Brazil’s Last Line of Defense

Dictatorships die hard. The Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–85) lasted long enough to shape one to two generations of authoritarians, as well as to consolidate a political, social, economic, and cultural coalition of its own, between conservatives and forces on the far-right. With the end of the dictatorship, the authoritarian coalition that had supported the regime was defeated, but its agents were not held accountable for their crimes. And although these groups were scattered after 1985, they were not fully dismantled.

By the mid-1980s, these conservative forces were still very strong in Congress, but they were now operating on their own, unshackled from the previous hegemony of the far-right. That was the moment they confronted another coalition, dominant and progressive, particularly during the Constituent Assembly of 1987–88 that produced the 1988 Federal Constitution.

This confrontation resulted in a political arrangement guided by a practice of accommodation—which then continued to dominate Brazil’s re-democratization for years. As a result of it, even the progressive coalitions that led Brazilian politics between 1994 and 2014 avoided systemic changes, particularly regarding income distribution and wealth taxation. There were no significant clashes regarding redistributive policies among all the different groupings. Social groups that were historically poor, marginalized, or discriminated against benefited minimally: The most important thing was to maintain the dominant positions that the other strata had previously acquired.

Since the mid-2010s, however, this accommodative arrangement has gradually become unsustainable. And the elections later this year will expose the limits of this arrangement—with significant implications for Brazil’s redistributive policymaking and perhaps for its very democracy.

Back in the late 1980s, the conservative forces in Congress formed an informal parliamentary bloc known as the Centrão (“Big Center”). Although the bloc’s composition has changed over time, it remains a decisive actor in Brazilian politics today, and an emblem of both conservatism and pork-barrel politics.

The vast majority of the parties in Brazil have no clear programmatic alignment. In Brazil’s highly fragmented political system, the many parties that comprise the Centrão unite around a common strategy that essentially hinges on selling their influence in Congress to the government, regardless of which administration is in power or which candidates they supported. Specifically, Centrão parties have traded parliamentary support for public funds and protection against judicial scrutiny for various wrongdoings.

Back in the 1980s, to ensure their own survival, the Centrão’s various political forces accepted the dominance of progressive coalitions from two poles. One was headed by former members of the Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (PMDB)—the heir of the only consented opposition that had operated within the limits established by the military dictatorship—who had broken with that party to create, in 1988, the Party of the Brazilian Social Democracy (PSDB). The other pole was led by the Workers’ Party (PT), created in 1980 from a coalition of unions and various grassroot and social movements.

Under the leadership of those two poles, the Centrão expanded to include parties that, as a whole, had not originally supported the military dictatorship. This was a sign that the conservatives the coalition represented were working under democratic assumptions—that is to say, assumptions about what a democratic conservative force might look like in Brazilian politics. The PMDB, for one, fully endorsed this logic from that point on: It even came to be the leader of the cartel selling the Centrão’s parliamentary support.

This is the reason I have called this way of managing Brazil’s political system “Pemedebismo,” an alternative to the usual characterization, “coalition presidentialism.”¹ Between 1994 and 2014, this arrangement produced an oversized government and oversized congressional coalitions. It slowed down both the government’s attempts to fight inequalities and democratization itself, since any administration had to reckon with those vast coalitions, which are by definition difficult to coordinate and move in a single direction. The expression of a conservative pact, it was also, nevertheless, a form of democratic conservatism.

From 1994 (when the Plano Real managed to overcome hyperinflation, one of the major pernicious legacies from the dictatorship, and its architect, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, from PSDB, was elected as president) to 2014 (when Dilma Rousseff, from PT, was reelected as president), negotiations between the executive and the legislative were made on a piecemeal basis, party by party, sometimes group by group, or even, in some extreme cases, among individuals. Every administration used the structural superiority of executive power to exploit the fragmentation of the political system in order to implement its own agenda.

This is to say that the political arrangement that dominated Brazil’s re-democratization period was guided by a practice of accommodation that went far beyond simply not holding agents of the past dictatorship accountable for their crimes. Even as the two progressive poles that led Brazilian politicians between 1994 and 2014 claimed to combat inequalities, in different ways and to varying degrees, the power dynamics within the Centrão precluded systemic changes, for instance when it came to the distribution of income or wealth taxation.

Accommodative democracy pushed these parties to reduce the worst of social inequality and poverty while avoiding straightforward confrontation. One strategy was to increase the tax burden from 25% of GDP in 1994 to about 32.5% of GDP by the mid-2000s (when it was capped at that level and where it has roughly remained since). At this point the country finally managed to overcome another pernicious legacy of the dictatorial period, its external debt. The PT governments of the period also sought to increase household indebtedness as a strategy to raise living standards for poorer Brazilians.

The commodities boom from 2003 to 2011 then offered another way to address economic inequality without challenging the political model’s prevailing arrangement of accommodation. Despite the 2008 crisis, the strategy remained operational until the mid-2010s, when commodities prices dropped. Then followed many years of intense multidimensional crises—economic, social, political—including an economic recession with GDP contractions of 3.5% in 2015 and 3.3% in 2016.

The mid-2010s were also the period when the Centrão re-emerged as a relatively cohesive force, but now it was searching for its independence from the two parties that had previously led it. Under the then-speaker of the Câmara dos Deputados (House of Representatives), Eduardo Cunha—a Newt Gringrich of sorts—the Centrão directly confronted Rousseff’s second administration. It managed to achieve some measure of cohesion while calling for protection from the so-called Operation Car Wash (Operação Lava Jato), a judicial task force that ostensibly sought to fight corruption. At the same time, the economic, political, and judicial crisis of 2015–16 drastically reduced the executive’s capacity to negotiate and sustain political agreements. In parallel, Congress created and expanded its direct power over budget assignments through mandatory expenditures.

As the Centrão parties failed to receive the protection they demanded, and with Rousseff’s approval ratings plummeting, they succeeded in ousting her in 2016. Her vice-president, Michel Temer, replaced her.² This was the Centrão’s first own government, and it quickly failed. The Temer administration (2016–18) was a total disaster in multiple respects; by June 2018 its approval rating was 3%. Still, the Centrão had established itself as a relatively cohesive and autonomous force: It had transcended the leadership of the PT and even more so that of PSDB, which underwent a steep decline after 2016.

Nevertheless, the Centrão needed a viable candidate for the 2018 presidential election. Temer’s government could offer no viable successor. And so the Centrão opted first to support the PSDB candidate and a historic adversary of PT, Geraldo Alckmin. But his candidacy was a wreck: Alckmin received only 4.76% of the vote in the first round. The Centrão then moved on to Jair Bolsonaro, a former Army captain who viewed the Brazilian military dictatorship as an ideal model for a political regime. Bolsonaro became president, defeating Fernando Haddad, the PT’s candidate. (Inácio Lula da Silva, the former two-term president from PT, had been imprisoned on Lava Jato charges by then—a conviction the Supreme Court would later annul after finding that the presiding judge in that case had been biased). This was a clear sign that the accommodative model of re-democratization was no longer viable.

Since 2018, this alliance between the right and the far-right, between the Centrão and the Bolsonaristas, has consolidated.³ In fact, it is the hegemonic coalition in Brazilian politics today. During the 2022 elections, the Centrão split in two, with one small fraction supporting Lula and the remainder backing Bolsonaro. The parties that originated from the party that had once supported the military dictatorship endorsed Bolsonaro.⁴ Alckmin joined Lula’s ticket, as candidate for vice-president, a symbol of a new progressive united front, this one led by the PT.

A similar split is highly unlikely in this year’s elections, even though Lula and Alckmin are running mates again. Lula has some supporters among parties of the Centrão—particularly in the northeastern region of the country—but there is no organized movement in this direction, not even a push from civil society, as there was in 2022. Lula, in other words, has not managed to maintain his Centrão support from the previous election.

The far-right led the right/far-right coalition in both the 2018 and the 2022 elections. It will do so again this year, thanks largely to its success at reaching out well beyond the military community and former supporters of the military dictatorship.

Jair Bolsonaro began the digitalization of his political strategy around 2012, long before his competitors. This approach was decisive for the 2018 elections, which he was able to win despite little official funding and almost no TV time. The effort has since spawned what I have dubbed the “Bolsonarista Digital Party,”⁵ which is not a party in any traditional sense but rather an innovation in political mobilization.

This development has granted the far-right an organizational advantage heading into this year’s elections. The Bolsonarista Digital Party is taking shape outside the dominant democratic institutions consolidated after Brazil’s re-democratization. It makes no commitment whatsoever to prevailing norms, and it does not seek any form of institutionalization. Rather, much like the mass parties at the turn of the twentieth century, the Bolsonarista Digital Party is a product of its time and of changes in the public sphere, in this case those brought about in the digital world, which will most likely change the features of existing political regimes, including liberal democracies—if democracy survives at all.

The competitive advantages of this kind of party are striking. As a non-institutionalized grouping, the Bolsonarista Digital Party escapes all manner of regulations and rules of accountability and transparency, including financing laws and campaign rules. Playing off the political system’s fragmentation, it has not tied itself to any other single party, which allows it to present or endorse candidates from many different ones.

It does, however, favor the Liberal Party, or PL, as a partner.⁶ Once a typical Centrão party—which even held the vice presidency during Lula’s first two terms—PL today brings together both a traditional Centrão faction that is shrinking and a majority faction that has emerged and consolidated around Bolsonarismo.

The Bolsonarista Digital Party also maintains a direct relationship with its base, engaging and mobilizing it via social media platforms. (Brazil ranks among the countries with the highest rates of internet use.) The Bolsonarista Digital Party is constantly proposing and testing new forms of cleavage that might rearrange social coalitions, even if only slightly in its favor.

The digital party engages in permanent online political campaign mobilization, on which its cohesion and its very existence as a political actor depend. It operates through direct, continuous, and disintermediated communication with its base through social-media algorithmic logic. The result is neither simplistic manipulation nor then the spontaneous manifestation of public opinion. Campaigning creates a valuable feedback loop: It helps the Bolsonarista Digital Party monitor public reactions and identify social cleavages in real time and then adjust its discourse accordingly and rapidly reorganize its internal coalitions. It works on a dynamic of permanent and coordinated digital action that perpetually adjusts the relationship between leadership and base.

Thanks to the cohesion they have achieved with the electorate, the leaders of Bolsonarismo have managed to mobilize support for their candidates with greater efficacy than the PT, in races for both national and local representation. The most relevant exception was, of course, the presidential race of 2022, but even then, Bolsonaro lost to Lula by less than 2% of the vote.

Jair Bolsonaro’s imprisonment did represent an important democratic victory against an authoritarian escalation, but it did not neutralize the organizational machinery that had coalesced around him. And this machinery will help compensate for the relative inexperience of Jair’s son Flávio, a candidate for president this year, which matters in the face of an opponent as formidable as Lula. The digital party that sustains Bolsonarismo isn’t just a diffuse movement or a mere online ecosystem. It is active, adaptive, and fully capable of redefining conflicts in both institutional and extra-institutional arenas. Understanding how it operates is essential to understanding Brazil’s political landscape today and what dynamics will shape the 2026 elections.

Now in his third term as president, Lula leads a minority government, and without an actual majority to govern, in order to get legislation passed he must negotiate on a case-by-case basis with a relatively unified congressional force, Centrão, that does not share his agenda.

Things have changed since the first decade of the century and Lula’s first administrations. Now backed by an enormous amount of public funding, especially resources for mandatory expenditures, the Centrão is less dependent on the executive, and it negotiates almost as a single bloc and from a much more favorable position than before.

This reality undergirds the apparent paradox of Lula’s minority support in Congress. Yes, he formally leads a coalition of 14 parties, but in practice the Centrão’s strength means that Lula’s government can rely on only roughly one-third of the representatives and perhaps two-fifths of the senators. This may be enough to avoid impeachment but not necessarily to pass major legislation, much less constitutional amendments that require a two-thirds majority in both houses. Conversely, the fact that some of the government’s proposals are adopted by wide margins does not actually mean that the administration enjoys strong or stable support in Congress.

The Centrão sometimes blocks a bill proposed by the government even before the bill lands in Congress. And when it enters negotiations to adapt some government bills to its own interests, the government then has to take responsibility for any compromise—and perhaps for appearing to compromise itself. Consider, too, the Lula administration’s many decrees⁷ and its many vetoes against pieces of legislation that originated with legislators—which vetoes have then often been overturned by Congress,⁸ which votes Lula has then challenged before the Supreme Court (Supremo Tribunal Federal, or STF).

The Centrão that was once led by the government, during the 1994–2014 period, is no more. Today it isn’t exactly the government’s enemy, nor the real opposition: That’s the far-right, which holds between 20% and 30% of both houses of Congress.⁹ But the Centrão isn’t a friendly bloc either.

And yet Lula has proven capable enough of running a government under these circumstances. He has forced the Centrão against the wall when it has come to legislation with popular appeal, but without taking the relationship to a point of no return. When Lula pushed for establishing a floor for taxing the rich or tax breaks for people earning minimum wages between $600 and $1,500 a month, he was banking on the fact that opposing the measures would cost the Centrão too much with voters. Lula has turned to the SFT to block the Centrão’s moves to expand its power. The Lula administration has also accomplished more in terms of tax justice in these past three years than previous PT governments between 2003 and 2016. (Watch now the government’s proposed labor legislation to reduce working hours, which is expected to go to a vote shortly.)

However much Lula has managed during his third term, though, the dynamics dominating Brazil’s politics have changed: The accommodative framework of re-democratization, which prevailed for decades, has reached new limits. Harsher confrontation now seems unavoidable, and that fact endangers the fight against inequalities. The only question is how intense the confrontation will be and in what direction it will take Brazil.

April 5 was the end of the so-called “party window,” a period during which members of the lower house of Congress can switch parties without losing their seats or facing sanctions from the grouping they leave. Even before then, 46 representatives out of 513 had already changed affiliation, and during the “window” itself approximately 25% of representatives did too. The PL, Flávio Bolsonaro’s party, gained the most. Lula’s coalition retained its stable minority. All parties now have until August 5 to hold their conventions and announce their candidates, not only for president and vice-president, but also for the whole of the House of Representatives and two-thirds of the Senate, as well as for all governors.

The presidential election is shaping up to be a neck-and-neck race. Flávio Bolsonaro and Lula were tied in recent polls for both the first round (40% for Lula, 31% for Flávio) and the second (47% for Lula, 43% for Flávio). (Flávio’s involvement with a banker responsible for major bank fraud has set him back.) Lula and Flávio score similarly high rejection rates among the electorate: 45% and 46%, respectively. Lula’s running mate is Alckmin again; Flávio is expected to announce his in June. For the moment, there are also two other candidates from the right, both very close to Bolsonarismo: Ronaldo Caiado, a former governor of the State of Goiás, and Romeu Zema, a former governor of the State of Minas Gerais. Both are currently predicted to score poorly in the first round if Flávio is among their competitors: 4% and 3%, respectively.

This shows that the progressive camp is unified under Lula’s reelection bid, whereas the right/far-right coalition is unified not behind a candidate but rather against Lula. Ultimately, though, this will not matter if the far-right rallies around Bolsonaro’s candidacy in an eventual second round.

The right/far-right alliance has the benefit of combining traditional parties (which are heavily funded by the state and can bring together governors from key Brazilian regions) with the Bolsonaristas’ informal digital party, with its loosely organized but deeply embedded networks. By contrast, the progressive camp relies mainly on analog resources of mobilization, traditional parties, social movements, and unions. Lula’s camp might, however, have the advantage of incumbency—might.

Since consecutive reelection was permitted in 1998, three out of four of the incumbents have been reelected (Jair Bolsonaro in 2022 is the sole exception). On the other hand, over the past decade throughout Latin America (other than in autocratic countries), a trend seems to have favored anti-incumbent candidates.

Lula will be up against a growing perception among voters that associates PT with corruption, even if, as usually is the case, security, health, and economic issues will most likely be voters’ main topics of concern in the 2026 elections.

The Brazilian economy shows no extraordinary growth (2025: +2,3%; 2024: +3,4%; 2023: +3,2,), but it isn’t in crisis either. If anything, Lula has not only reinstated redistributive social policies dismantled under the Bolsonaro government; he has also introduced new ones capable of producing tangible short-terms effects. His efforts to court the strata of Brazilians who earn between $600 and $1,500 a month and are mainly pro-Bolsonaro have not paid off as expected, but at least they stopped the bleeding. His approval ratings are neither great nor cripplingly poor. International tensions—such as trade disputes involving the US and China—allow the government to articulate a renewed nationalist discourse and cast the alliance between the traditional right and the far-right as subservient to external interests.

But perceptions about the economic situation may matter more than reality.¹⁰ Although polling can’t be taken at face value, it is noteworthy that according to some surveys, a significant portion of Brazil’s population (46%) thinks economic conditions have worsened in recent months. In another poll, a solid majority of respondents said they were discouraged (61%), felt insecure (69%), and were afraid of the future (61%).

Some conjunctural themes might impact the campaign directly—and presumably not in the incumbent’s favor. More than 3 million people are waiting for their pension requests to be reviewed. Lula promised to end this waiting time but has failed to do so. At the same time, some $1.5 billion have been unduly appropriated from pensioners. The fraud began under the administration of Jair Bolsonaro, but his son Flávio will try to pin the problem on the Lula government.

It is difficult to evaluate the extent to which household debt even matters in electoral terms. According to the Central Bank, 50% of Brazilian households are now in debt, one of the highest levels since such tracking began in 2005. Another record: Nearly 30% of household income is spent on repaying debt.

The disposable income of households—income available after essential spending, taxes, and debt servicing have been accounted for—has declined. From 23.6% in 2024, it has fallen to 21%. (The figures peaked at 27.2% in 2011 and 27% in 2020.) The Lula administration seems to fear that it will be blamed for this, which presumably is the reason it has taken strong measures to address the problem.

The government has also taken all possible measures to avoid a surge in fuel prices as a result of Israel’s and the US’s war in Iran. Expected major cuts in interest rates—which have been incredibly high, at around 15% a year between June 2025 and March 2026—have been delayed. Brazil’s benchmark interest rate is still at a shocking 14.5% per year. On the other hand, the Brazilian real has been appreciating against the US dollar, which helps keep inflation under control. And Brazil is a net exporter of oil. The country’s main oil company, Petrobras, which remains under state control, has made extraordinary profits in recent months.

Finally, there is the major problem of the bank fraud that resulted in the extrajudicial liquidation of Banco Master. It has been proven that Flávio Bolsonaro had a direct relationship with a now-imprisoned, bankrupt banker involved in racketeering. But Lula’s candidacy might be affected as well. Two Supreme Court justices—one of whom convicted and sentenced Jair Bolsonaro to jail—have family members who had contracts with the bank and its owner. The judges could be prosecuted, possibly impeached. These two judges, like the majority of the STF, are associated with Lula’s government.

The Câmara dos Deputados, the lower house, is now composed of a broad majority of right-wing representatives unafraid to ally with the far-right. If the coalition led by Flávio Bolsonaro wins the election, Câmara dos Deputados will not only have more representatives from the far-right: The far-right will likely assume the leadership of the coalition in that house.

The Senate remains slightly more friendly to Lula—which is why securing a Senate majority is a top priority of Flávio’s. (Two-thirds of the Senate’s seats will be in dispute in October.) And there is good reason to believe that even if the right/far-right alliance fails to win the presidential election, it is highly likely to win a majority of the Senate.

Taking control of the Senate would enable this coalition to threaten sitting Supreme Court justices with impeachment—the STF has been a faithful and decisive ally of Lula’s in his third term—and to block, veto, or approve new presidential appointments to the court. The next president is expected to appoint at least two new justices during their term.

The Senate’s rejection of Lula’s appointee to the STF last April—a first since 1894—seemed especially harsh, like a declaration of war from the right/far-right congressional alliance to the government. It might also augur just how tough the presidential race might be. Even if Lula wins again, his margin for maneuver in the new term will probably be even more limited than it has been for the last three years.

The 2026 elections in Brazil will also be about aligning with the US, or not, or to what degree—and that, in turn, could determine the future of the government’s position on extractivism after almost forty years of neoliberal rule. The war in Iran, waged by Israel and the US, and the Trump administration’s military intervention in Venezuela (and a next one, Trump has threatened, in Cuba) are also a reminder of Brazil’s peripheral (or semi-peripheral) status on the international scene. The 2026 elections will determine Brazil’s repositioning in the global order’s ongoing recasting.

Upon signing the US-Argentina Agreement on Reciprocal Trade and Investment in February, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said, “The deepening partnership between President Trump and President Milei serves as a model of how countries in the Americas, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, can advance our shared ambitions and safeguard our economic and national security.” The deal will eliminate tariffs on over 200 American products, including machinery, transport equipment, and pharmaceutical and chemical products—threatening to cripple what is left of Argentina’s manufacturing.

The declaration also promises far more than that. It creates a partnership between two presidents rather than two countries. And it sets out the current US government’s model for the entire Americas. The carrots side of it, at least. The sticks side has been on display with the US’s intervention in Venezuela and its current blockade of Cuba.

In his speech in Dallas, Texas, in late March, Flávio Bolsonaro pledged that Brazil’s interests would completely align with US interests. And more: “Brazil is going to be the battleground where the future of the hemisphere will be fought, because Brazil is America’s solution to break dependence on China for critical minerals, especially rare earth elements.” Without these natural resources, he added: “America’s technological revolution stalls and national security becomes vulnerable. And when America becomes vulnerable, the entire free world becomes vulnerable.”

This is one of the most explicit defenses of the neo-extractivist position in which Brazil finds itself after decades of deindustrialization and re-primarization. Both camps endorse a version of neo-extractivism, but the right/far-right coalition does not see this position as a trap that the country should try to escape. It is a structural position, not an accidental or even ephemeral result of broader dynamics.¹¹

Oil exploration is especially relevant in this context, given its increasingly important role in Brazil’s economy. In 2023, Petrobras published a study estimating that the Amapá portion of the Equatorial Margin block, near the mouth of the Amazon River, contains the equivalent of 5.6 billion barrels of oil. Brazil’s environmental regulatory agency, Ibama, refused to grant Petrobras a license to begin any type of exploration. The minister of the environment, Marina Silva, supported Ibama’s decision, emphasizing that the agency’s technical expertise should not be subject to political interference. But the Lula administration is moving toward authorizing drilling in this area. In October 2025, just weeks before the COP30 climate conference was set to begin in Belém, the second-largest city in the Brazilian Amazon region, Ibama granted Petrobras a license to collect geological data to assess the economic viability of extracting oil and gas in the region. Lula has publicly defended the initiative, arguing that Brazil should not “throw away wealth” that could improve the living conditions of its people.

Still, there is a difference between the progressive and the right/far-right coalitions regarding their approach to neo-extractivism. Progressives seek to steer neo-extractivism politically and combine it with redistributive social policies, the promise of environmental regulation, and a fair and equitable energy transition. They are trying to escape that trap, or at least to mitigate its worst effects. Of course, this does not come without contradictions and significant internal tensions, but it is a way of saying that the country’s current neo-extractive position should not become a neo-extractive condition.

The right/far-right coalition, for its part, embraces neo-extractivism fully. Bringing together most sectors of agrobusiness, mining, and finance, as well as most of Congress, it advocates loosening environmental and regulatory controls. It systematically views redistributive policies and environmental protections with hostility.

There is still a final point to be made. In Brazilian history, PT is no ordinary party. It is a mass party with deep roots and the only outspoken left-wing party ever to reach the presidency. This, of course, has a lot to do with Lula. He was on the ballot in six of the nine presidential elections since re-democratization; he won three of them, scoring second place in the other three. The 2026 election will be his seventh, during which he will turn 81.

In the 1989 election, the country’s first direct presidential election after 29 years—and Lula’s first—PT specifically targeted young voters with the slogan “My first vote.” It sounded like a shibboleth for PT as a young party claiming to speak for the future of the country. And it worked. But in polls about this year’s election, 72.7% of voters between the ages of 16 and 24 reject the current president (the average among the general population is 53.5%).

This election will be Lula’s last, and the very future of PT is at issue. If he wins, he may well lead his party to a next stage and help choose PT’s candidate for 2030. If he loses, he might still be able to do that, but under much more difficult conditions. Knowing that PT represents today the main organized party against authoritarian forces, as well as historical inequalities and injustices, any disruption within it would also mean a serious setback for the country itself.

Lula is the last man standing in Brazil. He is the ultimate rampart against complete domination of the system by a right/far-right coalition under the far-right’s control. His government scored important victories over authoritarianism, not the least with Jair Bolsonaro’s imprisonment. Once again, with this year’s elections, the very survival of Brazilian democracy is at stake.

Marcos Nobre is a professor of political philosophy at the University of Campinas (Unicamp), a senior researcher at and a former president of the Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning (Cebrap), a researcher at and a member of the Deliberative Council of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), and Director of the Center for Critical Imagination (CCI/Cebrap). His 2022 book Limits of Democracy: From the June 2013 Uprisings in Brazil to the Bolsonaro Government won the Prêmio Jabuti award for best book of the year in the social sciences.

1. Marcos Nobre, Imobilismo em movimento: da redemocratização ao governo Dilma (Companhia das Letras, 2013). ↩︎
2. As the headline of Celso Rocha de Barros’s op-ed in The New York Times at the time rightly stated, “Dilma Roussef’s impeachment isn’t a coup, it’s a cover-up.” ↩︎
3. According to a recent survey whose results have not yet been fully released, 80% of members of Congress from the right/far-right alliance accept the possibility of an Armed Forces intervention “to guarantee internal order,” a figure only comparable with that of the same survey in 1990. Article 142 of the 1988 Constitution allows for this possibility. ↩︎
4. For a reconstruction of this evolution from 2013 to the 2022 elections, see Marcos Nobre, Limits of Democracy: From the June 2013 Uprisings to the Bolsonaro Government (Springer, 2022). ↩︎
5. A complete description of the operation of the Bolsonarista Digital Party will be available in the forthcoming book The Bolsonarista Digital Party, eds. Marcos Nobre and Ana Cláudia Chaves. ↩︎
6. This is a striking difference compared to, for instance, the US’s two-party system. The MAGA movement had only one possible party to hack, but Brazil’s highly fragmented system means that more than 15 parties are available to the Bolsonarista Digital Party. ↩︎
7. As of March of this year, Congress had converted only 23% of the provisional presidential decrees into law. ↩︎
8. By the end of last year, Congress had overturned approximately 50% of the third Lula administration’s vetoes to laws approved by Congress. During Lula’s first two terms as president, this rate was less than 2%. ↩︎
9. For the House of Representatives; for the Senate. ↩︎
10. Laura Carvalho and Guilherme Klein provided an interesting explanation for this phenomenon in a recent article ↩︎
11. Marcos Nobre, “Brazil’s Neo-Extractivist Trap: Dependency Patterns at the Dusk of Neoliberalism,” Phenomenal World, April 2025. ↩︎