment, anti-party sentiment, and the issue of
corruption. At those protests, anger directed at the PT and a deep distrust of tradi-
tional politics coexisted with the participants’ joy in socializing with each other in a
context that was mostly socially homogeneous. In the second section, drawing
together different qualitative data, we argue that the new right sought different
methods to channel the energy of the streets into institutional politics, given the
challenge of immense mistrust in traditional politics among their base. We also
discuss how Bolsonaro’s candidacy was able to bring together discourse that was
aggressive and violent but also irreverent, rebellious, and transgressive—transmit-
ting confidence to wide swathes of the electorate who saw Bolsonaro as someone
sincere, authentic, and honest. At the end of the cycle, the 2018 elections confirmed
that Brazil had shifted to the right, pulled by a far-right political project that presents
itself as anti-system and aims to destroy the 1988 democratic pact that made it pos-
sible for a post-bourgeois public sphere to develop in the country, albeit very slowly
and ridden with countless obstacles.
4.1 The Impeachment Campaign (2014–2016)
Dilma Rousseff’s 2014 reelection was undoubtedly the crucial political opportunity
for the new right and Bolsonarism to consolidate. That year, Rousseff suffered an
abrupt drop in popularity, down from an around two-thirds approval rating months
prior to June 2013 (Datafolha, 2013). Corruption became understood as one of the
main problems in the country (Singer, 2018), and on Facebook, tens of millions of
people2 were reached by pages that spread discourses against the PT and theses
1
Data compiled by the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) also show a considerable increase in
violence in the countryside, especially between 2015 and 2017 (CPT, 2018).
2
At the time, Facebook was accessed by 68.5% of the 85.9 million Brazilians who used the Internet
(Santos Junior, 2016).
supported by Olavo de Carvalho, among them the pages of Brazilian Social

Democracy Party (PSDB) politicians and pages linked to Jair Bolsonaro, already
nicknamed “Bolsolegend” (Santos Junior, 2016). The crisis of Lulism was looming
as leftist groups abandoned protests against corruption in the streets and online,
creating an opening for anti-PT forces to completely take ownership of the issue and
for the nascent new right to enter into combat formation. A campaign for the São
Paulo state legislature played a key role in this process, that of businessman Paulo
Batista, hero of the “Privatizing Laser” video.
Although ultraliberal candidates had run for office in previous years,3 the
Privatizing Laser campaign was the first that unified all of the ultraliberal activists
in a single project. Most of them had been involved with the creation of Líber. The
campaign’s hero, Paulo Batista, was a small business owner from the real estate sec-
tor who had served as deacon of a local church for 10 years and whose father had
been a city councilman in Valinhos, in the state of São Paulo. Inspired by his father’s
political experience, Batista, who began to consider himself liberal beginning
around 2006 based on readings in a college marketing course, decided to run for
office without any help from religious groups. He said he did not agree with their
political practices. Soon, he found refuge in the Progressive Republican Party
(PRP), which allowed him to mount a candidacy with independence.
As part of campaign activities beginning in 2012 in a law firm in the city of
Vinhedo, 7 kilometers from Valinhos, Batista made conduct with activists in a
nascent group called Liberal Renewal. The movement was composed of various
Líber members and captained by Renan Santos, who had participated in student
activism at USP’s law school and had taken an active part in the June 2013 demon-
strations, denouncing proposed constitutional amendment PEC 37, which would
curtail the public prosecutors’ investigation powers (O Globo 2013). Santos intro-
duced Batista to his brother Alexandre Santos, who owned a São Paulo video pro-
duction company called ANC, and to Marcelo Faria, who he had met in June 2013
and who in 2014 founded and began to direct the São Paulo Liberal Institute.
Based on ideas from the activists engaged in Batista’s campaign, Alexandre
Santos’ company created an online campaign in which Batista appeared in short
videos dressed as an ultraliberal superhero who shot “privatizing” laser bolts at
communist cities, transforming them into highly developed ones. In the words of
Fábio Ostermann, who started to accompany the group in 2014:
In 2014, everyone had their own different focus. I had a focus on Marcel’s [Van Hattem]
campaign. During the campaign, the people who were coordinating Paulo Batista’s cam-
paign found me on the internet. They already followed my work, something like that, and I
ended up getting to know them here in São Paulo. [Paulo Batista] was basically a candidate
that they took and decided to do a mega-innovative and iconoclastic campaign to really try
to make a case study. It was a group that had a video production company and some ideas
in mind. They were inclined toward liberal values, they liked what I did, they liked the work
3
Such as Bernardo Santoro, who ran for Rio de Janeiro city council in the PSL in 2012, or Marcel
Van Hattem, who began his political career in Rio Grande do Sul as a city councilor of Dois Irmãos
in 2004, when he was only 18.
that I was doing with Marcel, and they invited me to give a talk at an event of theirs here in
São Paulo. I got there, and the poster of the event was my face along with the other speak-
ers, so, man, I really felt like someone important. And I went there, I spoke, I met them, I
thought they were great people. I gave some tips about Paulo Batista’s campaign, but they
had very few resources. It was a start-up campaign. So from there I liked the people, I
thought it was interesting, and there was a connection on vision, about the need to do politi-
cal communication in an innovative form. Different, but in a much more iconoclastic way.
(Rocha, 2019, p. 163–164)
Batista’s candidacy, despite being officially housed in the PRP, was understood
by its organizers as belonging to Líber, such that it soon became widely known
among the ultraliberals, as Batista affirmed:
The group was from Líber, with the components of information, ideas, liberalism, libertari-
anism: Paulo Batista, Rubens, and Jeferson, with the role of organization of strategy, judi-
cial component, political positioning with the Party; and Renan sought out Marcelo to
understand how to deal with this, with regards to media, and then Renan said: “Look, my
brother Alexandre has a production company, ANC. What if we unite Rubens’ firm, Líber,
Marcelo, and ANC?” Perfect. I debuted supporting the Republican Party, but I used the logo
and the badge of Líber. Líber had a candidate, it was Paulo Batista. And then we made a 30
second video that went viral. There were more than a million accesses in three days, and
from day to night I became a celebrity. That campaign was the campaign in which the liber-
als emerged in the Brazilian political context. I, Marcel Van Hattem, Adolfo Sachsida,
Paulo Eduardo Martins, we were the vanguard of it. Rodrigo Saraiva Marinho helped. Hélio
Beltrão helped. The Privatizing Laser became, at some point, a project of the liberals,
because it was a voice here in São Paulo against everything that was happening. (Rocha,
2019, p. 164)
In addition to the videos, the activists united by the Privatizing Laser campaign
began to organize protests and public demonstrations in the city of São Paulo,
attracting other people and groups:
The first rally that we did was a protest at the door of [the Embassy of] Venezuela. We
brought a truck of toilet paper pallets to the front of the Embassy and we did a protest there,
against Venezuela. It resulted in police, in [coverage in newspaper] Folha de São Paulo, it
attracted a group from a party called NEW, which was so new that I didn’t know it. They
showed up and said, “We love your work,” so much that I helped them get more than 300
signatures to officially register the party afterward. The campaign was an adventure per
day! I went to confront the people from the PSTU [Unified Socialist Workers’ Party] and
PCO [Workers’ Cause Party] in the center of the city, with a megaphone, and I almost got
beat up. I went inside the main committees of the PT and PCdoB to deliver a letter of invita-
tion for them to supply toilet paper to Venezuela. We took an inflatable boat to the door of
the Cuban consulate. I was going to skydive over USP—and the parachute was black and
yellow, the color of anarcho-capitalism—on that day, thank God, it rained. Several people
collaborated on the ideas. For example, at USP it was Renan, Venezuela was Marcelo from
ILISP [São Paulo Liberal Institute], the Cuba idea was from the Líber people, and after this
first Venezuela event, there was one more piece, they introduced me to Pedro [D’Eyrot]
from the band Bonde do Rolê, and Pedro was very important for the campaign, and was
very important for the liberal movement, because Pedro is an artist and he has a totally
distinct vision from the rest of people. (Rocha, 2019, pp. 164–165)
In spite of having taken off as an Internet phenomenon and having appeared on

comedian Danilo Gentili’s talk show on major television network SBT, Batista
received 16,800 votes and was not elected. Still, his campaign was able to bring
together most of the mobilized ultraliberal activists in the country, who, during the
elections, combined forces with other groups aiming to prevent Rousseff’s reelec-
tion. Those other groups included Come To The Street, which was created in
September 2014 by businesspeople and other professionals.4 There were, however,
divergences among the groups. While the members of Come To The Street identi-
fied more with the candidate opposing Rousseff, Aécio Neves of the PSDB, the
ultraliberals’ support for Neves was totally pragmatic to avoid Rousseff’s reelec-
tion. Meanwhile, Revolted Online, led by Marcello Reis, refused to participate in
street demonstrations against Rousseff’s reelection because they considered PSDB
and PT politicians “flour from the same bag” (Vrydagh, 2020).
In any case, at the time, the opposition thought Rousseff’s defeat was a given.
Denunciations from the anti-corruption probe Operation Car Wash, which had
begun in March 2014, hit the PT dead-on, after its image had already been eroded
by the mensalão trial in 2012. Rousseff’s victory was so unexpected for her adver-
saries that soon afterward, suspicion arose that there could have been election fraud,
even without any evidence. That hypothesis was embraced by the losing candidate,
Aécio Neves, whose party requested a hearing with the Superior Electoral Court
(TSE), inflaming reactions on the part of stauncher PT opponents and creating a
favorable climate for those who wanted to protest the situation in any way.
Without hesitating, the core of the group organized around Paulo Batista, accus-
tomed to conducting more aggressive protests against the left,5 seized the occasion
4
“Come To The Street” was created in September 2014 by financial sector workers and business-
people who knew Rogério Chequer and Collin Butterfield and who lacked previous political expe-
rience. They were apparently unconnected to members of the nascent new right, but they were
unhappy with corruption and the economic policies associated with the PT governments. The
group, which was identified as ideologically liberal, united with the aim of holding large street
protests inspired by the June 2013 revolts. The movement was originally called The Enough!
Movement. Aiming to mobilize thousands of people to the streets, the movement’s leaders recorded
a video of a flash mob on Paulista Avenue that was intended to go viral on social media, showing
their indignation against the government. However, after gathering around 30,000 Brazilian reais
(around $13,000 at the time) of their own money and producing the video, including arranging for
a drone, they concluded it had been a fiasco and a waste of money. The video had very few views,
and the color of the flash mob participants’ T-shirts, orange, was confused by viewers with red, the
color of their adversaries. But the group did not give up. A month later, through intense use of
social media, they finally were able to mobilize 10,000 people unsatisfied with the PT on the eve
of presidential election. The demonstration was ridiculed by the British magazine The Economist
(2014), which called it The Cashmere Revolution in reference to demonstrators’ high socioeco-
nomic class and linked the movement to Aécio Neves’ (PSDB) campaign. Information from the
book Come To The Street (Chequer & Butterfield, 2016).
5
“I and Renan [Santos] were arguing about some projects, Renan pushing much more than me,
always pushing much more, more aggressively. For him, it was not enough for me to be there with
a megaphone. He wanted me to stick my hand in people’s faces. Things that sometimes weren’t
necessary. It’s not my personality. Sometimes, I was obliged to adopt [a more aggressive tone],
because the situation called for it. There were ten people in front of me, me alone, Renan, and
Pedro. If I did not take a leadership position, and acted tough in order to prevent a fight, we three
would have gotten beat up. So I had to break from my personal paradigms, sometimes, to defend
myself and to defend them” (Paulo Batista, São Paulo) (Rocha, 2019, p. 166).
to organize a demonstration demanding Rousseff’s impeachment. It was only 6 days

after her victory announcement. The protest was announced on Batista’s Facebook
page, had 100,000 confirmations online, and received support from Olavo de
Carvalho. Still, at the time, the idea of impeachment—though it had been murmured
in legislative circles to imply a threat to the president—was perceived as radical and
counterproductive by PT adversaries (Lima, 2014) and the Come To The Street
leaders, Rogério Chequer and Collin Butterfield. Both looked negatively on the
November 1 demonstration that Batista convoked against Rousseff, believing it
risked losing the political capital built in the streets until that point.6
Despite this, the protest drew around 2500 people, according to press reports.
They carried Brazilian flags and signs with messages such as “Out with the PT,”
“Out with Dilma,” and “Out with the Corrupt,” marking the beginning of the pro-
impeachment campaign (Chapola, 2014; Uribe et al., 2014). Participants included
groups and movements that were initially not part of the ultraliberal activist net-
works, such as military interventionists and members of Reis’ Revolted Online
group. Reis brought a truck with loudspeakers and claimed responsibility for orga-
nizing the demonstration but was booed by participants when he proposed a military
intervention, making him refocus his speech on ousting Rousseff (Vrydagh, 2020).
It was the first time that the ultraliberals, Revolted Online, and iconic figures such
as Carvalho and Eduardo Bolsonaro—one of Jair’s sons, who had just been elected
to his first term as a federal congressman—united around a common cause, a mile-
stone in the consolidation of the new right.
Revolted Online called for a second protest on Paulista Avenue on November 15,
15 days after the first demonstration. For the occasion, the activists from the
Privatizing Laser campaign decided to resurrect the Free Brazil Movement that
Fábio Ostermann had created during the June 2013 demonstrations. According to
Paulo Batista, they swapped it in for Renan Santos’ Liberal Renewal moniker,
which “had not caught on”:
At that moment, it had already been decided that the name Renew was not going to catch
on. They needed a new name. So between [November] 1 and 15, the date of the second
protest, it was decided that the name Free Brazil Movement would be used, from Fábio’s
movement. Really, it was just a website. Fábio called and said, “Look, guys, we already
have a movement. It’s all set up, it’s really simple, and it’s a really easy name, Free Brazil
Movement. What do you think?” “Man, nice.” Fábio is a sociologist, really well thought of,
a guy that is super respected in the area: “Let’s go with Fábio’s idea.” Everyone was in. So
at the second demonstration, we went to the street as the Free Brazil Movement.” (Rocha,
2019, pp. 167–168)
6
“Obviously, the repercussions of the rally were extremely harmful. It created an idea that Aécio’s
voters didn’t know how to lose. The PT supporters swam way ahead with this position from the
demonstrators. We watched all of this incredulously. ‘What are these movements doing?’ we asked
ourselves. The worst was that the press put all of the movements, participants or not, in the same
basket. As if we, who had carried out a beautiful and peaceful movement before the runoff election,
had now done all of that. […] We decided to do something to make it clear that we did not agree
with the position of those demonstrators” (Chequer & Butterfield, 2016, p. 77).
While at the first pro-impeachment demonstration, Eduardo Bolsonaro was the

only politician, the second on November 15 and a third on December 6 began to
gain support from leaders of parties and traditional political groups, according to
Paulo Batista:
We went to the second demonstration as the Free Brazil Movement. We got on top of the
truck and a group from [the party] Solidarity got on the truck. I got off, and then Renan said:
“Man, you’re fighting with the guys who are helping us. They’re our friends.” I said, “No.
Not my friend, no. I want a reduction of the State. I fight against the involvement of political
parties in situations of popular decision, and you bring these guys here on top of the truck?”
And at the third demonstration, I realized that my position as a protagonist had been
changed to that of a mere supporter. At the third demonstration, again the people from
Solidarity [were] passing out stickers, and Serra [José Serra, a PSDB politician] was on top
of the Come To The Street truck. And Serra took the microphone and said: “Look, I want to
thank here all of the parties that back and develop this initiative of support…”. So then I
took the microphone, cut him off, and said, “Look, wait there. This is not a party demonstra-
tion. This is a people’s demonstration. Parties do not have any merit here. The work was
done by the people. If there are merits, the merits are the people. Unlike other demonstra-
tions, we have a situation that is inverted here. In past demonstrations, people came out to
support the parties. Today, the party comes to support the people. Today, truly, we have a
people’s demonstration. The expression of what the people want.” […] It was a really bad
feeling. The next week, I said that I wanted to dissociate from the movement. (Rocha,
2019, p. 168)
In spite of some low points, the protests continued through the start of the follow-
ing year, amid an economic downturn and the development of the Operation Car
Wash investigations. Because of the extensive media coverage of Car Wash, its key
characters—above all, judge Sergio Moro, who became synonymous with the oper-
ation—soon became icons among activists against corruption, which 21% of
Brazilians identified as the country’s main problem at the time. That number cer-
tainly helps explain the success of rallies organized across the country by the MBL,
Come To The Street, and Revolted Online for March 15, 2015. Planned far in
advance, they drew thousands of people, motivated above all by opposition to the
PT and by the revolt against corruption (Telles, 2016). At São Paulo’s protest,
according to the Military Police, the number of demonstrators on Paulista Avenue
hit one million. Research institute Datafolha calculated 250,000 people—a lower
number but still very large (Tatagiba et al., 2015).
A survey conducted at the protest by Datafolha found that most participants were
of the middle and upper middle class. Among interviewees, 7% said that they earned
up to two times the minimum wage,7 22% between two and five times, and 27%
between five and ten times. A full 41% reported earning more than ten times the
minimum wage. This socioeconomic profile remained quite stable in all of the pro-
impeachment protests, according to available surveys.8 Even more striking than this
7
Brazil’s minimum wage in 2015 was fixed at 788 reais, around $250 in March of that year.
8
According to another study by students of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation-São Paulo (FGV-SP)
and USP’s School of Economics, Management, Accounting, coordinated by professors Cláudio
Couto and Eduardo de Rezende Francisco, nine districts in the city of São Paulo accounted for a
third of the almost 400 interviewees: Vila Mariana, Moema, Bela Vista, Jardim Paulista, Tatuapé,
social homogeneity was the strong family-friendly nature of the protest, which
could be seen in people’s behavior. What was most visible were entire families:
fathers, mothers, grandparents, aunts and uncles, adolescents, small children, and
even dogs. It was rare to see groups of friends or collectives (not of young people or
students, nor of people of the same profession, as was common in many left-wing
demonstrations), just lots of families that, apparently, had gone together or agreed
to meet up on site.9
Another striking characteristic of the São Paulo protest that differentiated it from
traditional left-wing equivalents: there was no route or march. During the demon-
stration, people did not move collectively from the entrance of the MASP art
museum, the official starting point, to another location. Instead, there were simulta-
neous and individualized flows in all directions (downtown to uptown and vice
versa) on all streets and sidewalks. In some places, there were so many people that
the confusion of comings and goings completely blocked movement. There was no
main geographic focus point for organizers: there were several sound cars, parades
proceeded one alongside the other, or even far apart from each other, with different
flags and slogans that did not necessarily match other flags and posters car-
ried nearby.
The people at the demonstration did not appear to be motivated only by the griev-
ances alone but also by social interaction in and of itself. It gave the impression of
a Sunday afternoon leisure opportunity. In addition to protesting, people were going
on a walk, meeting up with family members, taking photos to post on social media,
and purchasing drinks, food, and flags. Still, this social dynamic did not yield a
totally relaxed atmosphere, as some demonstrators behaved with aggression and
violence.
One episode that revealed this dynamic occurred near the MASP, suddenly inter-
rupting the mood of the promenade. A group started to yell fiercely, “Son of a bitch,
son of a bitch,” after someone extended a red flag in a window on Paulista Avenue.10
Reactions of cursing spread through the crowd, followed by yells of “Our flag will
never be red,” “Jump!” and “Go to Cuba!” The cries continued until the resident
removed the flag, which was loudly celebrated. Minutes later, families had returned
to their normal conversations, and the celebratory mood was restored. Other epi-
sodes of harassment appeared in coverage by left-wing alternative media, including
the case of journalists from the magazine Carta Capital, who were harassed from
Pinheiros, Morumbi, Jabaquara, and Consolação—all of them regions where the traditional middle
class is highly concentrated, revealing relative social homogeneity and intense participation by
almost all of the traditional middle class. Data is available at https://pesquisa15-03.blogspot.com/;
the categorization of neighborhoods into districts (wider territories) was done afterward, as it is not
present in the original spreadsheet.
9
These qualitative observations and descriptions are present in an unpublished article by Antonia
M. Campos and Jonas Medeiros (titled “Political Culture and Conservatism in Brazil Today:
Reflections About the Short and Long Term” and dated March 31, 2015). We thank Antonia
M. Campos for the permission to reproduce a slightly altered version of the observations from São
Paulo pro-impeachment protests.
10
Afterward, it was possible to discover on social media that it was a red towel.
the MBL sound car. One of the movement’s leaders that day, Kim Kataguiri, said
“The PT has to be shot in the head” (Carta Capital 2015). Even small children
embraced the atmosphere, singing along with their family members, “Lula, booze-
hound, return my money,” or yelling “Son of a bitch” on their own, watched admir-
ingly by their parents.
When grievances could be observed on posters, banners, and slogans that were
yelled or sung, what stood out the most was a lack of pluralistic and proposal-based
demands. The focus was clear: anti-PT sentiment combined with anti-corruption,
seen through a moralist prism. Most common were posters with the words “corrup-
tion,” “thievery,” “ethics,” “moral,” “shame,” “cleaning,” and “clean out,” and
phrases such as “Out with Dilma/Lula,” “Corrupt,” “The PT is Brazil’s cancer,”
“Lula is Brazil’s cancer,” “Dilma is robbing my pride of being Brazilian,” etc.
Common watchwords and chants included “Lula, boozehound, return my money,”
“Out with the PT,” “Dilma, go fuck yourself,” the national anthem, and, “I am
Brazilian, with lots of pride and lots of love.”
While social media activity preceding the demonstration had focused on memes
and content that suggested a climate of social chaos and economic collapse, the
streets evoked an anti-PT sentiment almost exclusively centered on the issue of cor-
ruption. Posters very rarely included the specific critiques that were widely circulat-
ing online about the high cost of electricity; inflation; the price of gasoline; a truck
drivers’ strike;11 public policies like the Bolsa Família anti-poverty program; a fed-
eral fund for financing private university fees (FIES); a government program that
brought doctors, including foreign doctors, to understaffed public clinics (More
Doctors); racial affirmative action quotas in public universities; and the “Schools
Without Homophobia” educational materials. Furthermore, there were practically
no posters that mentioned institutions:12 issues like reform of the political system
were almost absent, and calls for presidential impeachment were expressed on post-
ers and in chants as simply “Out with the PT” and “Out with Dilma.”
The anti-PT character of the event was remarkable, especially when compared
with the plurality of issues at the June 2013 revolts. June 2013 included chants of
“more health and education” and “FIFA-quality education (or hospitals),” along
with other calls for social rights and better public services that were absent in March
2015. In March 2015, the call “Out with Dilma” was open enough to encompass
different social actors who had not yet reached a consensus around the issue—the
motto acted much more like a shared identity among the predominant social group
at the rally than a clear and institutionally expressed demand. The colors, stickers,
and strips of cloth tied around people’s heads recalled a group of soccer fans; cre-
ative posters were celebrated and photographed, and the parading of a large green,
blue, and yellow banner was cheered, such that there did not appear to be a rigid
11
This strike had begun in February 2015.
12
Participant observation at the protest yielded sight of only one poster citing Congress and two
citing the public prosecutor’s office. One accused attorney general Rodrigo Janot of “cowardice;”
the other called him a “hero.”
separation between the motives for the protest, the watchwords, and the collective
identity of many protestors.
Some references to anti-communism appeared, as did mentions of Cuba and
Venezuela and hostility toward the color red as a kind of symbol of evil. Still it was
anti-PT sentiment specifically that appeared to focus the cathartic dimension of the
rally. That catharsis was also due to the discovery of the joy experienced in the pos-
sibility of occupying streets, which had been introduced by the June 2013 revolts
and small right-wing protests in late 2014. What remained undefined at that initial
moment of expansion of street demonstrations organized by the right was the ques-
tion of who would be able to give shape to this intense anti-PT sentiment and trans-
late it into organized political actions. It is telling that the specific proposal of
impeachment was not yet appearing in chants and signs, though it did appear in
survey responses: In April 2015, 63% of Brazilians said that Rousseff, popularly
known simply as Dilma, should suffer impeachment, a rate that rose 3% by that
August, when 71% disapproved of her government (G1 2015).
After their success in terms of mobilization and of media coverage in newspa-
pers, magazines, and television networks—absent in the 2014 protests—the Free
Brazil Movement was emboldened to call for another round of nationwide demon-
strations the following month, on April 12. Revolted Online embraced the idea
again, whereas Come To The Street thought it might be too early for the move, but
participated nonetheless. In São Paulo, estimates of crowd size from the Military
Police and Datafolha, while they did not align on March 15 or April 12 in terms of
absolute number of people, both concluded that the number of participants fell by
more than half, at the minimum. The PM said that participation fell from one mil-
lion to 275,000 people: Datafolha, from 210,000 to 100,000. This was still a signifi-
cant number of participants, reflecting, above all, the new right’s unprecedented
ability to convoke a mass protest.
In São Paulo, in addition to the decrease in protest size on April 12, it was pos-
sible to see a change in the event’s dynamic. While on March 15, people shared
emotions in a cathartic manner, that experience appeared less present a month later.
Groups of families and friends seemed to stick more to themselves, interacting less
with the sound cars and with discourse chanted by leaders, which did not appear to
excite most participants much. The thrill of the novelty of the March 15 protest
appeared to have passed; in addition, at that moment, people did not actually expect
Rousseff to leave power. While 63% of Brazilians called for impeachment, 64%
believed that it was not a real possibility. For that, the political system would need
to send a clear signal, which brings us to the issue of the protest leaders and their
bridges to professional politicians.
At São Paulo’s April demonstration, it was clear that organizers were more
numerous and dispersed. While in March, only three leaders were more visible—
Revolted Online, the Free Brazil Movement, and Come To The Street—this protest
included the groups Liberal Movement Wake Up Brazil, Nationalist Democratic
Union, the March 15 Civil Movement, I Want To Defend Myself Movement,
Rightward Brazil, the Federalist Movement, and the Nonpartisan School Movement,
in addition to groups in favor of a military intervention: SOS Armed Forces,
Constitutional Military Intervention, and Military Intervention Now. Members of

SOS Armed Forces and the group’s posters appeared more widespread, as the group
had rented not one, but two sound cars, in addition to printing several signs that
demonstrators carried around.
In another change, a few professional politicians participated in April. Former
federal congressman Arnaldo Madeira (PSDB, from the state of São Paulo) partici-
pated anonymously, whereas FHC-era justice minister Miguel Reale Junior, who
would later become an author of the motion to impeach Rousseff, climbed to the top
of the Come To The Street sound car. Jair Bolsonaro, then a federal congressman
(PP, from the state of Rio de Janeiro) was hailed at the Revolted Online sound car as
a potential 2018 presidential candidate (Hupsel Filho, 2015). Bolsonaro was one of
the rare politicians, if not the only one, whom the public applauded at the pro-
impeachment demonstrations, unlike other opposition members. Through his social
media activity, especially beginning in 2013 with the launch of his Facebook fan
page, Bolsonaro had become more widely known and garnered new supporters. The
following year, helped by a macro-political scenario of wear and tear for the PT, he
received the most votes of any Rio de Janeiro candidate for the Chamber of Deputies,
four times more than his average vote haul over the course of his political career.
Bolsonarism had begun to consolidate, helped by the developments of Operation
Car Wash.
At that point, Bolsonaro had never been formally accused of any kind of misuse
of funds,13 which helped disconnect his image from that of traditional politics,
thought to be synonymous with corruption. As such, his presidential candidacy
would be defined by his anti-PT, anti-party, and anti-system discourse, which paral-
leled demonstrators’ sentiments. Traditional centrist and right-wing parties such as
the PMDB and the PSDB were also attacked at these early 2015 demonstrations, as
were the press, Congress, and the Supreme Court, institutions that would later
become Bolsonaro’s open enemies. Although demonstrators saw the PT as the nerve
center of corruption, especially after the start of Operation Car Wash, other parties
were viewed as part of the same corrupt system. In the understanding of most pro-
testors, anti-PT sentiment, anti-party sentiment, and being anti-corruption were inti-
mately connected and reinforced each other, as was possible to detect in a series of
public opinion surveys during the demonstrations that Esther Solano
co-coordinated.
At the April 12 demonstration, while the anti-PT tone was evident, data collected
from 571 demonstrators suggest that anti-party and anti-system sentiments were
13
By the end of 2019, there were three lines of corruption investigations involving Bolsonaro and
his three politician sons: (1) the case of Fabrício Queiroz, Flávio Bolsonaro’s former aide, sus-
pected of embezzlement and money laundering through deposits of part of the salaries of Flávio’s
office employees when he was a Rio de Janeiro state lawmaker; (2) the suspected use of “ghost
aides” (people who were appointed to positions, but never carried out their duties, returning part of
their salaries) by Carlos Bolsonaro in his office at Rio de Janeiro city hall; and (3) the Superior
Electoral Court’s investigation about the use of WhatsApp in the 2018 election, when companies
supposedly bought “packages of mass message transmission against the PT,” an illegal practice, as
corporate financing of electoral campaigns was declared unconstitutional in 2015 (BBC 2019).
also deeply rooted. Demonstrators reported a high level of mistrust in Rousseff and
the PT (96%). However, the opposition did not do much better: 47.6% did not trust
the PSDB, and 81.8% did not trust the PMDB, the party that would assume the
presidency if Rousseff were impeached.
At São Paulo’s March 15 demonstration, Datafolha had found that most partici-
pants politically identified between the center and the right and had voted for Aécio
Neves in the 2014 presidential runoff. However, research conducted by Solano and
Pablo Ortellado in April suggested that this did not translate into a higher trust in the
PSDB. On the contrary, only 23% of demonstrators reported strong trust in Neves
and 11% in the PSDB, which also extended to the PMDB party of vice president
Michel Temer: only 1% strongly trusted the party and only 3% its top leader,
Eduardo Cunha, president of the Chamber of Deputies. Bolsonaro came in first
place as the most trustworthy politician, but even so, that only amounted to 19% of
demonstrators. At the time, he was perceived as a political outsider.
The disapproval of traditional politics was also present in protestors’ high level
of trust in the movements that organized the demonstrations, which had only been
created very recently. Seventy-one percent strongly trusted Come To The Street and
53%, the Free Brazil Movement. The number fell to 19% for Revolted Online. Here,
it is interesting to note that the Free Fare Movement, associated with the June 2013
protests, earned 25% of the protestors’ trust.
The mainstream media was also ranked as a highly untrustworthy institution,
earning only 21% of strong trust in the survey. Trust was surprisingly low in the
influential newscast Jornal Nacional, the country’s leading television news show
transmitted by Globo Network, in which only 16% of respondents had strong trust.
Veja magazine, more aligned with the right, earned a higher level, 52%, similar to
commentators and polemicists critical of the PT such as Rachel Sheherazade (49%)
and Reinaldo Azevedo (40%). Paulo Henrique Amorim, who was more to the left
but used confrontational rhetoric, also stood out with a strong trust level of 28%,
suggesting that style could be more important than ideology.
Finally, researchers tested demonstrators’ agreement with common Internet
hoaxes, some of them flagrantly false. Seventy-one percent agreed that Lula’s son
was an owner of meat giant Friboi and 53% that the First Capital Command (PCC),
Brazil’s largest criminal gang, was an armed wing of the PT. Anti-communism,
which Bolsonaro would later fully mobilize in his 2018 campaign, was already
resonating among demonstrators: 64% agreed that the PT wanted to implement a
communist regime in Brazil and 56% that the São Paulo Forum, the conference
uniting leftist Latin American parties and organizations—made more widely known
by Olavo de Carvalho—aimed to create a “Bolivarian dictatorship” in Brazil.
A second quantitative study was coordinated by Pablo Ortellado, Esther Solano,
and Lucia Nader during São Paulo’s third large-scale anti-PT demonstration of
2015, on August 18 in Paulista Avenue. As in March and April, simultaneous pro-
tests also occurred in many other Brazilian cities. In São Paulo, according to the
Military Police, around 350,000 people were present, while Datafolha counted
135,000 people. The data show that while the groups organizing the protest intended
to channel anti-PT sentiment, again, the demonstration took an anti-politics and

anti-party tone, based on a perception of corruption in the entire political system.
The survey measured the perception of gravity of corruption scandals involving
the government and the opposition, as well as the perception of involvement by
leaders from the two political camps. As could be expected, almost all demonstra-
tors (99%) considered the mensalão and Operation Car Wash scandals grave.
However, corruption scandals that involved the PSDB were also considered grave.
Eighty percent of demonstrators considered a scandal known as the “PSDB men-
salão” grave, and 87% thought the same of a corruption scandal involving São
Paulo’s subway and train companies.
Regarding perceptions that politicians from the two camps were individually
involved in corruption, the results differed slightly, but not as much as might be
expected. Ninety percent of demonstrators considered president Rousseff corrupt,
and 77% considered the PT mayor of São Paulo, Fernando Haddad, corrupt, while
a significant 42% portion of demonstrators considered São Paulo’s PSDB governor
Geraldo Alckmin14 corrupt, and 38% thought the same of senator Aécio Neves.
Opinions appeared about pathways to resolve Brazil’s systemic crisis that would
later gain momentum with Bolsonaro’s candidacy. Fifty-six percent of those sur-
veyed agreed fully or partially that solving the crisis required handing over power to
someone outside of the political game, 28% agreed fully or partially that the solu-
tion was handing over power to the military, and 64%, handing over power to an
honest judge, referring to judge Sergio Moro, the main public figure of Operation
Car Wash. At the same time, 77% agreed fully or partially that it was necessary to
widen participation through mechanisms such as a plebiscite and 49% through
strengthening NGOs and social movements.
Regarding the economy, the survey found high levels of support for universal,
free public services. Among demonstrators, 97% agreed fully or partially that public
health services should be universal and 96% that they should be free. Ninety-eight
percent agreed fully or partially with universal public education and 97% that it
should be free of cost. Even the recent, heterodox social demand of free public
transportation (“zero fare,” demanded by the Free Fare Movement) had 49% full or
partial support among demonstrators, contrary to the positions defended by the
ultraliberal protest leaders such as the Free Brazil Movement.
If, on one hand, pro-impeachment protestors’ support for demands regarding
public education and health could be read as a counterintuitive connection with the
June 2013 protests, on the other, all surveys carried out in the period revealed that
the sociodemographic profile of the pro-impeachment campaign was not the same
as that of the 2013 demonstrators. While education levels at the different protests
were in fact very similar—Datafolha found that in São Paulo, 78% were college-
educated at the June 20, 2013, protest and 76% were college-educated on August
16, 2015—income levels differed. An Ibope survey at the June 20, 2013, protests in
seven state capitals and the Federal District found that 23% of participants earned
14
Alckmin would later be the PSDB’s presidential candidate in 2018.
above ten times the minimum wage (see Fig. 4.1), whereas that number almost
doubled to 42% when measured at the August 16, 2015, pro-impeachment protest
by Datafolha (see Fig. 4.2).
Demonstrator age was another difference between the groups at the June 2013
demonstrations and at the pro-impeachment demonstrations. According to
Datafolha, while the average age of demonstrators in São Paulo on August 16, 2015,
was 45.3 (see Fig. 4.4), the average age of demonstrators on June 20, 2013, was
28.4, a little more than half (see Fig. 4.3).
In addition to different sociodemographic profiles, the political-ideological pro-
files of the 2013 protests and the 2015–2016 protests also differed. At the June 20,
2013, protest in São Paulo, the sum of people who were identified as far-left, left, or
center-left was 36%; 31% as center; and 21% as far-right, right, and center-right
(see Fig. 4.5). At the pro-impeachment demonstration on August 16, 2015, also in
the city of São Paulo, 15% were identified as far-left, left, or center-left; 34% as
center; and, finally, a much greater 47% as far-right, right, or center-right (see
Fig. 4.6).
Considering income, age, and ideology, it becomes undeniable that the publics of
the 2013 revolts and the 2015–2016 pro-impeachment campaign are socially and
politically differentiated, with more discontinuities than continuities. As we have
argued, the connection between the June 2013 protests and the pro-impeachment
demonstrations can be made based on the understanding that they are part of the
same protest cycle, that is, of a diffusion of disruptive forms of collective action
from some sectors of society to others, eventually reaching all of the social fabric,
with the final participants—unlike the first—pointing in the direction of a potential
base for Jair Bolsonaro.
Fig. 4.1 Income of demonstrators (June 20, 2013; Seven capital cities and Federal District).
S.M. = Minimum Wage. (Source: Ibope)
Fig. 4.2 Income of pro-impeachment demonstrators (August 16, 2015; Paulista Avenue). (Source:
Datafolha)
Fig. 4.4 Age of pro-impeachment demonstrators (August 16, 2015; Paulista Avenue). (Source:
Datafolha)
In that light, another important element detected by the April 2015 survey co-
coordinated by Esther Solano is opinions on inequality, crime, drugs, immigration,
and women’s and LGBT+ rights. There was a certain consensus about two issues:
1) support for harsher punishments for criminals, consistent with Bolsonaro’s
Fig. 4.3 Age of demonstrators (June 20, 2013; Paulista Avenue). (Source: Datafolha)
Fig. 4.5 Ideology of demonstrators (June 20, 2013; Paulista Avenue). (Source: Datafolha)
positions on public security; 2) a strong preference for meritocratic discourse cou-

pled with a strong rejection of the targeted programs the PT implemented for poor
and Black people, such as racial quotas for university admissions. Seventy percent
of the demonstrators agreed fully or partially that “it is fair for those who studied
and worked harder in life to have some privileges”; 86% agreed fully or partially
that “the best way to achieve peace in society is by increasing punishments for
Fig. 4.6 Ideology of pro-impeachment demonstrators (August 16, 2015; Paulista Avenue).
(Source: Datafolha)
criminals”; and 80% agreed fully or partially that “Black people should not use skin
color to obtain privileges like racial quotas.”
On the other hand, the survey detected progressive and tolerant postures regard-
ing women, LGBT+ Brazilians, and marijuana use among most demonstrators.
Seventy-nine percent of those present at the rally did not agree that “there would be
fewer rapes if women were more careful and did not use short clothing”; 61% did
not agree that “relationships between gay people are not natural and gay people
should not express affection in public”; and even 50% fully or partially agreed that
“people should have the right to smoke marijuana legally, as long as it does not hurt
others”, contradicting Bolsonaro’s discourse. Bolsonaro was still quite controver-
sial for the nascent new right, especially the groups that denounced the military
dictatorship. That was the case of the MBL, which at the April 12 rally announced
that it would conduct a “March for Liberty” from São Paulo to Brasília calling for
Rousseff to be stripped of her office. The pilgrimage that the group conducted
between late April and late May of 2015 was accompanied by Marcello Reis of
Revolted Online but received little media coverage and low participation in com-
parison to the street protests.
At the time, impeaching Rousseff was not even openly supported by Come To
The Street, which decided to focus its energy on delivering a “Letter to the Brazilian
People”15 to Congress, venting deep dissatisfaction regarding corruption in the
political system. It was only when the Federal Court of Accounts (TCU), a govern-
ment accountability office, declared that there were irregularities in the federal
15
The name of the document alluded to a letter signed by Lula in 2002.
government’s accounting corresponding to the 2011–2014 PT administration that

the movement began to support the idea of impeachment more explicitly. This facil-
itated coordination among the three groups, which continued their intense social
media activity to attract more supporters. That strategy led the MBL to rapidly
expand in a somewhat disorganized way, which resulted in the departure of another
of its main founding members, Fábio Ostermann.
According to Ostermann, people drew close to the MBL because they knew him
or other members who soon became points of reference, such as Kim Kataguiri,
creator of the Facebook page “Prankster Liberalism,” who joined the group at the
end of 2014. However, other nuclei were then formed in a quite decentralized,
destructured, and chaotic way, via contacts of people whom the original founders
did not know, and decision-making power was granted to those who simply devoted
more time to the movement’s activities. Amid the ascension of new leaders, includ-
ing Kataguiri, and unable to devote more money and time to the movement—which
lacked financial transparency, in his opinion—Ostermann opted to leave the MBL
months before it, and other groups decided to organize an encampment in front of
Congress to demand Rousseff’s removal.
Unlike the left, which does not tend to ask police permission to carry out inter-
ventions of this type, the leaders of the pro-impeachment movements thought it best
to do so. With this, they aimed to demonstrate their commitment with law and order
and signal to potential supporters that the encampment would be “clean, organized,
and safe” (Vrydagh, 2020). On October 19, camp was set up on the front lawn of the
Congress with the authorization of Chamber of Deputies president Eduardo Cunha
(PMDB), who had been systematically using the threat of impeachment to black-
mail the president (Singer 2018). The MBL and Revolted Online occupied the space
with around 50 tents each, and Come To The Street, while it could not physically be
on site, planted a flag at the camp to show symbolic support. In addition to the three
movements, a group of military interventionists also participated, which created
growing tensions with the other demonstrators and resulted in the expulsion of more
radicalized activists.
The intervention lasted a little over a month. On November 21, 2015, camp was
dismantled without impeachment having been introduced in the Chamber of
Deputies (Vrydagh, 2020). In spite of the combined forces of different groups and
new leaders that emerged over the course of the protest and used different perfor-
mances to draw media attention—such as InTheStreets, which used toy handcuffs
to “handcuff themselves to Congress”16—the impeachment motion would only be
introduced by Cunha at the end of that year, on December 2.
The following year, another unified protest calling for the president’s ouster was
held on March 13. According to Datafolha, in São Paulo, 500,000 people gathered
to protest against Rousseff on Paulista Avenue, whereas the Military Police counted
1.4 million demonstrators, more than what had been registered 1 year earlier. A
As remembered by one of the group’s main leaders, Carla Zambelli (2018), in her book It Was
16
Not a Coup: The Behind-the-scenes of the Struggle in the Streets for Dilma’s Impeachment.
noteworthy fact about this protest was the participation of PSDB politicians: Aécio
Neves, who had lost the 2014 presidential election, and Geraldo Alckmin, governor
of São Paulo. Both, however, were met with cries of “corrupt” and “schoolchil-
dren’s food thieves,” referring to a corruption scandal regarding cafeteria food in
São Paulo public schools (Apple & Guimarães, 2016). This was unsurprising, con-
sidering that all of the surveys carried out at anti-PT protests in 2015 pointed to a
weak preference for the PSDB and a profound rejection of the entire political system.
During the same period, protests were also held against Rousseff’s impeach-
ment, where different sentiments prevailed. According to surveys carried out at pro-
tests on both sides that year, demonstrators who supported Rousseff and classified
impeachment as a coup had high trust in leaders of the PT and of the left in general
as well as higher trust in the party politics system as a whole. When asked about
solutions to the political crisis, these demonstrators opted for approaches related to
an increase in public participation. While trust in political parties in general was
relatively low among Rousseff’s supporters (37% did not trust parties), 43% said
they strongly trusted the PT, and 74% strongly trusted São Paulo’s PT mayor,
Fernando Haddad. Those numbers stand in contrast to the 73.2% of pro-impeachment
demonstrators who, in April 2016, said they did not trust parties in general, with the
most popular party, the PSBD, earning the trust of only 11% of those present.
Another contrast between the two sides was their degree of trust in the press.
While 83.2% of the pro-Dilma demonstrators did not trust the press, this rate was
only 20.8% at the anti-Dilma rally on April 12, 2015, although 57.8% reported that
they had a little trust.
In the years preceding the eruption of the impeachment protests, well-known
journalists who wrote in the magazine Veja and the newspaper O Globo had pub-
lished books criticizing the Workers’ Party with Record Editorial Group, one of the
country’s biggest publishers. Continuing that movement, in 2013, Record hired
Carlos Andreazza as nonfiction editor. Unlike his predecessor, Luciana Villas-Boas,
he bet on sales of right-wing books, which at the time were only consumed in more
restricted circles. This initiated a move to the right in the Brazilian publishing mar-
ket, as emphasized by the group’s president, Sérgio Machado:
You can identify a certain shift to the right. The theory that Luciana supported was that the
left reads more than the right. And, to me, that always made a kind of sense. Andreazza bet
on the opposite, and, to our surprise, it worked. It was proven that the right also reads. He
perceived a growth in liberal thinking. This diversity is good for democracy. (Machado
apud Campos 2015)
2013 brought the publications of the books Caviar Left: The Hypocrisy of
Progressive Artists and Intellectuals in Brazil and in the World by Rodrigo
Constantino and The Minimum You Need to Know to Not Be an Idiot by Olavo de
Carvalho, which soon became one of the year’s bestselling books. In 2015, amid the
height of mobilization for Rousseff’s impeachment, Carvalho’s book officially
became a bestseller with 120,000 copies sold, amounting to a Carvalho craze and a
watershed moment for penetration into dominant publics by right-wing
counterpublics that originated on Orkut. The right was no longer ashamed, and their
repressed demand for books was met by Carlos Andreazza:
The case of Olavo is very symbolic. What we did was give a pop treatment to the author. We
hyped Olavo, from the choice of the title to the cover of the book. There was a repressed
demand for these authors that we identified. (Andreazza apud Campos 2015)
After the success of The Minimum You Need to Know…, Record published books
by authors from the emerging new right who did not have the same degree of public
exposure as Carvalho and Constantino. The year 2015 brought the publications of
the books Stop Believing in the Government by political scientist Bruno Garschagen,
who had participated in the project Liberty on the Highway in 2009 and became
responsible for the Mises Institute Brazil podcast in 2012, and Behind the Mask by
Flávio Morgenstern, who had run for USP student government alongside Rodrigo
Neves on the “Reaction” ticket in 2011, when he was a literature student. In addition
to this, seizing the political moment, Record announced that it was in talks about
releasing a book by one of the most famous MBL leaders, Kim Kataguiri, who that
year had been named by TIME magazine as one of the 30 most influential young
people in the world and who in January 2016 would begin to write a weekly column
for newspaper Folha de São Paulo.17 Finally, the publishing house also released
works by authors who addressed philosophical and cultural themes in more detail
and who had only been published in smaller imprints, such as It Is Achievements
and Vide Editorial. In the words of translator and Atlas Network fellow Márcia
Xavier de Brito:
This is coming. They are even looking back through their catalogs for things they could
republish to meet a demand they are seeing that exists. And it’s a cultural movement, there’s
no use resisting. Sérgio Machado, before he died, hired Andreazza because he wanted to
innovate. He wanted to shake up Record. For example, at the suggestion of these authors,
he [Andreazza] published Roger Scruton, but the person who started to publish Roger
Scruton in Brazil was Edson [from It Is Achievements], who had already done a ton when
Record, with their mega-distribution, bought his latest [book]. (Rocha, 2019, p. 174)
The new right’s consolidation in the Brazilian publishing market came accompa-
nied by a wider cultural phenomenon that became visible in the traditional media:
“political incorrectness.” While the topic had been addressed since the 1990s in
Brazil, including by Carvalho, artists and humorists who were critical of the PT
began to increasingly adopt the trend of political incorrectness as the political crisis
rapidly advanced. Cases that stand out include those of the musicians Lobão and
Roger Moreira from the band Ultraje a Rigor, the comedian Marcelo Madureira,
formerly of the troupe Casseta e Planeta, and the humorist Danilo Gentili, who in
2015 gave a talk at the National Conference of Students for Liberty (Brazil) in São
Paulo. Gentili, who began to host the talk show The Night on the network SBT in
March 2014, together with Roger Moreira, even published a book titled Politically
However, the book, entitled Who is this Kid Writing in Folha? a collection of journalistic col-
17
umns, was published in 2017 by Simonsen, the owner of which had participated in courses of the
Center for Interdisciplinary Ethics and Personalist Economy (CIEEP) in Rio de Janeiro.
Incorrect in 2012 that contained jokes from his stand-up comedy performances. He
defined the term in an interview to Antagonist TV18 in March 2017:
Political correctness is not a way for you to protect people or an etiquette for you to avoid
committing gaffes and hurting people. Really, it’s just a rule for you to shoot at who they
want you to shoot and shield who they want to be shielded. […] The conversation always
starts like, “So, do you agree with me, or are you a Nazi?” There is no other option. “Hey,
do you agree with me, or are you racist? Hey, do you agree with me, or are you sexist? Do
you agree with me, or are you a monster?” There is no dialogue. Either you are “on the good
side” or you are a monstrous person. That’s their propaganda. Ah, “because political cor-
rectness is kept in order to protect minorities and the oppressed”—that’s a lie. For example,
I remember when Joaquim Barbosa [former Supreme Court justice, who is Black] posi-
tioned himself against Dilma, against the PT government. The blog that campaigned for
Dilma called him a monkey. Then, it was allowed.19
By the time the campaign for Rousseff’s impeachment finally reached its objec-
tive in August 2016, the new right had firmly planted its feet in the traditional public
sphere. Still, it did not completely abandon its recourse to the politics of shock,
which it mostly continued to use on social media. This prepared the terrain for the
new right’s consolidation in institutional politics. To that end, it sought to spread out
in various political parties, focusing efforts on three new political-party groups: the
subgroup FREE of the Social Liberal Party (PSL), the NEW Party, and the Social
Christian Party (PSC), the new home of the Bolsonaro family.
4.2 Toward Bolsonaro’s Election (2016–2018)
After Rousseff’s impeachment, the emerging right began to channel the energy that
had circulated on the streets since 2014 in a more accelerated way. However, its
leaders were faced with their base’s deep mistrust of traditional politics, which
remained even after the president’s ouster.
On March 26, 2017, a demonstration in support of Operation Car Wash was
organized on Paulista Avenue, and the sound car that attracted the most participants
was that of Come To The Street, with the mantra “across-the-board clean out.”
According to a survey coordinated by Esther Solano, Pablo Ortellado, and Márcio
Moretto Ribeiro during the protest, the demand for a “clean out” of politics was
directed mainly, but not only, at the PT: 84.8% of those present identified as very
anti-PT, and 72.9% said that they did not identify with any political party, followed
by 11.7% who chose the PSDB and 6.8% the NEW Party.
Although the issue of fighting corruption dominated, different right-wing groups
sought to call attention to their own demands. Alongside Come To The Street, addi-
tional groups present included the MBL, the NEW Party, the Movement for
18
Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlQbDemKXG8
19
Gentili was referring to Dilma’s Blog, an unofficial media site of Rousseff’s campaign that pub-
lished an image of Barbosa alongside that of a monkey (cf. Dias, 2013).
4.2 Toward Bolsonaro’s Election (2016–2018) 117
Restoration of the Monarchy in Brazil, and various militaristic groups, defending

causes such as a reduction in the public funds earmarked for political parties, pen-
sion reform, labor reform and privatizations in general, the abolition of sweeping
2003 gun control legislation, the military’s return to power, and even the return of
the monarchy. Still, most groups attracted few demonstrators to their sound cars,
including the MBL, which was broadcasting a message of support for the minimal
state and opposition to pension reform that was rejected by 74% of those present.
The ideological heterogeneity of demonstrators was also evident in their positions
on social mores. While most were conservative when it came to fighting crime and
inclusionary policies such as racial quotas and targeted minimum income programs,
their stances split regarding support for women’s and LGBT+ rights and religious
teaching in public schools.20 That heterogeneity of positions was not present at a
protest on the other side of the political spectrum that same month; there, at the
March 31 protest against pension reform where 83% of demonstrators considered
themselves left-wing, they reported very homogeneous positions on the same
issues.21
Nevertheless, if the right appeared ideologically scattered in the streets, among
more dedicated activists, the “liberal-libertarian hegemony” from the new right’s
formation period had already given way to an ultraliberal-conservative amalgam.
Ultraliberals, like Rodrigo Constantino22 and Bernardo Santoro, the latter of whom
had entered the PSC in 2014, began to describe themselves as liberal-conservatives
in the sense that they defended both radically free markets as well as conservative
positions on social mores and the defense of order, suggesting the repetition of an
international historical trend in which free marketeers adhered to conservatism.23 At
20
A 512-interview study found that 82.6% of demonstrators supported increased punishments for
criminals, 84.6% supported lowering the age at which teens are tried as adults, 82.2% said targeted
minimum income programs such as Bolsa Família (created during Lula’s first administration) dis-
incentivize work among beneficiaries, and 75.2% disapproved of racial quotas. At the same time,
34.8% agreed that same-sex unions do not constitute families, 57.2% that feminism is male chau-
vinism in reverse, 51.4% that catcalling women on the streets is offensive, 58.6% that two men
should be able to kiss on the street without being harassed, and 48.6% that schools should teach
religious values. Regarding ideological self-identification, 47.3% said they were very conservative
and 34.4% said they were slightly conservative, whereas 31.4% said they were right-wing and
17.4% considered themselves center-right.
21
Among 442 interviews, the majority of responses oscillated between 70 and 90% of either agree-
ment or disagreement, depending on the topic, including completely different topics: 8.8% agreed
that same-sex unions do not constitute families, 12.2% that feminism is male chauvinism in
reverse, 77.1% that catcalling women on the street is offensive, 87.1% that two men should be able
to kiss on the street without being harassed, and 17.9% that schools should teach religious values.
22
In September 2018, Constantino released a book with publisher Record called Confessions of an
Ex-Libertarian: Saving Liberalism from Modern Liberals.
23
This phenomenon is visible in many different contexts. Two examples include libertarian support
for the campaign of conservative US senator Barry Goldwater in the 1960s (Doherty, 2007) and the
already-mentioned support from Hayek for conservative British political leader Margaret Thatcher
(Cockett, 1995). In both cases, the support came with significant tensions surrounding ideology
and identity.
first, this caused discomfort among activists, given that the label appeared to be an
oxymoron, according to journalist Lucas Berlanza, current president of the Rio de
Janeiro Liberal Institute. According to Lourival de Souza, it eventually caused ten-
sions in groups such as Liberty Express in the state of Maranhão:
There are people who think the expression liberal-conservative is an oxymoron. But I think
that, in addition to these words changing in their meaning as time passes, the confusion
comes from way at the beginning of everything, when Burke himself, the point of reference
for conservatism, was a legislator in the Whig party, which was a liberal party opposing the
Tories. So what was he, liberal or conservative? I think these words have different meanings
based on place, based on time, based on the ideological interest of who is using them. I
think whoever says that liberal-conservative is an oxymoron because there is no semantic
possibility of using the expression under any circumstance is saying that due to ideological
interest. They are, above all, the libertarians, who want to distance any thought that values
order and institutions from the liberal field. They did not invent liberalism, so I don’t recog-
nize their right to decree something in this sense. I think that liberal-conservative thought
exists. The expression is used not only in Brazil, but also outside of it. So I think these
things are not so dogmatic. (Lucas Berlanza) (Rocha, 2019, pp. 181–182)
[Liberty] Express was made concrete in 2012, and until then, it was not very well defined
in terms of being liberal or conservative, because it orbited around a common position
which is that tripod based on natural law, of life, liberty, and property. Classic liberals talked
about this. Conservatives also talked about this. With time, the liberals all left. The self-
proclaimed liberals in the group were actually, I would say, pseudo-liberals, because all of
them said they were liberal [but] they were liberals with conservative hues. They had devel-
oped as part of a conservative group. I saw the liberal world through the blessings of
[Brazilian writer] Nelson Rodrigues, while someone else saw it through the blessings of
[Spanish intellectual] Ortega y Gasset, who is an aristocratic and conservative liberal, for
someone else, of a monarchist author, but a monarchist author who was culturally very
conservative. In the end, the other issues in society were discussed, and the group ended up
taking a conservative form. (Lourival de Souza) (Rocha, 2019, p. 182)
It was true that, as Berlanza pointed out, ultraliberals who did not want to
embrace conservatism—commonly referred to as leftlibs24 by the activists—were
put in an uncomfortable position within the new right, especially as many activists
began to draw close to the Bolsonaro clan. With Jair Bolsonaro’s move to the PSC
at the beginning of 2016, the liberal-conservatives began to have their own political
space, and many began to refer to themselves simply as conservatives.
Another tension arose when activists from the Orkut counterpublics who had
joined the PSC, then composed of figures such as pastors Everaldo and Marco
Feliciano, ran up against a lack of solid ideological points of reference among some
party members. When Santoro was invited to be an economic policy advisor to
Pastor Everaldo’s 2014 presidential campaign, it was an arduous task to try to con-
vince the pastor and other members of the group about the advantages of the free
market. In Santoro’s view, Everaldo had similarities with Leonel Brizola, a politi-
cian known in Brazil for supporting what he called “brown socialism.” It was also
difficult to get members of the party to publicly identify as conservatives, according
Abbreviation of Left Libertarianism or Left Libertarians, that is, libertarianism and libertarians
24
of the left, whose central concerns are issues of injustice and social inequality.
to Fernando Fernandes of Rio de Janeiro, who was Santoro’s student at the State
University of Rio de Janeiro and participated in the PSC’s youth wing.
Some party members at that time had Olavo de Carvalho as their only intellectual
point of reference, whereas others had absolutely no north in this regard. Until
recently, the party had been essentially “physiological,” the Brazilian term for cro-
nyist. This started to change after 2013, when pastor and federal congressman
Marco Feliciano assumed the presidency of the human rights commission of the
Chamber of Deputies and pastor Everaldo ran for president in 2014. Fernandes said
that counter-intuitively, the Brazilian left helped define the profile of the party, as it
lacked political and ideological coherence, though its members shared a kind of
conservative common sense:
I think it was the left who said what the PSC was. Because when leftist parties saw a con-
servative Christian seated in the chair of the Commission, they said, “Conservative, reac-
tionary, he’s going to defend family values, he’s going to be against abortion!” So the left
pushed the PSC toward a political position that didn’t exist before. It was just cronyism.
Actually, saying there wasn’t a position is an exaggeration on my part. There could have
been one, for religious reasons. But, for example, the party was opposed to Dilma, and
inside the party, there were people who supported her. In Niterói [city in the state of Rio de
Janeiro] there was a city councilor who we expelled, and he went to the PT!” (Rocha, 2019,
pp. 184–185)
Bolsonaro’s entrance into the party soon attracted a multitude of radical young
people who defended traditional values and market radicalism, making the PSC
start to acquire an ultraliberal-conservative platform. While beforehand it frequently
made political concessions to larger parties such as the PT or the PMDB—the PSC
was part of the federal government’s allied base in Congress, as was Bolsonaro’s
former party, the PP—after Bolsonaro entered, the PSC began to look poorly on
such concessions, especially toward leftist parties. This disapproval of concessions
to traditional parties was also present in other parties related to the new right, like
the NEW Party. But Fernandes believed that only the PSC stood for the repressed
demand for an authentic representation of the right, despite the discomfort with the
Bolsonaro clan’s closeness to the legacy of the military dictatorship:
It was very clearly signaled that the PSC would give space for a voice of the right to speak.
And with that came this flood of people behind Bolsonaro, backing conservatism, backing
liberal support, many different types of people. There was a repressed demand for represen-
tation. We always say that in Brazil, until 2014, right-wing parties did not exist. All of the
parties ranged from center to left for historical reasons, because the right was associated
with the military movement, with the dictatorship. Which is bizarre, because Lacerda, who
was the main name on the right, was the first to be exiled by the dictatorship. Truly right-
wing, because I think the military dictatorship was imposition, and imposition does not
have a side. (Rocha, 2019, p. 186)
While on one hand, the Bolsonaro family’s entrance into the PSC helped rein-
force its image as a conservative party, on the other, Santoro focused his efforts on
actively influencing Jair Bolsonaro and his sons so that they would radically support
the free market. At the time, Bolsonaro was seen by free-marketeers as a follower of
the nationalist developmentalism that prevailed during the dictatorship. But
Santoro’s efforts soon bore fruit: in March 2016, Eduardo Bolsonaro announced he
would enroll in the Mises Institute Brazil’s first postgraduate certificate program in
Austrian school economics.
While the PSC sought to better define its ideological contours, the NEW Party,
which had been officially registered in 2015, faced a similar challenge incorporating
new members who ran up against ideological issues. Some ultraliberal activists saw
the party as an alternative to the conservatism of the PSC but thought that the NEW
Party was more concerned about public policy efficiency than about being ideologi-
cally coherent as ultraliberals, according to Fábio Ostermann. Ostermann learned
about the party on the Internet in 2011, soon after its founding, and invited its
founder and main leader João Amoêdo, an executive of Itaú bank, to give a talk at
the Institute of Business Studies, where he was director. Ostermann believed that
party members focused on efficiency and management of public administration
while lacking a base of values underneath. But even so, he joined. Beginning in
2013, he became the NEW Party’s leader in his home state, Rio Grande do Sul. He
left the party in 2015 due to a feeling that it limited his autonomy and short- to
medium-term political ambitions. That year, the NEW Party became officially reg-
istered, and Ostermann joined the small Social Liberal Party (PSL) with other ultra-
liberal activists.
At the time, discussions were underway about what the MBL would do after
Rousseff’s impeachment or after an eventual “cooling down of the movements.”
Ostermann supported more direct involvement in party politics, with two possible
options: 1) join several parties, in order to be able to act on a multi-party front, or,
2) his preference, to enter as a bloc into one party and occupy it. In November, lead-
ers of the PSL, a small party that sought a way to renew itself, reached out to a blog
called Market for the People—considered leftlib among ultraliberals—contacting
Felipe Melo França,25 who had helped found the MBL during the June 2013 dem-
onstrations. França soon established a connection between the PSL, and Fábio
Ostermann, who, enthused with the PSL’s openness to his ideas, became the director
of the foundation linked to the party and created a subgroup in the party called
FREE, which attracted other ultraliberals.
With this, in 2016, most of the activists who originated in the Orkut communities
began to concentrate on three parties, sometimes even acting in more than one
simultaneously, as described at the time by Filipe Celeti, Líber’s former coordinator
in São Paulo:
25
“Felipe Melo França has a law degree from UFPE [the Federal University of Pernambuco] and a
postgraduate certificate from Georgetown University. Cofounder of the junior company Beviláqua
(Law-UFPE), former executive advisor of the Students for Liberty (Brazil) network. He also has
experience at Internationale Akademie für Führungskräfte (IAF) of Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung
in the course “Rule of Law and Fundamental Rights: The Liberal Approach” (2014) and from the
World Intellectual Property Organization’s Summer School (2011). He is the Executive Director of
the Market for the People Institute,” according to https://mercadopopular.org/politica/
capitalismo-de-compadrio-enquanto-a-republica-nao-cai-odebecht-lidera-com-41-os-
emprestimos-do-bndes/
As far as political action, we’re building three fronts. They include the NEW Party, which
was recently founded and still moves around the figure of Amoêdo. There is the
PSC. Bernardo himself, from the IL, created part of Pastor Everaldo’s platform. And the
PSL is betting on this renewal of trying to become an ideological party. This is a double-
edged sword in Brazil, because in Brazil, you vote for people, not for ideas. It’s hard. We
are going to need to see what happens in this year’s elections. How society will behave in
response to a discourse that will start to appear a little more in the media. As people have
contact with these ideas, they will start to be present in the public debate, and this will drag
the debate toward a center that is closer to what we desire. I think that’s part of the work, to
drag the debate a little to our side, exactly in order to be able to facilitate real changes that
are more consistent with the reduction of the size of the State. (Rocha, 2019, p. 189)
While activists from the same circles trafficked among different parties, antago-
nism toward Bolsonarism was still quite common, above all among the ultraliberals.
Alongside the 2016 municipal elections, the Third Liberty and Democracy Forum
took place in São Paulo in October 2016. It was organized by the Institute of Leader
Formation, which in the past had been linked to the Institute of Business Studies.
Fábio Ostermann participated in an event with Jair Bolsonaro himself, along with
senator Ana Amélia (PP, from Rio Grande do Sul), which was moderated by Hélio
Beltrão of the Mises Brazil Institute. The event was fairly full and occurred with
reasonable calm until Bolsonaro started being booed by half the auditorium, upon
which the other half started to chant the name of the dictatorship-era colonel: “Ustra,
Ustra, Ustra.” After that, it was said among the new right that Bolsonaro had chosen
to abandon those spaces.
The event, however, did not undermine the Bolsonaro family’s relationship with
Santoro, who in the 2016 elections began to accompany Flávio Bolsonaro at all
campaign events as he made a bid for mayor. At the same time, several other mem-
bers of the new right launched their own candidacies. Fernando Fernandes ran for
Rio de Janeiro city council in the PSC, and candidates who ran in the FREE sub-
group of the PSL included Filipe Celeti for São Paulo city council, Rodrigo Saraiva
Marinho for Fortaleza city council, and Fábio Ostermann for mayor of Porto Alegre.
There were a total of 44 legislative candidates directly linked to the MBL, of which
only two ran in the NEW Party and four in the PSC; most ran in traditional parties
such as DEM and the PSDB, with ten candidates running in each. Eight candidates
linked to the MBL were elected that year: one in DEM, four in the PSDB, one in the
Green Party, one in the Popular Socialist Party (PPS),26 and one in the Party of the
Republic (PR). Finally, João Doria won his election for mayor of São Paulo. Though
he ran in the PSDB, he echoed the new right’s platform.
Beginning in 2017, the new right’s three main fronts began to shift. Tensions
between Bolsonaro and the leaders of his new party had grown, as excessive politi-
cal pragmatism in the party almost always sacrificed issues that Bolsonaro openly
supported. The last straw had been an alliance between the PSC and the Communist
Party of Brazil in the state of Maranhão for the 2016 elections, which prompted the
fervently anti-communist Bolsonaro and his sons to seek a new party. In August
26
In 2019, the party changed its name to “Citizenship.”
2017, it was announced that the family would move to the PEN, the National
Ecological Party, which changed its name to Patriot as a precondition for hosting
Bolsonaro’s presidential pre-candidacy. Bernardo Santoro, acting as the Secretary-
General of Patriot, introduced Bolsonaro to a well-known economist in the pro-
market circuit, Adolfo Sachsida, whose doctorate was from the University of
Brasília and who was a career employee of the Institute of Applied Economic
Research (IPEA). At Santoro’s request, Sachsida assembled a group of 11 econo-
mists who exchanged ideas weekly with Bolsonaro.
Around this time, the free-marketeers’ resistance to Bolsonaro, whose presiden-
tial aspirations were already publicly backed by Olavo de Carvalho, appeared to
gradually begin to recede. In December 2017, Rodrigo Constantino publicly sug-
gested Paulo Guedes as a potential Bolsonaro finance minister. Winston Ling,
founder of the Institute of Business Studies, had previously introduced Guedes and
Bolsonaro.27 Suddenly, at the beginning of 2018, Bolsonaro decided to break with
Patriot and join the PSL without even telling Santoro, who learned what happened
from the newspaper. The lightning-fast move caused immense discomfort among
the PSL’s ultraliberal activists, gathered in the FREE subgroup since 2016. They
were staunch anti-Bolsonarists and left the party soon after Bolsonaro entered,
migrating to the NEW Party.
Bolsonaro caused yet another shock in the pro-market crowd by refusing to par-
ticipate in a presidential debate organized that year by the Liberty Forum, the IEE’s
annual event that brought together the main leaders and ideologues of the Brazilian
right, from anarcho-capitalists to monarchists. While at the beginning of 2018,
Bolsonaro’s intended candidacy earned a steady 20% of support in polls, his eco-
nomic team was still unknown, and much of the pro-market circuit doubted that he
would adopt a liberal economic platform given his past comments on the topic. With
this in mind, aiming to dispel the mistrust caused by his past abrupt moves,
Bolsonaro decided to once and for all seal his alliance with the free market support-
ers by appointing Paulo Guedes as his economic mentor and candidate for finance
minister in April 2018.28
At the same time, the NEW Party announced that its founder João Amoêdo
would be its presidential candidate. In spite of using more moderate and less-
aggressive discourse than Bolsonaro, Amoêdo also began to support an ultraliberal-
conservative line. As Bolsonaro and Amoêdo expanded their presence in the public
sphere, claims that a free market should be radically supported and that Brazil had
a “leftist hegemony”—as diagnosed by Carvalho—reached a new level of popular-
ity among everyday people.
In April 2018, as the official campaign period approached, the crisis in Lulism
reached its peak with Lula’s imprisonment. Political polarization in the country
reached stratospheric levels. Popular enthusiasm that had focused on Lula’s
According to Ling’s Facebook profile in a post on November 16, 2018.

27
Later, in the Bolsonaro government, the Ministry of Finance would become the Ministry of the
28
Economy, which also absorbed the Ministry of Planning, Development, and Management; the
Ministry of Industry, External Commerce, and Services; and the Ministry of Labor.
candidacy now competed with the euphoria surrounding Bolsonaro for attention,
and immense groups of Bolsonaro volunteers carried out an intense, highly net-
worked campaign based on links that had been woven since 2014. The campaign
acted in ways yet unregulated by election laws that had adapted little to the new
logic of social media (Brito Cruz, 2020). In the first round of voting, Bolsonaro
earned more than half of valid votes in 12 states and the Federal District, surprising
many political analysts who had thought it impossible that Bolsonaro would reach
the runoff. While Bolsonaro himself was disappointed with the outcome, believing
that he could have won in the first round, the activists from the Orkut communities
and street demonstrations were impressed with their results.
In those elections, Marcel Van Hattem received the seventh-most votes in the
nation among candidates for the Chamber of Deputies and the most votes in the
state of Rio Grande do Sul. His party, the NEW Party, elected a delegation of eight
deputies to the Chamber of Deputies, same number of the PSC. Kim Kataguiri, for
his part, received almost half a million votes and was the fourth-most voted Chamber
of Deputies candidate in the country. Fábio Ostermann received the sixteenth-most
votes for Rio Grande do Sul’s state legislature. In addition, new political leaders
who emerged during the campaign for Rousseff’s impeachment were elected,
including Bia Kicis, Carla Zambelli, Joice Hasselmann, and lawyer and university
professor Janaína Paschoal, who ran in the PSL and whose over two million votes
topped those of any other state congressional candidate countrywide. In the first and
second place among the most voted Chamber of Deputies candidates, earning more
than one million votes each, were Eduardo Bolsonaro and Joice Hasselmann,
respectively. The PSL emerged from the first round of the election with 52 seats in
the Chamber, the second-largest congressional delegation. The delegation grew to
more than six times its former size.
In the runoff, practically all of the new right, with few exceptions and more or
less emphatically, supported Bolsonaro to prevent the PT’s return to the presidency.
But in addition to electoral pragmatism, votes for Bolsonaro also had begun to sig-
nal support for his radical discourse amid a significant part of the electorate. This
was visible in two qualitative studies conducted among committed Bolsonaro sup-
porters in the city of São Paulo in the second half of 2017, 1 year before the election.
The first study consisted of in-depth interviews with seven residents of the city
of São Paulo who were selected to include diverse economic positions, professions,
ages, and genders (see Table 4.1). The second study was based on two group exer-
cises conducted with public high school students in São Miguel Paulista, an impov-
erished neighborhood on São Paulo’s periphery. Forty third-year students and 20
first-year students participated. We can consider these voters committed Bolsonaro
voters, especially those in the first study, seeing that at the time—according to a
September 2017 Datafolha study—the intention of voting for Bolsonaro among
society at large oscillated between 15% and 19% with several possible scenarios
taken into account. It rose to 33% of votes in a possible second scenario against
Lula, who would win with 47%. This floor of voters who were staunchly committed
to supporting Bolsonaro remained practically unchanged until at least the beginning
of 2021.
Table 4.1 Interviewees in Study 1

Code Gender Age Occupation Other characteristics
Interviewee W Male 24 College student Born in Brasilândia
Interviewee D Male 37 São Paulo State Military Born in Grajaú
Police Officer
Male Male 32 Owner of a law firm Member of a financially powerful
interviewee E family, born in Jundiaí
Interviewee M Female 35 Manicurist Born in Jaraguá
Female Female 50 Businesswoman Born in Jardim Paulista
interviewee E
Interviewee J Male 19 Student Self-identified as “right-wing gay,”
born in Capão Redondo
Interviewee L Female 45 Psychologist Born in Vila Mariana
Interviewee A Male 27 Uber driver Born in Itaquera
During the interviews, in addition to voicing a mistrust that is natural with an

unknown researcher, several respondents had apprehensions about exposing their
political opinions, with comments such as “A lot of people say that we’re fascists.
But it’s nothing like that! We just want this mess to end, this crisis of values” (Male
Interviewee E) (Solano, 2018, p. 11). Because of this, most interviewees asked that
their names not appear. They feared retaliation, as one respondent said: “In this
political environment, which is so angry, I’m afraid, so it’s better not to put a name
or photo. Nothing, please.”
Below, we have organized into themes the elements in their responses, which
reproduce several elements of Jair Bolsonaro’s own discourse and conform to the
main ideas-force which guide Bolsonarism and which changed little after his
election.
4.2.1 Public Security and the Militarization of Life
According to the Secretariat of Public Security, in 2017, the city of São Paulo
experienced a daily average of 350 thefts conducted without threat of violence.
Over the course of the year, there were more than 150,000 robberies (thefts con-
ducted with violence or the threat of violence). Though the state of São Paulo has a
lower homicide rate than other states, there were 295 homicide victims in November
2017. There were 1051 rapes reported. These scandalous numbers made people feel
a permanent fear and a constant insecurity:
You can be killed at any moment! This country is horrible. You have a daughter, she goes
out at night, and she could be raped. Robberies, muggings, everywhere. It doesn’t work to
live like this, it doesn’t work. I’m afraid for me, for my children. No one deserves to always
live in fear. We want solutions. (Female Interviewee E) (Solano, 2018, p. 12)
To deal with those feelings, interviewees tended to organize their responses into
a discourse that set up an opposition between so-called good citizens and the figure
of the bandit, understood as an enemy who needed to be punished. During the PT
administrations, little was done to improve public security statistics and create
counternarratives against this commonly used dualist thinking, which draws on the
idea that criminals are exempt from punishment and suggests the militarization of
daily life as a response to insecurity.
Another recurring theme in the interviews was the victimism of bandits. The idea
that “the thief became the victim” was constant. This logic painted an altered picture
of the social order in which victims of crimes were completely abandoned by the
State, and good citizens were always unprotected, whereas criminals were extremely
protected by the State and by human rights defenders, understood as “bandit defend-
ers.” This logic is well summarized by common maxims that permeate the Brazilian
social imagination, which Bolsonaro exploited to the point of exhaustion: “human
rights [should be] for humans who do right” and “a good criminal is a dead criminal.”
We know about the lack of fathers in the periphery. The idea that extreme poverty leads
someone to crime has a basis in truth, but that doesn’t justify it. The thief became the vic-
tim. It’s like he was compelled to enter into the world of crime due to the State’s negligence,
due to his family situation. I don’t accept that. I experienced hunger too. For breakfast, we
ate cornmeal flakes with water and sugar and my mother said they were poor people’s
Frosted Flakes. Lunchtime juice was vinegar with water. Because of this, I don’t accept this
idea of the thief becoming the victim. Even the 9 p.m. Globo novela carries out this homage
to crime! Human rights defenders fight tooth and nail for bandits. They are human, but what
about the victims? I don’t see anyone supporting the victims. Look at the stipends paid to
dependents of arrested people. How absurd. A thief kills a father of a family and the family
of the guy becomes destitute. There could be a homicide stipend, right? A victim stipend?
No one looks to the victim. So, legalize crime, close down the police, and pronto, all done!
(Interviewee D) (Solano, 2018, pp. 12–13)
I just know that today, in this age, it’s better to be a bandit than a good citizen. We’re scared
to walk down the street, and they’re not. They have more rights than we do, and, later, there
is all of this self-pity broadcast on television for us to pity them. Pity for a criminal? Have
pity on us, because we can’t live in peace! (Interviewee M) (Solano, 2018, p. 13)
According to the interviewees, police had become the targets of constant crimi-
nalization and persecution by the media and leftist groups, as well as being aban-
doned by their top commanders and by the State itself, which blocked their own
words from being heard and considered in the public debate. In the words of a
police officer and Bolsonaro supporter:
We, police officers, are abandoned, handcuffed. We can’t do anything, because the laws
increasingly restrict our work. In articles in the media, it always seems like we kill a lot of
people, like we go out to kill! As if police officers don’t die. And there is always this idea
that most of the victims are black or brown.29 That is, police are freely assassinating people
and criminals don’t do anything. That’s not true! Police who kill do not go unpunished. That
ends their and their families’ lives. We don’t even have a lawyer for the organization. No
29
In Brazil’s census, preto and pardo, black and brown, together comprise the racial category
negro, translated here as Black.
one helps us at a time like that. They say that the internal affairs department is loyal to the
corporation. It’s not, it punishes! And then articles come out about parties on the periphery
in which the police are harassing young people. Young people? They are criminals! It’s like
in the 2013 protests; people go and trash everything, and who is cursed afterward? The
Military Police! They talk about demilitarizing the police. A lot of police die because they
are afraid of killing, of being arrested, of being punished. And the question remains: do I
shoot, or do I not shoot and die? And what about the thieves? They kill police officers and
don’t respond for armed robbery or homicide, because it was legitimate defense! Because
the police officer was armed! For the love of God…it’s impossible! Bolsonaro and the other
politicians linked to police forces stand on our side, because they know, because they were
already on the same side. But then a specialist in public security arrives, a 30-year-old guy
who has never patrolled, who has never entered a favela pursuing a thief, and his words
carry weight. What about ours? (Interviewee D) (Solano, 2018, p. 13)
Faced with that scenario, Bolsonaro’s responses were convincing: iron fist, dis-
cipline, jail, lowering the age at which teens are tried as adults, increasing punish-
ments in the Penal Code, life sentences, the right to carry arms, giving more power
and protection to the police,30 and ending “the victimization of bandits”:
The law has to be tough. In Brazil, we are very lax. Criminals in jail, pronto. If you don’t
want jail, go work. Easy. (Interviewee L) (Solano, 2018, p. 13)
The right to bear arms should be approved for good citizens. If the State doesn’t protect us,
we have to protect ourselves on our own. The criminals have guns, and we don’t! Like in
the U.S. It’s one of our rights! If we want guns to defend our families and homes, how can
they ban it? (Interviewee A) (Solano, 2018, p. 13)
The guy has to rot in jail, to pay with the same currency. I think that the person should stay
there suffering. In jails today there are cell phones, even mattresses. They should sleep on
the floor. Being arrested should mean suffering. Jails shouldn’t have mattresses, they should
have whips. (Student 3, 15) (Solano, 2018, p. 14)
However, while some interviewees supported vindictive punishments and

dungeon-like jails, that was not the consensus, especially among people who had
family or professional experience with the Brazilian prison system:
I’m against the death penalty because it’s not a prolonged punishment, but I’m in favor of
life sentences and of increasing some penalties. The Brazilian prison model doesn’t work,
because there is no resocialization process. It doesn’t correct anyone. My aunt is in prison
for robbing an ATM and drug trafficking. I don’t pity her. She should have to pay. But I feel
sorry for my cousins. And the prisoners don’t have water, they eat rotten food, and it’s
unnecessary suffering. People leave there feeling more hate. You have to have discipline,
but not suffering. They are people. It’s not Hammurabi’s code. I feel bad about this.
(Interviewee W) (Solano, 2018, p. 14)
What was truly a consensus among interviewees was the need for discipline,
authority, hierarchy, or, as the popular saying goes, “putting the house in order.” To
that end, all of them broadly supported militarism, including military schools, as a
social and political model. The interviewees believed that Brazil’s
This would be done through the expansion of a legal device called exclusion of illegality, which
30
can be activated in certain circumstances that override the illegality of an action.

redemocratization and the PT governments were very permissive with crime and
neglected the issue of public security, causing an “inversion of values” that could
only be reverted with a militarization of public and private life:
Yes to discipline, and also in public schools. Singing the national anthem, treating teachers
as authorities, the respect and discipline inherent to the military system. In my life, that was
a game-changer. Laws have to be respected, and authorities too. (Interviewee W) (Solano,
2018, p. 14)
These days, you advance to the next year of school without knowing how to read and write
fluidly. Discipline and authority are missing. Compare a public school with a military
school! There, there’s dedication, discipline, authority. The boys even improve their behav-
ior at home. They have respect. Militarism teaches how to be a person, to be a man, to be
decent. But this junk generation just wants debauchery, without rules, without limits, and it
doesn’t work. (Interviewee A) (Solano, 2018, p. 14)
Bolsonaro’s own discourse constantly resignifies the military dictatorship as a

period in which life was safer and more disciplined, as opposed to the democratic
period that followed, in which he says life was more insecure, “a mess,” “debauch-
ery.” As such, both Bolsonaro and his supporters romanticize the dictatorship as a
healthy period in which good citizens were protected by the State and in which
order reigned, rather than confusion. In their view, democracy was a chaotic system
of government in which the corrupt governed and good citizens felt unprotected.
While not all interviewees truly supported the idea of a military intervention, most
did not condemn the idea. To them, the military was one of the few social actors
with the legitimacy to restore traditional values that had been forgotten:
There was more security during the dictatorship. We have freedom of expression now, yes,
but we don’t have the right to come and go. Here on the periphery, at least, we don’t have
it. Maybe it would be good to put the military in control temporarily, because now we’re
being ruled by bandits. (Student 2, 15) (Solano, 2018, p. 24)
I always learned at home that there was not a military coup, there was a necessary interven-
tion. Was there torture? Yes. But it was a state of war. Was it unnecessary? But a coup now
would not resolve things. General Villas Bôas31 is excellent, one of the best that the army
ever had. He would be in command. But he’s not an idiot. He knows that there is no space
for that now. If that would resolve things, I myself would grab the guns and let’s go. (Male
Interviewee E) (Solano, 2018, p. 24–25)
This militarized conception of public life would materialize in the high degree of
militarization in the Bolsonaro administration. By March 2021, the Bolsonaro gov-
ernment had a general as a vice president, ten military ministers out of 21 total, and
more than 3000 government positions filled by people who originated in the armed
31
General Eduardo Villas Bôas was Brazil’s army commander between the start of Dilma
Rousseff’s second term, in 2015, and the beginning of Jair Bolsonaro’s administration, in 2019. He
became politically known for an April 2018 tweet which was read as a threat toward the Supreme
Court so that it would deny a petition for a habeas corpus that would block Lula’s arrest. When he
left the High Command of the Army in 2019, Villas Bôas became a special advisor in the presi-
dent’s Cabinet of Institutional Security (GSI), which was commanded by a military figure who had
supported Bolsonaro since the beginning of his 2018 presidential campaign.
forces. This made it the most militarized government in the Brazilian history, even
compared with the military dictatorship. For the sake of comparison, in the Dilma
Rousseff and Michel Temer governments, military figures accounted for only 2.4%
and 3% of top commissioned positions, respectively. In the Bolsonaro government,
they account for 14% (Trezzi, 2021). Militarism also expresses itself in federal con-
gress, where former military, police, and firefighters form the Parliamentary Public
Security Front. Known as the “Bullet Caucus,” it uses discourse similar to
Bolsonaro’s, calling for the repeal of landmark 2003 gun control legislation, the
reduction of the age at which teens are tried as adults, and support for the Brazilian
arms industry, which includes the companies Taurus and the Brazilian Cartridge
Company (CBC).32
4.2.2 Meritocracy and Victimism
There is still no social consensus in Brazil about the need for fiscal adjustment and
to decrease the size of the State. According to a study by Datafolha, 71% of
Brazilians opposed the pension reform introduced by the Temer government
(Datafolha, 2017b), and 64% believed that the labor reform it proposed would ben-
efit business owners more than workers (Datafolha, 2017a). Similarly, a Vox Populi
study found that a 2016 constitutional amendment that froze public spending for
two decades33 was opposed by 70% of Brazilians (Vox Populi, 2016). Finally, the
Data Popular Institute found that 81% of Brazilians would prefer to access better
public services than pay less taxes (Carvalho, 2014).
At the same time, ideas about the power of people’s individual efforts, merit, and
entrepreneurship are present in much of the population, signaling a potential subjec-
tive acceptance of a neoliberal rationality. After all, support for neoliberalism is not
32
According to news site Congresso em Foco, in 2019 the Bullet Caucus grew from 36 lawmakers
to 102, with 93 deputies in the Chamber of Deputies and 18 senators. In 2014, it did not contain a
single senator. As of late 2020, much of the caucus was formed by members of the Social Liberal
Party (PSL), where Bolsonaro was affiliated in 2018. That year, including state legislators, 73
police and military figures were elected to office, 43 of them in the PSL. Colonel-lieutenant
Luciano Zucco (PSL) was the top vote recipient in the Rio Grande do Sul state legislature. In Mato
Grosso do Sul, the top-voted state legislators were army captain Renan Contar (PSL) and Military
Police colonel and former general commander Carlos Alberto David dos Santos (PSL). Some of
them are noteworthy for their personal trajectories, such as São Paulo Military Police corporal
Kátia Sastre, who killed a criminal at the entrance to a school in the city of Suzano in the state of
São Paulo. She became the seventh-most voted federal congressperson in São Paulo using the
security camera images of the death in her campaign ads.
33
At the time, it was labeled Proposed Constitutional Amendment (PEC) 241, and it was approved
at the end of 2016.
only expressed superficially through opinions on specific economic reforms but

also, above all, in a deeper dimension related to the shaping of subjectivities.34
In interviews, this was visible through negative perceptions of public policies
such as Bolsa Família or racial affirmative action quotas at universities, which inter-
viewees said fostered laziness and produced passive citizens acting as parasites of
the State. This perception was always accompanied with rhetoric about being a
taxpayer: “I pay my taxes and with that, I sustain the bums who don’t do anything”
(Interviewee A) (Solano, 2018, pp. 17–18). Another negative opinion about such
policies was the view that the PT used them in a clientelistic manner to guarantee
the votes of the poorest Brazilians and keep them under control. In this line of think-
ing, the policies were unnecessary, because “whoever works becomes victorious in
life,” such that the self-made man is the model of success:
Ideally, Bolsa Família would not exist. It may be important for some people, but the truth is
that it’s used as electoral currency to make people always vote for the PT. To really buy their
votes. Why do you think that so many people in the Northeast vote for the PT? (Interviewee
C) (Solano, 2018, p. 18)
There are a lot of lazy people who just want to suckle the teats of the government. And we
sustain them, right? With Bolsonaro, this would end. Want to eat? Work. But it’s easier to
self-pity: “I’m poor, I’m poor.” And go asking for money, asking for help with everything.
And we are working our asses off. It’s unfair. (Interviewee A) (Solano, 2018, p. 18)
It is interesting to note that several of these interviewees were, at some moment,

directly or indirectly benefited by PT public policies but that today some of them
deny those policies’ importance. Along those lines, one interviewee said, “I don’t
need to be treated like a child by the State, much less so by someone from the
PT. I’m not poor. I’m not a victim of anything. I have my work” (Interviewee A)
(Solano, 2018, p. 18). According to Interviewee L, “We don’t want government
handouts,” (Solano, 2018, p. 18) which is consistent with a broader neoliberal ratio-
nale which believes inequalities can be overcome by the market and which is sub-
jectively anchored in the ideas of merit and personal effort:
My son gets access to FIES [government-supported financing for higher education], but he
deserves it. The government is not giving it to him for free. He is working his tail off in
order to study. Am I going to vote for the PT because of this? I’m not a poor or Northeastern
person who is going to vote for the PT. This thing about being a hard worker, about getting
ahead in life, this is what we want, not handouts from the government. We want them to let
us work. (Interviewee M) (Solano, 2018, p. 18)
34
This look at neoliberal rationality’s deep impact on the formation of political culture and subjec-
tivities is compatible with Wendy Brown’s heterodox approach carried out between the neo-
Marxist and Foucauldian perspectives (Brown, 2019, p. 17–21).
4.2.3 Corruption and Anti-politics
Anti-corruption discourse is key to being able to understand the interviewees’

rejection of traditional politics. In their view, corruption permeated all of the parties.
They believed that there was no difference between left and right, because practi-
cally all of the politicians were only interested in their own benefit. Except, that is,
for Bolsonaro, whom the interviewees described as one of the few honest politicians
in Brazil, and thus an alternative to systemic corruption:
Bolsonaro is an icon of ethics. The country has been going through a crisis of ethics and
morals since the time of Collor [president from 1990–1992]. It’s revolting. The mensalão
of the PT, of the PSDB, Car Wash. He’s not involved. He’s ethical. And it’s so difficult to
find someone with his political life who is clean. Apparently, he’s incorruptible. He’s
remained clean during all this time, in such a dirty environment. The political system
doesn’t work. It’s all corrupted. Parties on the left, on the right, their ideologies are corrup-
tion. (Interviewee J) (Solano, 2018, p. 15)
Bolsonaro is not corrupt, and he’s different from the parties that are there. The PT and the
PSDB are the same thing. In Brazil, there is only power and money. Look at Car Wash. In
Congress, they’re supposedly against each other, but in corruption they are hand-in-hand.
Bolsonaro is different because he’s not corrupt. (Interviewee D) (Solano, 2018, p. 15)
When asked about criticism of Bolsonaro that appeared in the media, the major-
ity of responses aligned: the press persecuted Bolsonaro with the aim of demoral-
izing his candidacy. In the interviewees’ view, Bolsonaro was a victim of a plot by
the traditional media that aimed to sabotage his public life: “The press wants to
finish him off because they know that he’s very strong. No one can hold him back.
They are going to do everything possible to destroy him, but we know that he’s hon-
est” (Female Interviewee E) (Solano, 2018, p. 15). That argument continued to be
reiterated years later among the most faithful Bolsonarists, as confirmed in a study
carried out for Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Brasil (Rocha & Solano, 2020).
Interviewees believed that Operation Car Wash was, in their words, cleaning out
Brazil and removing corrupt people from power. When asked about the operation’s
controversial methods, such as forceful summons, plea bargains, proximity with the
press, and the trampling of due process and other legal rights, interviewees argued
that corrupt politicians were “evil,” a cancer to be excised, and that the Car Wash
Task Force, judge Sergio Moro, and the prosecutors represented “good”: heroic
figures who, in a salvationist discourse, had a mission to save Brazil from corrup-
tion. In their view, the corrupt politician was, fundamentally, the PT politician. He
was the enemy to be destroyed, and therefore, his legal rights were mere
formalities:
The problem now is Lula’s rights. Rights? If you want rights, don’t steal! He’s such a poor
little thing, right? He says that testimony is not proof, that things were leaked. The guy is
the head of a gang, and he still wants rights!! (Female Interviewee E) (Solano, 2018, p. 16)
4.2.4 Moralization and Christianization of Life
In public appearances, Bolsonaro often cites Bible verse John 8:32—“Then you will
know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Raised Catholic, Bolsonaro was
baptized on May 12, 2016, in the Jordan River by Pastor Everaldo, president of the
PSC, of which he was a member at the time. “God” was one of the words he most
used both during the 2018 presidential campaign and during his inaugural address
on January 1, 2019, in Brasília.
A Datafolha study from October 25, 2018, 3 days before the presidential runoff,
estimated that evangelical voters would opt for Bolsonaro over his opponent
Fernando Haddad of the PT: 29.9% of Catholics and 21.7% of evangelicals pre-
ferred Bolsonaro, whereas 28.7% of Catholics and 9.7% of evangelicals preferred
Haddad. A few weeks earlier, on September 30, bishop Edir Macedo, the founder
and leader of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God—which includes around
ten million members, according to Macedo—had publicized his support for
Bolsonaro on his Twitter and Facebook accounts. Macedo had always supported the
PT until 2016, when he backed Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment; with the Bolsonaro
endorsement, he made it clear that his history of support for the PT had ended. The
massive evangelical church Assemblies of God also opted for Bolsonaro. Silas
Malafaia, one of its leaders who had supported Lula in 2002, Marina Silva in 2010,
and Aécio Neves in 2014, endorsed Bolsonaro in March 2018.
Thus, Brazil’s two main evangelical churches participated wholeheartedly in the
elections, both opposing the PT. According to the Interunion Department of
Parliamentary Aides (Diap), based on data from Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court
(TSE), in 2014, there were 75 evangelical lawmakers in 18 parties in the Chamber
of Deputies. Among the 14 evangelical denominations with federal deputies, the
Assemblies of God and the Universal Church had 36. The lawmakers from the
Assemblies of God were more dispersed among different parties, whereas the
Universal Church was more linked to the Brazilian Republican Party (PRB). In the
2018 elections, the evangelical caucus grew to contain 84 federal deputies.
Interviewees said that part of their support for Bolsonaro was due to his position-
ing in favor of values such as family, religion, discipline, authority, and ethics,
which had been absent from the public debate during the PT governments. In that
sense, they believed the PT’s corruption was moral as well as political, taking into
account values related to social mores, and that it echoed a deeper moral crisis in the
country:
Bolsonaro is a guy of values, of family, of principles, and of religion. This is very important.
At its base, Brazil’s crisis is a crisis of values. No one respects anything anymore. (Male
Interviewee E) (Solano, 2018, p. 24)
Interviewees frequently mentioned progressives’ disdain for Christian positions

and more specifically, for evangelicals, criticized as stupid, fanatical, and funda-
mentalist. In a departure from this, Bolsonaro represented a candidacy that respected
people of faith and pledged to restore Christian values to public and private life. His
2018 campaign frequently characterized the PT as the party opposed to the Brazilian
family, and which, if elected, would aim to destroy the traditional Christian family
and its values. The message was clear: Christians, and especially evangelicals,
should vote for Bolsonaro if they wanted to preserve their customs, values, and
ways of life:
I’m evangelical. I go to church because I feel peace. I like it there. But it seems like we have
to ask for forgiveness for this sometimes. They say evangelicals are dumb, that evangelicals
only vote for who their pastor supports. Do I stick my nose in their lives? (Interviewee M)
(Solano, 2018, p. 24)
That perception also extended to schools and universities, viewed as sites of left-
ist indoctrination and of censorship of Christian values and ways of life. Because of
this, the interviewees defended initiatives such as the Nonpartisan School Movement,
which aimed to denounce and censor teachers with supposedly indoctrinating con-
duct in classrooms. Above all, the movement was sensitive to issues related to
human sexuality, believing it should be “reprivatized” (in the sense of Fraser 1989),
that is, reverted to being dealt with only in the private sphere and not in public space:
We have to talk about what’s happening in the schools. I don’t want my son to become
indoctrinated and tomorrow turn into a pothead, leftist. I want him to learn values. Isn’t the
issue of pedophilia important? We are in a moral crisis. (Interviewee A) (Solano, 2018, p. 24)
We know that the teachers are all leftists and influence the students a lot. In you guys’
courses of sociology, history, there are only communist teachers. Classrooms are for teach-
ing all of the ideologies, not only the ones that you guys want. Because of this, the
Nonpartisan School Movement is good, because it guarantees freedom in the classroom and
protects students from teachers who want to capture students for leftist parties. (Female
Interviewee E) (Solano, 2018, p. 25)
Teachers talk about censorship from the Free Brazil Movement and by the Nonpartisan
School Movement. But we are the ones suffering censorship, we who want our children to
be educated with ethical values, and we can’t even say it, because the left says that we’re
fascists. (Interviewee L) (Solano, 2018, p. 25)
4.2.5 Pop Hatred and the Language of the People
When asked about Bolsonaro’s discourse of hate, most interviewees said that his
violent and prejudiced declarations simply reflected his natural way of speaking. In
their perception, in spite of his harsh, crude, and aggressive way of expressing him-
self, Bolsonaro did not really aim to hurt people. In fact, they saw his radical nature
in a positive light, as a sign of authenticity and honesty that showed Bolsonaro
would not allow himself to be managed or domesticated like traditional politicians,
who “talk pretty” with the intent of fooling and manipulating the population:
I don’t see hate speech. He’s not sexist or homophobic, it’s his natural manner. He speaks
like that because he was in the military. He’s dumb in politics, he’s like an outdated uncle,
and it could be poorly interpreted, but it’s not hate speech. (Male Interviewee E) (Solano,
2018, p. 20)
He doesn’t use hate speech. He’s just sharing his opinion, speaking the truth. And when it’s
a little radical, he apologizes. There’s no hate speech, because he wants the best for every-
one. It’s just that the left exaggerates things. (Student 7, 16) (Solano, 2018, p. 20)
Bolsonarist hate speech can be understood as a pop hate discourse, often pre-
sented as a meme, in an irreverent phrase, in the form of a YouTube video with
juvenile and humoristic language, or as a joke. Interviewees did not view his violent
comments as something that should be rejected. On the contrary, they believed that
people who said the discourse amounted to hate speech were reacting with exag-
geration and hysteria to a folksy and politically incorrect style of speaking.
Bolsonaro, in this line of thinking from his most emphatic supporters, was leading
a battle against the tyranny of political correctness and in favor of freedom of
expression. Minorities’ perspectives were viewed as an imposition. Political incor-
rectness was valued as an exercise of freedom and irreverent criticism:
It’s that he has this crude, harsh way of speaking, a really military thing. But he didn’t want
to say these things. Sometimes he exaggerates. He doesn’t think, because he goes with his
impulse. He is very honest, very sincere, and doesn’t measure his words like other politi-
cians, who are always thinking about political correctness and what the press is going to
think. He doesn’t care at all about political correctness. He says what he thinks, and that’s
it. But he’s not homophobic. He likes gay people. It’s just his way. (Interviewee L) (Solano,
2018, p. 21)
One of the interviewees who self-identified as a “right-wing gay” said that left-
wing parties and LGBT+ groups had stances of either exaggerated exhibitionism or
of a dualism that incorrectly divided the world into victims and people with privi-
leges. In his view, though the LGBT+ population did face discrimination, the solu-
tion was to “work and do less self-pitying.” He said that gay people should be treated
without any kind of privilege, like any citizen, as Bolsonaro would treat them:
What, why can’t I be a right-wing gay? I support liberal government, I support traditional
values, discipline, authority. I think that we have to have an iron fist against criminals. You
like criminals? Take them home with you! Because I’m gay, I have to like these thieves
from the PT or radicals from the PSOL? I’m gay, but I don’t like LGBT parades, for exam-
ple. I think they’re really exhibitionist, really provocative. What’s the need for that? I’m not
the victim of anything. This idea that we gay people should be pitied, that we are victims,
doesn’t work. Let’s work and do less self-pity. (Interviewee J) (Solano, 2018, p. 20)
He’s poorly interpreted, on purpose. He’s not sexist or homophobic. He never said anything
against gay people or women. They manipulate what he says. When was he homophobic?
Never. They say that we are fascists. Look, they put on Che Guevara shirts and it’s all good,
but just walk into the Catholic University [considered more left-wing] with a Bolsonaro
T-shirt to see who is beating up whom. And later, it’s us who are intolerant! (Interviewee D)
(Solano, 2018, pp. 20–21)
The same thing happened with women interviewees, who did not see any inco-
herence in being women and identifying with Bolsonaro’s speech. They rejected the
term feminism; one said, “they are women who fight for their rights, but they aren’t
feminists. Actually, I’m anti-feminist” (Interviewee L) (Solano, 2018, p. 21). In
their view, Bolsonaro was not sexist or misogynist, but rather an older man who
behaved controversially without bad intentions, and women felt offended by
Bolsonaro because they fell back on feminism’s discourse of victimization—they

were “feminazis,” in the words of one interviewee:
I’m a woman, yes, but I’m not a feminist. They are constantly self-pitying. They bring up
this victimism, all radical, wanting to cut ahead of the men. Feminazis. I don’t like anything
about this. I’m a businesswoman, I live well, I’m well-off in life and I never needed femi-
nism. If we fight for it, we can get the same thing that men have, but these women seem like
they just know how to cry and blame men. They’re exaggerated. (Female Interviewee E)
(Solano, 2018, p. 21)
As we saw in previous chapters, anti-feminism is a very important element for

understanding the moral cohesion of the Bolsonarist project, as is confrontation
with feminist, anti-racist, and anti-homophobic demands. At the beginning of the
group exercise with students in São Miguel Paulista, they watched a video with
Bolsonaro’s most controversial phrases, including racist and misogynist content in
which hate speech was blatant. The researchers expected negative reactions of
rejection and contestation of the video. However, by its end, many of the students,
the majority of them Black, were laughing and applauding instead of reacting nega-
tively to the racist discourse. When asked why they laughed and applauded, they
were direct: “Because Bolsonaro is cool, he’s a legend, he’s funny, he says what he
thinks and he doesn’t care one bit.” (Student 5, 15) (Solano, 2018, p. 22).
With more than five million Facebook followers at the time, Bolsonaro already
represented a right that communicated with young people and that some young
people identified as rebellious, cool, opposite the system, bearing a different pro-
posal, and carrying “the courage to stick out his chest at the guys in Brasília and say
what has to be said. He’s a badass,” (Student 2, 15) (Solano, 2018, p. 22). The non-
mainstream perspective that Bolsonaro represented was already present in the
rebranding of hate speech as rebelliousness, fed by the use of social media. There,
memes and short, appealing videos based on Bolsonaro’s irreverent and even ridicu-
lous words constructed a heroic and juvenile figure of the “legend,” “Bolsolegend”:
“Bolsolegend is fun, the rest of the politicians aren’t” (Student 7, 14) (Solano,
2018, p. 22).
Still, some interviewees criticized Bolsonaro for his excess of theatricality,
which they said diminished the seriousness that a politician should have, in an
apparent reference to the “politics of respectability” (Brooks-Higginbotham apud
Gomes 2018). After Bolsonaro took office, this would become one of the most pow-
erful critiques from his supporters:
Jair is turning into a character. To grow, he is making himself ridiculous. They want higher
numbers. He has a military roughness, a rusticness, but he turned into too much of a show-
man. He is not what he looks like. But he really does want to do good. He’s a simple man.
He doesn’t have greed for money. I know how he travels, and he stays in cheap hotels. It’s
not for show, it’s real simplicity. He’s an amazing strategist. He knows that if he puts on his
uniform and adopts a hard line it won’t earn popularity, and he’s a great showman, he com-
municates really well. He has the intelligence to perceive that this style attracts a lot of
people, but he runs the risk of losing himself in the character. (Male Interviewee E) (Solano,
2018, p. 22)
The outsider figure that Bolsonaro constructed is fundamental to understanding

his potential. Although he had been a politician for 28 years, people identified
Bolsonaro as an outsider and a different kind of politician who dared to confront
what he called “old politics”: “We don’t want more of the same. They are all the
same. We want someone different.” (Interviewee M) (Solano, 2018, p. 23).
Bolsonaro’s radical and violent discourse is key to his identity as an outsider:
Female Interviewee E: He’s different.
Researcher: But he’s been a federal congressman for years, which means he won’t be very
different. In fact, during his previous terms, he accomplished very little. He barely approved
any bills.
Female Interviewee E: Of course, because they don’t let him do anything, because he
doesn’t sell out. He doesn’t ally himself with those bandits. So he ends up alone, isolated.
He’s upstanding. He’s not like them. (Solano, 2018, p. 23)
Another characteristic that interviewees said made Bolsonaro different was his
proximity with common people through the use of relatable and everyday language:
“Bolsonaro speaks our language. He’s not like other politicians who sometimes we
don’t even understand” (Interviewee J) (Solano, 2018, p. 23). Interviewees said that
Bolsonaro liked people and to feel close to them, and thus was unlike other tradi-
tional politicians, whom they saw as deliberately distant and inaccessible, members
of an elite to which Bolsonaro did not pertain. This, they said, was visible in his
values, principles, style, and rhetoric:
He is still the Bolsonaro who I met in 2014. What’s happening is that he’s being treated like
a pop star. He wasn’t the one who created this, it was the groups of virtual activists that
organize themselves. We don’t even know where the “Legend” nickname came from. It
wasn’t from a political marketeer. The phrase #ItsBetterToGetUsedToItAlready [in
Portuguese, a play on Bolsonaro’s first name, #ÉMelhorJairSeAcostumando], it wasn’t us
that came up with it. It appeared. Sometimes, these activists end up creating this character.
He’s still in the same office, letting people come visit. (Interviewee C) (Solano, 2018,
pp. 23–24)
On the one hand, these interviews show profound and legitimate experiences of
disrespect and feelings of injustice, such as (1) the insecurity and lack of protection
caused by State abandonment, especially on urban peripheries; (2) a feeling of
being stigmatized (with prejudice, discrimination, and scorn) as killers in the
police’s case and as stupid, blind, fundamentalists in the evangelicals’ case; (3) a
desire for autonomy from the State (or, at least, the desire to not depend on the State
as a client); (4) indignation with the corrupt interplay between the political and
economic systems; and, finally, (5) the desire for a political culture based on authen-
ticity, honesty, sincerity, simplicity, and proximity to working-class people.
On the other hand, the interviews reveal how Bolsonaro’s radicalism is normal-
ized by his supporters. Efforts to superficially deny the existence of Bolsonaro’s
hate speech, or legitimize it as pop hatred, were part of an opposition the supporters
envisioned between political correctness—which they saw as exclusionary or tyran-
nical—and political incorrectness, which they saw as an exercise in broad freedom
of expression. Their arguments came accompanied by a mix of emotions that confer

a deeper meaning to supporting Bolsonaro than merely agreeing or disagreeing with
specific policies. Summarizing, the emotions present in their responses can be
grouped into three basic types: anger, joy, and trust.35 Beyond recognizing their dif-
ferences, what is fundamental is perceiving their joint presence, which appears to
legitimize Bolsonaro’s discourse among those it reaches.
The first emotion is anger, which was sometimes expressed more softly (as if
Bolsonaro were provocative or controversial), more condescendingly (Bolsonaro as
crude, provincial, or harsh, with the crudeness attributed to coming from the mili-
tary), and rarely recognized as such; after all, if his rhetoric were understood as
violence without any mediation, it would be more difficult to deny that is was hate
speech.36 The second emotion is happiness; Bolsonaro was seen as irreverent, funny,
entertaining, an excellent communicator, a “showman,” and therefore different from
other traditional politicians, understood to be annoying, gray, and distant. At times,
Bolsonaro’s charisma was exaggerated into a hero figure—courageous and rebel-
lious—and, of course, into the “legend.” Finally, the third emotion is trust: his voters
felt that he was closer to the people than other politicians as he “speaks our lan-
guage,” which was sometimes seen as sincerity (Bolsonaro as honest, simple, “it’s
just his way”) and sometimes as impulsivity. In any case, his rhetoric was mostly
well-received due to its courage: he “says what he thinks” and “doesn’t care one bit.”
Beyond the typological description of the emotions, three apparently incoherent
oscillations can be seen in the interviewees’ characterizations of Bolsonaro’s rheto-
ric: (1) between strategic theatricality (he’s a character, sometimes excessive, bor-
dering on the ridiculous, but “a great showman”) and expressive sincerity (“it’s just
his way,” “he says what he thinks,” “impulsive”); (2) between stupidity (“an out-
dated uncle,” crude, provincial) and intelligence (“he communicates very well,” “an
amazing strategist”); and, finally, (3) between the extraordinary (“legend,” hero, pop
star, rebel against the system) and ordinary (simple, “speaks our language,” proxim-
ity to the people).37 However, these oscillations did not confuse people; after all,
their ambivalence was fundamental for the radical counter-hegemonic rhetorical
strategy of Bolsonarism to resonate among audiences and build increasingly broad
legitimacy as it moved from Bolsonarist counterpublics toward dominant publics.
Instead of recognizing Bolsonarist rhetoric as hate speech, people took it in as an
anti-system perspective.
35
Broadly speaking, the identification of the three emotions was based on Jasper’s proposal of
sociology of emotions and social movements (Jasper, 2016, p. 106–109).
36
In just one example of explicit hate speech, Bolsonaro said to supporters that “these red thugs
will be banned from our homeland” and that the “petralhada” (a reference to PT supporters and
leftists) would be sent “to the end of the beach” (Veja, 2018), a veiled reference to a naval base
where the bodies of political dissidents who were tortured and killed during the military dictator-
ship were secretly dumped (Balloussier, 2018).
37
This same oscillation between the ordinary and the extraordinary was observed in Mendonça and
Caetano’s analysis of Bolsonaro’s visual self-presentation on Instagram (Mendonça and
Caetano 2020).
References 137
The interviewees’ experiences of disrespect, scorn, and feelings of injustice do

not necessarily produce authoritarian and “fascist” tendencies a priori. However, in
a scenario in which several groups on the political left and right showed incapacity
and distance, it was Bolsonaro’s campaign alone that symbolically embraced and
dealt with those experiences. Channeling them politically, it was able to strengthen
and legitimize its far-right political project, which defends and praises the military
dictatorship, revives anti-communism in Brazilian society, and carries out processes
of militarization and Christianization of public and private life that corrode Brazilian
democracy. To that end, Bolsonarist counterpublicity has been, until the present
moment, the chief method of legitimizing Bolsonaro’s attacks on the post-bourgeois
public sphere, resignified by Bolsonarism as “the system” to be combated, and sig-
naling the installation of a new authoritarian regime in the country.
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Chapter 5
Conclusion
When the polls closed in Brazil’s 2018 elections, they brought further surprises
beyond Jair Bolsonaro’s election as Brazil’s 38th president: judge Wilson Witzel—a
PSC candidate whose platform was coordinated by Bernardo Santoro (Moura,
2018)—was elected governor of Rio de Janeiro,1 and businessman Romeu Zema
was elected governor of Minas Gerais as part of the NEW Party. If there was ever a
“leftist hegemony” in Brazil, after the 2018 elections, it certainly faced its worst
crisis since the country’s redemocratization.
Many of the characters who appeared in previous chapters of this book were
elevated to positions of power during the Bolsonaro administration and became
responsible for shaping federal government policy, especially with regard to the
economy, education, culture, the environment, and foreign relations. Economist and
banker Paulo Guedes, who had been introduced to Bolsonaro by Winston Ling,
became economy minister; economist Adolfo Sachsida, introduced by Bernardo
Santoro, became a secretary of economic policy under Guedes; and Salim Mattar,
an important financier of ultraliberal think tanks, served as a special secretary of
privatizations until August 2020. Ricardo Vélez Rodríguez, the intellectual who fre-
quented conservative and economically liberal circles, directly recommended by
Olavo de Carvalho, served in the education ministry for 3 months, whereas Ricardo
Salles, who founded the Rightward Brazil Movement in the 2000s and was part of
the NEW Party until being expelled, became an internationally troublesome envi-
ronment minister until June 2021. In addition, disciples of Carvalho occupied top
positions in educational and cultural governance and especially in diplomacy: Filipe
Martins as the president’s special advisor for international affairs and Ernesto
Araújo as foreign minister until his resignation in March 2021.
As of early 2021, while the new right has maintained various points of contact
with Bolsonarism, including through Carvalho’s influence, some of its members
1
Witzel would later be stripped of the office of governor in August 2020, and he suffered impeach-
ment in April 2021, accused of corruption related to health governance.

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79653-2_5
142 5 Conclusion
have made a point to distance themselves from the president, a trend that grew
stronger over the course of his government (Schmitt & Roxo, 2019). Examples
include economist and philosopher Joel Pinheiro da Fonseca, who participated in
the attempt to found the party Líber, and state congressman Fábio Ostermann, one
of the founders of the Free Brazil Movement (MBL) who left the Social Liberal
Party in 2018 when Bolsonaro joined it. Fonseca criticized Bolsonaro for praising
torture and the military dictatorship, denouncing the dangers of a putschist rupture
with democratic institutions (Fonseca, 2019), whereas Ostermann, elected as part of
the NEW Party, not only continued to criticize Bolsonaro’s authoritarianism but
also supported Salles’ expulsion from his party (GZH, 2019).
Despite the distinction made here between the new right and Bolsonarism, it is
common in the public and academic debate to speak only of Bolsonarism or the far
right, or to view both as part of the same movement. In recent years, several Brazilian
analysts connected to international debates about the character of far-right govern-
ments that have consolidated in the last few years—such as in Hungary (Orban,
2010–), Turkey (Erdogan, 2014–), India (Modi, 2014–), Poland (Duda, 2015–), the
United States (Trump, 2017–2021), and Italy (Salvini, 2018–2019)2—have used the
concepts neo-fascism, totalitarianism, hybrid wars, culture wars, conservatism, and
populism to interpret Bolsonaro’s rise to power.
Generally, those who characterize Bolsonaro as neo-fascist have a Marxist inspi-
ration (Saad Filho, 2018; Puzone & Miguel, 2019) and seek to differentiate classic
fascism—dictators sustained by mass parties and supported by paramilitary groups,
through which the public sphere is eliminated—from Bolsonarism, which maintains
some democratic liberties while seeking to limit them with repressive and authori-
tarian means (Löwy, 2020). Those who describe Bolsonaro as totalitarian dialogue
with the political philosopher Hannah Arendt through an ethnographic perspective,
pointing out how communicative reason is substituted by a rhetoric of raw violence
gestated at the intersection of militarism, Pentecostalism, and entrepreneurship on
the country’s urban peripheries (Feltran, 2020). The line of thinking based on hybrid
wars, for its part, instead of focusing its analysis on the leader or mass movement,
analyzes that the protagonists behind Bolsonaro are a group of high-level army
generals whose return to power was camouflaged by apparently democratic elec-
tions and calculated psychological operations (Leirner, 2020). Then, there is the
understanding of Bolsonarism as a digital populism, in light of the actions support-
ing Bolsonaro in WhatsApp groups, which permitted an unprecedented reach of the
populist logic theorized by Ernesto Laclau (Cesarino, 2019).3
Among those who seek to consider Bolsonarism as part of or a result of a wider
conservative phenomenon are scholars who rely on the ideas of culture wars and of
an escalation in conservatism. The former argue that the far right seeks to substitute
2
Without mentioning parties that have not arrived in government, such as Alternative for Germany,
Sweden Democrats, and Vox (in Spain).
3
Beyond “digital populism,” the notion of “populism as parody” emphasizes communication, per-
formance, and the role of reception as significant actions in order to interpret Bolsonarism
(Mendonça and Caetano 2020), which gets closer to our own approach.
5 Conclusion 143
the universality of citizenship and human rights with the universality of masculinity,
heterosexuality, whiteness, and Christianity (Netto et al., 2020). The latter, based on
anthropological approaches, point to a conservative moment in the public debate
and view the emergence of Bolsonarism via notions of a “conservative wave”
(Almeida, 2020) or as a “conservative political subjectivity” (Pinheiro-Machado &
Scalco, 2020), which deals not with a homogeneous mass movement but with a
phenomenon that is process-based, dynamic, and much more contingent than the
totalitarianism reading.
In spite of their differences, most of these approaches share the same diagnosis:
that the Brazilian public sphere has already collapsed or is on the verge of collapse.
That recent or eminent collapse is thought to be due to a fascist threat (Puzone &
Miguel, 2019); to the emergence of a totalitarian and anti-modern subjectivity
among the masses on urban peripheries that substitutes communicative reason with
political violence (Feltran, 2020); to a hybrid war that eliminates the public sphere
by substituting it with cognitive manipulation by the armed forces (Leirner, 2020);
or by the algorithmic and platformed architecture of social media, resulting in the
abolition of a public sphere that was only ever originally conceived as an expert
system (Cesarino, 2019). The exceptions are the approaches based on culture wars
and conservatism, whose proponents do not diagnose the public sphere as closed,
and which more closely approximate our proposal in this book.
We hope to substantiate here, both from theoretical-conceptual and political-
normative viewpoints, that, despite Bolsonaro’s rise to power, Brazil’s public sphere
not only continues to exist but also is permeated by a highly dynamic and complex
process of institutional construction, questioning, and attempts at deepening, con-
testing, and de-institutionalization. We undoubtedly are living through a process of
technical-cultural, sociocultural, and sociopolitical complexification with very
accelerated timing, and exactly because of that, we believe interpreting its dynamics
through the notions of publics and counterpublics can be extremely fertile to account
for the complexities, as we hope to pinpoint when we characterize Bolsonarism as
a right-wing counterpublicity.
The dissociation between counterpublicity and subalternity is counterintuitive,
and many authors who investigate the public sphere see it as unnecessary or contro-
versial. After pioneering work that innovated by recognizing this phenomenon,4
some thinkers resisted extending the concept to apply to counterpublics beyond
socially subalternized groups.5 However, in the 2010s, right and far-right political
phenomena compatible with the idea of right-wing counterpublicity emerged across
the world, and we believe the empirical studies that used the idea are very instigating.6
4
Including Warner (2002), Downey and Fenton (2003), and Maddux (2004)
5
Such as Asen (2009) and Duerringer (2013)
6
Above all, publications that investigated similar phenomena in Germany (Neumayer 2013; Toepfl
and Piwoni 2015; Kaiser and Puschmann 2017), Britain (McIvor 2019), Sweden (Hellström and
Edenborg 2016), Finland (Hatakka 2019), Canada (Sanscartier 2020), South Korea (Reijven et al.
2020), and especially in the United States (Takemoto 2010; Edwards 2015; Thimsen 2017;
Levingston 2017; Groundwater 2020, among others)
144 5 Conclusion
Even so, at the time of writing, all of these analyses are exclusively focused on
the Global North. As such, we believe that this book can be an original contribution
to consider right-wing counterpublicity from a Global South perspective. Compared
with other studies that were previously carried out, the approach we sought to
develop in this book has a less structural and more interpretive character, whereas it
does not forego normative reflections.7 Firstly, we believe that analysis must be
open to native categories from all social groups, taking their experiences, world-
views, emotions, agency, and reflectiveness into account, seeking a balanced syn-
thesis between their own interpretations and our analytical categories, as challenging
as this may be when we consider the transmission and reception of far-right dis-
course. Secondly, we believe that the “counter” in counterpublicity can only be
understood in relation to a dynamic that is subjectively perceived as dominant.
In the Brazilian case, for example, we diagnose that Bolsonarism can only be
understood by considering the existence of a post-bourgeois public sphere that was
able to integrate some demands of subaltern groups, even while that process was
fragile and uneven. In that regard, we are not abandoning the normative concerns of
Critical Theory when we extend the concept of counterpublics to encompass the
rhetoric of social groups that are not subaltern. Moreover, we believe that the
dynamics of the public sphere must be understood historically, and today, social
conflicts occur in more complex ways, seeing as subalternized groups stage their
struggles both inside and outside institutional politics. After all, it is the very pene-
tration of subaltern discourse in dominant publics that triggers new conflicts, as
certain sectors lose power and/or feel marginalized, react, and begin to spread their
own discourse in alternative forums, which later can impact the dynamics of the
hegemonic public sphere itself. This was the case of Bolsonaro’s rise to power
through the creation of the phenomenon of dominant counterpublicity.8
While after the 2018 elections some members of the new right began to moderate
their discourse and distance themselves from the government, the core nucleus of
Bolsonarism did not undergo any normalization and continued to use counterpub-
licity as a radical counter-hegemonic strategy. That was how Bolsonaro and his
supporters could continue to perceive and present themselves as anti-system in the
face of an “establishment” that they said continued to pose imminent existential
threats to their worldviews and ways of life. This was how they justified their refusal
to participate in a public debate and political system based on rational-critical argu-
ment, which, in their view, were dominated by values that should be eliminated,
thus the need to bet on “politics of shock” despite having moved to occupy a central
position in institutional politics.
The possibility of a dominant counterpublicity is precisely what differentiates
the right-wing counterpublics from subaltern counterpublics. Ultimately, with their
permanent reproduction of values related to structures of domination and systems of
7
For a functionalist approach to non-subaltern counterpublics, different than ours, cf. Kaiser and
Rauchfleisch (2019).
8
A more detailed discussion of dominant counterpublicity can be found in Rocha and
Medeiros (2021).
5 Conclusion 145
oppression, the right-wing counterpublics’ potential to establish a new social order

once they are in power is incomparably greater than that of subaltern counterpub-
lics, which have a normative horizon rooted not in supporting traditional values and
ways of life but in transgressing and subverting them, with a goal of emancipation
(Warner, 2002; Gomes, 2018). Even so, the use of dominant counterpublicity is not
free of obstacles, especially considering the position occupied by those who
use them.
During the Bolsonaro government, both the president and his sons have often
mobilized a politics of shock in making scatological comments, using curse words
in comments to the press, or making authoritarian threats. But only less powerful
Bolsonarists were punished for crossing the tenuous line that divides acceptance of
counterpublicity as part of the democratic exercise from direct attacks on the rule of
law. Such were the cases of the culture secretary who was dismissed for making a
speech with Nazi references (Paulino & Rocha, 2020; Nunes, 2020) and of a
Bolsonarist federal congressman who was arrested for sharing a YouTube video that
cursed the Supreme Court, threatened the judges with violence, and praised authori-
tarian measures from the military dictatorship (Poder360, 2021).
Taking that into account, we can say that Bolsonarism exemplifies, in a paradig-
matic way, the pure conflict that characterizes counterpublicity. After all, the prior-
ity of Bolsonaro and his supporters is to destroy the cultural and institutional
foundations of the public debate and of the political system associated with the
democratic pact of 1988 and, in order to do this, actively seek to refuse consensus,
naturalize extremism, and signal a future authoritarian political regime for radical-
ized groups, which could also be individually abandoned along the way if their
actions threaten Bolsonarism’s continuation in power.
The choice of open conflict was evident during the government’s pandemic cri-
sis, when Bolsonaro opted to ignore consensus in the public debate from experts and
other non-Bolsonarist actors on measures such as social distancing and isolation. In
his public appearances, Bolsonaro said that the virus would only cause a “little flu,”
criticized the mainstream media’s “hysteria” and what he called “mass confine-
ment” proposed by some governors, mocked people who contracted the disease,
incentivized and frequented maskless agglomerations of his supporters, and criti-
cized social distancing measures, saying Brazil should “stop being a country of
pussies and confront the pandemic with its chest out” (Gomes, 2020) and that using
masks on the street was a “faggot thing” (Bergamo, 2020).
Even though those declarations were harshly criticized in the mainstream media,
Bolsonaro got his supporters to adhere to his narrative that a choice must be made
between preserving the country’s health or its economy, as we observed in a May
2020 study, amid the pandemic (Rocha & Solano, 2020). While they believed that
Bolsonaro had erred in underestimating the pandemic’s gravity, his voters, espe-
cially those in the working classes, said that quarantine was unviable for people who
did lack sufficient material resources and that the government’s emergency stipend
was insufficient, a sentiment that was stronger among men, who echoed the presi-
dent’s message that people needed to have courage, be “macho,” and confront the
pandemic “with your chest out.” Despite disagreeing with the idea that the
146 5 Conclusion
pandemic was only a “little flu,” Bolsonaro’s supporters continued to celebrate his
aggressive and uncompromising style, seen as indicative that he was someone “sin-
cere,” “authentic,” “true,” and different from traditional politicians, viewed as cor-
rupt and ruled by electoral marketing.
With this in view, we believe that understanding Bolsonarism requires taking its
paradoxical nature into account. The first paradox is the connection between
Bolsonaro and the new Brazilian right, which, despite denouncing the legacy of the
military dictatorship, ended up collaborating with the ascension of one of its most
staunch supporters. One of the new right’s intellectuals, Martim Vasques da Cunha,
said that he had observed in 2016 a tragedy that we would like to call a “paradox of
unintended consequences”9 while giving classes in a post-graduate certificate pro-
gram at the Mises Institute Brazil. In one class, Cunha proposed a debate about a
book that is central to ultraliberalism, written by Hans Hermann Hoppe, which
affirms: “there can be no tolerance for democrats and communists in a libertarian
social order” (Hoppe apud Cunha, 2020). When Cunha said that this point by Hoppe
was counter to a “libertarian social order” and coherent with a “totalitarian social
order,” the only response from his students came from Eduardo Bolsonaro, one of
Jair Bolsonaro’s sons: “Professor, at home we have guns and knives so that this can
happen here, in Brazil.”
The second and most relevant paradox of Bolsonarism—and of right-wing coun-
terpublicity in general—is its ability to attribute an anti-system dimension to domi-
nant social positions, especially, in Brazil’s case, regarding issues of gender and
sexuality and the rights of children and adolescents. It was precisely the use of
counterpublicity that legitimized Bolsonaro’s rise to power in Brazilian social strata
that are not far-right, transforming hate speech into an acceptable and desirable
rhetoric of political incorrectness, and voicing feelings of anger, revolt, and margin-
alization. This dynamic permitted a surprising reframing of an aim to restore legiti-
macy to systems of oppression that became publicly contested after Brazil’s
redemocratization.
Finally, the third paradox regards dominant counterpublicity: the ability of right-
wing and far-right actors to continue presenting themselves as anti-system even
after they occupy central positions of power. As we highlighted here, the rhetoric of
counterpublicity helps explain why Bolsonaro continued to enjoy around 30% of
the Brazilian public’s support in early 2021, even amid overlapping political, eco-
nomic, and health crises.
The future of Bolsonarism is difficult to predict, given that dominant counterpub-
licity is an unstable phenomenon and can lead to different political consequences. If
the Bolsonarist counterpublics continue to expand, we do not discard the possibility
9
The original formulation is by Max Weber (2001, p. 48): “unforeseen and even unwanted results
[...]. Indeed, the cultural influences stood often quite distant from, or precisely in opposition to, all
that [the actors] had in mind.” Wendy Brown (2019, p. 60) develops a similar diagnosis when she
asks how “neoliberal political reason” contributed to the rise of the antidemocratic right incarnated
in Trumpism, due to its “blindnesses” in relation to “democratic political power,” introducing
“unintentional effects” in its own project.
References 147
of a historic transition to a new authoritarian regime in Brazil. That path would not
only entail the total destruction of institutions allowing for the reproduction of the
cultural horizon associated with the democratic pact of 1988 but would also demand
the creation of new institutions capable of normalizing Bolsonarist counterdis-
courses to make them hegemonic or to impose them by force. In any case, those two
processes would certainly result in a new configuration of Brazilian political cul-
ture, or, in the words of Bolsonaro’s faithful supporters, a “cultural revolution.”10 On
the other hand, while the post-bourgeois public sphere has experienced accentuated
de-institutionalization under the Bolsonaro government, it has still not completely
disintegrated. In the case that Bolsonarist counterpublicity becomes weaker, other
publics, on the left or right, could become stronger and spur a new round of disputes
for hegemony in the Brazilian public sphere.
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Index
A Brazilian autonomism, 95
Anarchic creativity, 3 Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB), 20
Anger, 97, 136 Brazilian Institute of Philosophy (IBF), 15, 16
Anonymous, 85 Brazilian public sphere, 1
Anti-abortion movements, 64 Brazilian Rural Society, 19
Anti-communism, 3, 6, 105, 107, 137 Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB)
Anti-corruption, 100, 104, 106 politicians, 98, 100, 102, 106–108,
demands, 60, 78 114, 116, 121, 130
discourse, 130 Brazilian Society for the Defense of Tradition,
movements, 66 Family and Property (TFP), 61, 63
protests, 79
Anti-feminism, 134
Anti-globalist women, 7 C
Anti-party sentiment, 97 Chamber of Economic and Social Studies and
Anti-politics, 108 Debates (CEDES), 18
Anti-PT protests, 97, 104–106, 108, 114 Chile’s student mobilizations, 80
Authoritarian regime, 147 Christian Democrat Party (PDC), 61
Authoritarian threats, 145 Christianization, 131, 132, 137
Authoritarianism, 142, 145 Citizen Constitution, 5, 12
Autonomous field, 95, 96 Clean Record Law, 79
Coalition presidentialism, 1, 5
Combating electoral corruption, 78
B Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB),
Bahian Conspiracy, 2 20, 95, 99
Bolsonarism, 97, 106, 121, 124, 136, Conservatism, 60, 63, 68
137, 141–146 Conservative reactions, 60
Bolsonarist counterpublics, 72 Constitutional Congress, 19, 74
Bolsonarist project, 134 Conviviality Society, 15
Bolsonaro paradox, 146 Corruption, 78, 95, 97, 102, 104, 106, 108,
Bolsonaro’s charisma, 136 112, 114, 116, 130
Bolsonaro’s rhetoric, 136 Counterpublicity, 6, 7, 66–69, 71, 72,
Bourgeois autocracy, 4 137, 143–146
Bourgeois public sphere, 1 Counterpublics, 5, 6, 65, 66, 69, 115, 118, 136
Brazil’s Constitutional Congress, 36 Counterrevolution, 4

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79653-2
152 Index
Coyote Collective, 68, 69 I

Critical Theory, 144 Impeachment, 105
Cycle of protests, 60, 66 Impulsivity, 136
Indigenous Brazilians, 4, 65
Indigenous communities, 87
D Indigenous Yanomami people, 61
Demobilization, 81, 82 Institute of Business Studies (IEE),
Democracy, 1 18, 44
Democratic anti-corruption demands, 60 Institute of Economic Research Foundation
Democratic-popular field, 95, 96 (FIPE), 18
Democratic Social Party (PDS), 20 Institute of National Reality in 2005, 43
Democratization, 4 Institute of Research and Social Studies
Dictatorship-aligned television journalism, 3 (IPES), 15
Digital populism, 142 Institutional activism, 66
Domestic violence, 66 Institutionalization, 65
Dominant counter publicity, 7, 144–146 Institutionalized feminism, 66–67
Dominant publics, 5, 6 Interdisciplinary Center for Ethics and
Personalist Economy (CIEEP), 23
E
Egyptian Revolution, 80 L
Entrepreneurship, 142 LGBT+ community, 4
Ethics and Political Philosophy, 32 Liberal-conservatives, 117, 118
Liberal Front Party (PFL), 20
Liberal Institute (IL), 18, 21
F Libertarianism, 35, 99
Fascists, 124, 132, 133, 137 Liberty, 115
Federal Court of Accounts (TCU), 112 Liberty Express, 118
Federal government policy, 141 Liberty Forum, 60
Feminism, 68, 133 Lost Agenda, 26
Feminist activism, 67
Feminist movement, 65
Fernando Henrique Cardoso (FHC), 27 M
Fetal anencephaly, 59, 62, 66 Maria da Penha Law, 66
Financing private university fees (FIES), 104 Mass communication, 3
Foundation for Economic Education Merits, 102, 128
(FEE), 15, 48 Militarism, 142
Free Brazil Movement (MBL), 29, 101, 102, Militarization, 125, 127, 137
105, 107, 108, 132, 142 Military dictatorship, 1, 3, 6, 59, 61,
Freedom of expression, 83, 85 77, 88, 146
Free Fare Movement (MPL), 80–82, 88, 89, 95 Military intervention, 87, 127
Military Police (PM) act, 84
Minas Gerais Conspiracy, 2
G Mobilizations, 66, 80, 84, 85, 87
Gender ideology, 75 Mobilized counterpublicity, 69
Globalism, 6 Mont Pelerin Society, 15
Greece’s anti-austerity movement, 80 Moral crisis, 72, 73, 131, 132
Morals, 104, 130
Movement Against Corruption, 85
H Movement of Progressive Unity
Happiness, 136 (MUP), 20
Hate speech, 132–136 Movement to Combat Electoral Corruption
History of Brazil, 1 (MCCE), 78
Index 153
N neoliberalism, 45
National Association of Automotive Vehicle online and offline meetings, 47
Manufacturers (ANFAVEA), 19 organization’s activities, 51
National Association of Economic and Social organizational support, 50
Programming (ANPES), 17 organizations, 52
National Constitutional Congress, 20 pro-market activists, 49
National Information Service (SNI), 16 pro-market organizations, 48
Neo-fascist, 142 radical free-market
Neoliberalism, 11, 14, 15, 17, 19, 34, 35, 45 capitalism, 44
New Brazilian Right social democracy, 45
aggressive approach, 39 social network, 46
Alborghetti/Prison Without Censorship, 39 student movement, 49
anti-communist discourse, 17 ultraliberalism, 45
Atlantic Institute, 21, 22 US organizations, 54
Bolsonaro government, 17 Internet, 30
bourgeois autocracy, 12 Liberal Institute, 21, 22
business community, 12, 25 Lost Agenda, 26
businessmen and people, 17 market analysts, 25
Catholic conservatism, 15 military dictatorship and
Catholicism, 14 redemocratization, 12
Citizen Constitution, 12 national assets, 20
civil organizations, 17 neoliberalism, 14
civil society, 17 neoliberalizing, 20
communist societies, 14 organization, 23
communities, 31, 33, 34 organizational structure, 16
Constitutional Congress, 19 paleoliberal, 35
counterpublicity, 38 party sentiment, 28
counterpublics, 43 political and social transformations, 13
cultural criticism, 25 political movement, 29
cultural Marxism, 32 political opinions, 28
demonstrations, 11 political system, 27
dominant publics, 34 primacy of interiority, 40
economic policy, 27 process, 13
economics degree, 34 pro-market circles, 24
ethics, 29 pro-market discourse, 20
financial sector, 26 public discourse, 40
foreign economists, 17 scientific bases, 14
foreign pro-market organizations, 13 self-identifying, 13
forums and social media, 39 social and political thought, 24
free-market capitalists, 35 social justice, 29
global government, 25 social movements, 11
Gramscian hegemony, 32 social networks, 14, 25, 31
groups and organizations, 15 TFP members, 15
Institute of Business Studies, 22 translation, 14, 40
institution, 37 ultraliberalism, 35
institutional financing, 41 ultraliberals, 36
institutionalization, 13 veconomic policy, 26
counterpublics, 43, 47 working groups, 16
decision-making process, 50 New right, 141, 142, 144, 146
economists, 45 Nonpartisan demonstrations, 78
liberal institutes, 53 Non-subaltern counterpublic, 7
liberal organizations, 53 Non-subaltern peripheral
Liberalism Community, 50 publics, 7
154 Index
O R
Occupy Wall Street, 66, 80, 84, 86 Radicalized groups, 145
Operation Car Wash, 100, 102, 106, 108, Redemocratization, 1, 4, 6, 59, 61, 74, 127
116, 130 Revolted Online (ROL), 88, 100–102,
105–107, 113
Rightward Brazil Movement (MEB), 28, 141
P Right-wing counterpublicity, 38, 143, 144, 146
Paradoxes, 146 Right-wing LGBT+ community, 7
Party politics, 120 Rousseff’s reelection, 97, 100
Pentecostalism, 142
Peripheral publics, 6, 7
Political corruption, 78 S
Political incorrectness, 7, 115, 116, 133, 135 São Paulo’s Free Fare Movement (MPL-SP),
Political polarization, 122 82, 84, 85
Post-bourgeois public sphere, 1, 5, 7, 77, Semi-bourgeois public sphere, 1, 3
144, 147 Social Liberal Party (PSL), 52, 142
Post-Habermassian theory, 5 Social media, 11, 32, 35, 37, 48, 103, 104,
Presidential election, 114 106, 113, 116, 123, 134, 143
Presidential impeachment, 104 Social representation, 73
Privatizing Laser campaign, 98 Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL),
Progressive Republican Party (PRP), 70, 96, 133
98, 99 Spain’s Indignados movement, 80
Progressive social movements, 61 Strikes, 81–84
Progressivism, 70 Students for Liberty, 51
Pro-impeachment campaign, 101, 108, 109 Subaltern counterpublics, 7
Pro-impeachment demonstration, 102, Subaltern social groups, 1, 6
106, 109 Subalternity, 7, 143
Pro-impeachment movements, 113
Pro-impeachment protestors’
support, 108 T
Pro-impeachment protests, 102, 109 Task Force of Information Operations – Center
Protagonism, 70, 75, 85 of Internal Defense Operations
Protest cycle, 60, 78, 80–84 (DOI-CODI), 61
Protests, 78 Think tanks, 14, 36, 48, 53
on Batista’s Facebook page, 101 Third edition of the National Program of
Brazilian society, 96 Human Rights (PNDH 3), 64
diversity, 97 Tight-wing counterpublics, 6, 7
Free Brazil Movement, 105, 108 Traditional politics, 97, 106, 107, 116, 130
impeachment, 114 Traditional print media, 3
pro-impeachment, 109 Trust, 107, 114, 136
protest cycle, 95, 96
right-wing, 105
São Paulo, 102, 103 U
social groups, 95 Ultraliberal activists, 89
street protests, 112 Ultraliberals, 88
Protests São Paulo, 105
PT politician, 100, 130
PT public policies, 129 V
Public policies, 129 Victimism, 125, 129, 133, 134
Public security, 124–128
Public sphere, 142–144, 147
Public transportation, 81, 83–87 W
Publics, 5 Workers’ Party (PT), 20

The Bolsonaro Paradox: Camila Rocha Esther Solano Jonas Medeiros

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Latin American Societies

Current Challenges in Social Sciences

Current Challenges in Social Sciences

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/16592

The Bolsonaro Paradox

ISSN 2730-5538 ISSN 2730-5546 (electronic)

If I had to locate The Bolsonaro Paradox in contemporary debates, I would say

any concreteness, this analysis allows Bolsonaro to no longer be seen as eccentric

President, Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP) Marcos Nobre

The use of ideas such as a post-bourgeois public sphere, right-wing counterpub-

São Paulo, Brazil Camila Rocha

ANFAVEA National Association of Automotive Vehicle Manufacturers

IMB Mises Institute Brazil

UDN National Democratic Union

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

dimension, highlighting advances and retreats as different social actors included or

Meanwhile, it is important to remember that power relations in the public sphere

While both left- and right-wing counterpublics use counterpublicity, an impor-

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 11

since Brazil’s military dictatorship and redemocratization, this phenomenon is

CEDES was composed of academics, mostly graduates of the University of São

Brazilian Rural Society, which theoretically was more resistant to neoliberalism. At

At the time of the Constitutional Congress, a crisis of national-developmentalism

stimulating foreign investment. The latter sought to continue the developmentalist

Due to the “taboo” of right-wing identification, in the words of Renan Santos,

developing in an extremely free-form and sometimes violent manner (Fragoso,

The “Gramscian hegemony” to which Boeira refers is related to an argument

Boeira’s perception about right-wing people’s isolation and lack of representa-

In the words of Bernardo Santoro of Rio de Janeiro, a frequent participant in

Libertarian Party (Líber) in 2007.

In Carvalho’s view, the use of polished language that is conventionally understood

It Is Achievements published several books by authors that Carvalho referenced

2.3 The Institutionalization of the Nascent New Right

Actions by members of the counterpublics gained more sustainability as new orga-

Initially conceived as an affiliate of the Institute of Business Studies,47 the

In addition to forming study groups at their respective colleges, Fonseca, from

defends libertarian ideas.

difficulties gathering the 500,000 signatures required for it to be officially regis-

Do you remember which communities you frequented?

employees, and significant funding. They were normally created by professionals,

To describe the work of today’s network of liberal organizations, Hélio Beltrão

This decentralized organization style is not unprofessional, on the contrary. The

Abranches, S. (1988). Presidencialismo de coalizão: o dilema institucional brasileiro. Dados,

Carvalho, O. (1999). Introdução Crítica à Dialética de Schopenhauer. In A. Schopenhauer &

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 59

3.1 The “Progressive Shock” and the Conservative Reaction

However, soon the “liberal-libertarian hegemony” of Brazil’s nascent new right

writing on the internet, cf. Gomes (2018, pp. 137–139).

In addition to describing their shock caused by images of performances by sub-

Anxiety and a sense of disposability in a rapidly transforming job market, as well

Interviews with Bolsonaro voters, as well as opinion polls on topics related to

The video can be seen on Flávio Bolsonaro’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb0JGA80iLo)

or Media Without a Mask’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5S47UfPF1g) YouTube

In spite of criticizing subaltern counterpublics’ use of counterpublicity, both

fear in “upstanding citizens” and received treatment of coercion, confinement, and

What is in play in domains as apparently different as children’s and adolescent

previous frontiers which were fiercely contested by oppositional discourses of femi-

3.2 The Protest Cycle and the Revolts of June 2013

association—united thousands of people. Many of them wore black and carried

According to mainstream media accounts, those demonstrations began with the

Fig. 3.1 Strikes in Brazil (1984–2020)

who objected to the construction of a subway station (Savazoni, 2016); an eruption

Brazilians pay in taxes

São Paulo, Brazil Camila Rocha

2.3 The Institutionalization of the Nascent New Right

3.1 The “Progressive Shock” and the Conservative Reaction

3.2 The Protest Cycle and the Revolts of June 2013

4.1 The Impeachment Campaign (2014–2016)

supported by Olavo de Carvalho, among them the pages of Brazilian Social

4.2 Toward Bolsonaro’s Election (2016–2018)

4.2.1 Public Security and the Militarization of Life

4.2.2 Meritocracy and Victimism

4.2.3 Corruption and Anti-politics

4.2.4 Moralization and Christianization of Life

4.2.5 Pop Hatred and the Language of the People