Brazilian Politics

How Foreigners Get Brazil Wrong

A Brazilian's reply to the English-language version of our politics

A friend of mine sent me a lecture by Professor Jiang about the Brazilian election. Jiang is sharp, and he has a model of the world that explains a lot of things correctly. But on Brazil he was working from the English-language shelf, and the English-language shelf is wrong about us in a very specific, very consistent way.

His claims were these:

that Lula is a socialist who defends workers' rights;
that Bolsonaro was not charismatic; and
that Christian Zionism is the driving force behind Bolsonarism.

One of those is right. The other two are the standard foreign misreadings, they are what you get when your entire picture of Brazil is assembled from a handful of English-speaking commentators who all, from different directions, arrive at the same story.

That story is a morality play. Democracy versus authoritarianism, the good union man versus the tropical Trump. It is emotionally satisfying, it travels well, but it is almost useless for understanding who actually runs this country.

I want to try to give you the other map. Not the neutral one — I don't believe in it — but a map drawn by someone who lives here, pays taxes here, and has watched both of these men govern.

The lens you have been given

If you are an English speaker trying to follow Brazil, you are probably reading one of two pipelines.

The first is the anti-imperialist one: Glenn Greenwald, Pepe Escobar, Vijay Prashad, Ben Norton, Brian Mier at Brasil Wire. These are not stupid people and they are not all saying the same thing. Greenwald in particular did work that mattered: the Vaza Jato leaks, published through The Intercept Brasil, showed that Judge Sergio Moro had been coaching prosecutors during the Lava Jato investigations. That was real, it was important, and it did more to expose the politicization of our judiciary than anything written by a Brazilian in the mainstream press. I will give him that permanently.

But the frame is still an American frame. In that frame, politics is left versus right, and the question is always whether you are on the side of democracy or the side of the authoritarians. Applied to Brazil, that frame produces a Lula who is a workers' hero and a Bolsonaro who is a fascist with no popular base beyond hatred. Both of those are caricatures, and the second one is not even a good caricature, because it cannot explain why tens of millions of people who are not monsters voted for the man twice.

The second pipeline is the liberal one: Oliver Stuenkel, Monica de Bolle, the Americas Quarterly / Foreign Affairs circuit. Smarter, more empirical, less romantic — and it lands in almost the same place, because it is also organized around the same axis. Bolsonaro is the threat to institutions; Lula is the institutionalist. From opposite ends of the spectrum, the two pipelines converge on the same verdict, which should make you suspicious. When the anti-imperialist left and the liberal internationalist center agree about a country neither of them lives in, what you are usually seeing is a shared set of assumptions, not a shared set of facts.

What Jiang got right

Christian Zionism is real, and it is not a fringe curiosity. It is one of the load-bearing walls of the Brazilian right.

The evangelical bloc in Congress is around two hundred deputies out of five hundred and thirteen. The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, the Assemblies of God, and the rest of that ecosystem are media empires, political machines, and tax-exempt real-estate operations at the same time. Bolsonaro went to Jerusalem and stood at the Western Wall with Netanyahu. His followers wave Israeli flags at rallies in a country where almost no one is Jewish. They say "God bless the USA and Israel" while calling themselves Brazilian nationalists, and they do not experience that as a contradiction, because in their cosmology America and Israel are not foreign countries — they are the right side of a cosmic war.

Jiang understood that. What he could not see, because it is not visible from the outside, is that this is a symptom of the Brazilian right's geopolitical naivety, not its cause.

Lula is not a socialist

This is the part that foreigners get wrong most often, and it is the part that matters most.

Lula is not a socialist. He has never been one in any meaningful sense. He is a utilitarian who wants power, and he has been extremely good at getting it. His government is not built on defending workers; it is built on transferring small amounts of money to poor people in exchange for their political dependence, while leaving the actual structure of the economy untouched.

Bolsa Família is the clearest example. It is a conditional cash transfer, created in 2003, reaching tens of millions of people, costing a bit over one percent of GDP. As poverty relief it does something. As a governing technology it does something else: it makes the poorest Brazilians dependent on the federal state, and therefore on the party that controls the federal state. It does not create jobs. It does not build productive capacity. It does not change the fact that a person in the Northeast can be fed and still have no path out.

That is the deal. He gives you enough to survive and not enough to leave. And in exchange he gets a voting bloc that will defend him against anything, including the corruption cases, because the alternative is losing the transfer.

The result is a man who has been in national politics for four decades, has already demonstrated that he does not have the people's interest in mind, and still gets described in the international press as if he were something much larger than he is. He does not generate jobs. He does not do anything significant to improve the country's productive base. At most, what we see is the maintenance of the strategic assets and projects that already exist. Nothing new is built.

And he is corrupt — more corrupt, in the plain sense of money moved, than Bolsonaro. Lava Jato convicted him in 2017. He spent five hundred and eighty days in prison. The Supreme Court annulled those convictions in 2021 on procedural grounds, which is not the same as declaring him innocent, and everyone here understands that distinction even when the foreign press does not. The Mensalão, the congressional vote-buying scheme from his first term, was the largest organized corruption case in the country's history until it was surpassed by the next one.

He has stayed in power for so long for a reason that has nothing to do with popularity and everything to do with usefulness. He does not stand up to the groups that are more powerful than him. He does not fight injustice in any way that would cost him. He is happy with his share of power and influence, and he does the will of the people who have more of it than he does. That is why the system tolerates him.

Bolsonaro was charismatic, and that is why he is in jail

The claim that Bolsonaro was not charismatic is the one that told me Jiang had never watched him speak to a crowd.

Bolsonaro is enormously charismatic. Not in the polished, professional sense — in the sense that he thinks the way a large part of the population thinks, and they can feel it. He is petty, he is crude, he says the thing that the average citizen is thinking and is not supposed to say. The average citizen is very simple-minded, and Bolsonaro is simple-minded in exactly the same register. That is not a bug in his politics; it is the whole mechanism.

And it is also why he was a disaster diplomatically. He thought Russia was communist, because the Brazilian right is still mentally in the Cold War and never got the updated news. He sold, or tried to sell, national resources to the United States and its allies while his followers waved American flags. He had no strategy and no theory. He was an average man with average instincts and an above-average ability to be liked.

Bolsonarism became a mass movement for a specific reason that foreigners consistently miss: he was seen as the only Brazilian politician who was not corrupt. He attacked Lula precisely on the corruption that everyone already knew about, and to a population that had watched the Workers' Party loot the state, that felt like the only person saying the obvious thing out loud. That is the emotional core of the movement. Not fascism. Relief.

On corruption, they are not on the same level. The Bolsonaro family has its cases — Flávio, his eldest son and the camp's candidate in this election, has been caught in minor ones, and is now reported to be tangled up with Vorcaro, the banker people here call the Brazilian Epstein, a man who allegedly used blackmail to control politicians and important people. That is serious and I am not defending it. But the charges against Jair Bolsonaro himself are about power, not money. Stealing is one kind of crime. Trying to stay in office is another, and a less venal one.

Which brings me to the conviction.

He was convicted of attempting a coup, and I'm not going to pretend the file was empty: there was a draft decree, there were two army commanders who say they were asked and refused. The law is real — articles 359-L and 359-M of the Penal Code, written so that the attempt is the crime, which is why "nothing happened" is not a defense. He was sentenced to twenty-seven years and three months. He is in custody, currently on medical house arrest.

But the court that convicted him is the same court that annulled Lula's convictions in 2021, and it convicted his opponent in ten months, in a five-judge panel that included Lula's own lawyer and Lula's own justice minister — judging a man accused of plotting to kill a third member of that panel. That isn't justice with a political shadow over it. That's the judiciary acting as one of the power groups I'm describing.

He is in jail because he made powerful people afraid. He spent his presidency fighting the other powers — the judges above all — and the judges in Brazil are one of the most powerful classes in the country, alongside the capitalists and the media. He had too much popular support to be managed, so he was removed. If he had been a docile, useful man like Lula, he would still be free.

Both of them are tools

Here is the thing that neither Jiang nor Greenwald will tell you, because it requires living here: neither Lula nor Bolsonaro sits at the table where the decisions are made.

They are instruments. They are told what to do. Lula is the instrument of the national elite and the state apparatus; Bolsonaro was the instrument of the globalist right and the American-aligned networks. Neither of them has a strong strategy. Both of them think like average people, because both of them are average people who happened to be placed in extraordinary positions.

And there is a group that is more powerful than either of them and almost never appears in the English-language coverage: American intelligence. It is one of the most influential forces in Brazilian politics, and it is stealthy. It does not announce itself. It works through NGOs, through media partnerships, through the security apparatus, through the endless exchange of favours that makes up the relationship between a peripheral country and an empire. I cannot prove this to you with a document, and I am telling you plainly that this is my reading of how the country works. But if you want to understand why Brazilian politics keeps producing outcomes that serve Washington's interests regardless of who wins, you have to at least consider it.

Nationalism is a costume on both sides

All sides pretend to be nationalist. None of them are.

The population does not care much about the label. Most of the population is at a very low level of political consciousness, and "nationalist" is not a tag that moves votes. What moves votes is identity, resentment, and the perception of who is on your side.

Lula talks about nationalism while bragging about the country's underdevelopment and poverty, and while his main achievement is a bribe program. Bolsonaro talks about nationalism while saying "God bless the USA and Israel," while his followers wave foreign flags at every rally, and while he tries to hand the country's resources to foreign companies.

The mentality here is Good versus Evil. If you do not support Bolsonaro, you support Lula, and that makes you an evil person. If you do not support Lula, you support Bolsonaro, and that makes you an evil person. Politics is not a debate about policy; it is a religious war with two congregations, and the foreigners who report on it keep accidentally joining one of the congregations instead of describing the war.

The middle class that never existed

I keep reading, in English, that the middle class is shrinking and that AI is coming for our jobs. Both of those sentences were written for countries that have a middle class.

Brazil's middle class has always been tiny. It is not shrinking from prosperity into precarity; it was never large enough to shrink. So when a foreign commentator tells Brazilians that automation and AI are destroying the middle class, the honest Brazilian response is: what middle class?

What we have is a small, extremely wealthy elite, a thin professional layer, and a vast base that has been poor for generations and is now being kept afloat by transfers. That is the actual structure, and it is why the global discourse about "demand destruction" and "elite overproduction" fits us badly.

You can see the consequences in the strategic sector. Brazil has one of the largest rare earth reserves on earth, and almost nothing is being done by either side to protect them from foreign interference. Not Lula, not Bolsonaro, not the Congress, not the courts. The most strategically valuable thing under our soil is sitting there while everyone argues about flags.

I am not saying the global trends are fake. I am saying that the countries with the worst conditions are not the ones the discourse is about. Of the leaders people compare — Trump, Putin, Modi, Xi — the one governing the worst conditions is Modi, and Modi is still doing a great deal, constantly, to develop strategic national projects for Indians. Lula does not do that. Lula maintains the status quo. And maintenance is not development.

The elite problem

If you take one thing from this, take this: almost every Brazilian thinker, of every political affiliation, agrees that the Brazilian elite is a very bad elite.

It is selfish. It is outward-oriented. The moment a Brazilian achieves success, he stops worrying about the country and starts worrying about Miami, Lisbon, and his dollar account. Our wealthy do not invest in Brazil's future because they do not intend to have one here. Our judges protect the class they belong to. Our media belongs to families that have been managing the country's narrative for a century. Our capitalists prefer a dependent country with cheap labour to a developed one with expensive labour.

That is the real political question in Brazil, and it is the question that neither Lula nor Bolsonaro can answer, because both of them are employees of the answer.

I am part of a minority here that actually cares about nationalism. Not the flag-waving kind — the kind that thinks a country should build things, protect what it has, and stop being a farm and a mine for people who live somewhere else. Neither of the two men on offer in this election represents that. The foreigners who write about us will tell you it is a choice between democracy and tyranny. It is a choice between two instruments, wielded by the same small group of people, and the only real question is whether you are willing to see the hand.

The 2026 election is being covered abroad as a referendum on democracy. It is not. It is a negotiation between the groups that have always run this country, and the outcome will be decided by which of them finds the other more useful. If you want to understand Brazil, stop asking who is good and who is evil, and start asking who is pulling the strings.