The fiery Brazilian right-wing movement ignited by Jair Bolsonaro’s 2018 ascent to the presidency is seeking a rebrand.
A year after Bolsonaro’s supporters stormed the capital in a bid to overturn his election defeat, members of his inner circle are trying to chart a more moderate path toward municipal contests in October, as they attempt to broaden their appeal ahead of a 2026 presidential race in which their standard-bearer can’t take part.
“The right has to be more centre-right,” Flavio Bolsonaro, the former president’s eldest son and a senator from Rio de Janeiro, said in a recent interview.
The fledgling strategy is still light on detail, and it is unclear if Bolsonaro himself is on board. Although the country’s electoral court in June barred him from seeking office for eight years, the rabble-rousing former Army captain who brushed off calls to moderate throughout his Presidency remains the Brazilian right’s de facto leader.
But that key figures close to him are considering a pivot is evidence of the murky future facing a movement that not long ago was in the vanguard of a global lurch rightward, and that even after Bolsonaro’s election loss seemed poised to dominate Brazilian politics.
Instead, it has suffered repeated setbacks since leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office at the start of 2023. Facing a litany of legal troubles, Bolsonaro fled to Florida for three months after the election. Even after returning in March, he remained largely on the sidelines as investigations piled up and a stronger-than-expected economy propelled Lula through a relatively smooth first year.
Brazilian prosecutors also charged hundreds of people with crimes related to the January 8, 2023 insurrection attempt in Brasília, dampening the enthusiasm of supporters who have since struggled to mobilise public demonstrations against the government.
It has all rendered Bolsonarismo, as the movement is known, a global outlier. As right-wing parties and leaders march into the mainstream from the Netherlands to Argentina — and Donald Trump prepares a comeback bid in the United States — the Brazilian right is mired in a political hangover it has struggled to shake off.
“Since the elections, the right has not had clarity on what to do,” said Isabela Kalil, an anthropologist at the São Paulo School of Sociology and Politics who has studied the rise of the extreme right. “It’s not an identity crisis because they know what they want. They are in a leadership crisis, in need of someone to say what needs to be done.”
‘We have to have the centre-right’
For now, that task has fallen to Flavio Bolsonaro and Valdemar da Costa Neto, the head of the Liberal Party that Bolsonaro adopted and helped spur to success in 2022, when its members won the largest share of seats in Brazil’s congress.
Costa Neto opened the party that once supported leftist governments to candidates that moulded themselves after Bolsonaro. But he has since sought to turn it into a bigger-tent organisation to increase its appeal and power.
The party is targeting 1,000 victories in October mayoral elections, seeing wins in 20 percent of the 5,000 races as a launchpad for a strong challenge to Lula in 2026.
To get them, “we have to have the centre-right with us,” Costa Neto said in an interview at party headquarters in Brasilia. “The people of the strong right are not that numerous.”
Flavio Bolsonaro said he has pushed allies to take a “flexible” approach to candidate selection, especially in regions like the Brazilian northeast, a stronghold of Lula’s Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT).
Bolsonarismo won’t bend on priorities like abortion, drug legalisation and free markets, but it shouldn’t demand 100 percent alignment on other subjects, he said, adding that it needs to adopt a softer rhetorical approach as well.
“The voter who likes those more radical things will end up voting for a centre-right candidate,” he said. “So there’s no point in radicalising the tone of speech.”
That strategy has already faced challenges. Bolsonaro in November reported disagreements with Costa Neto over mayoral candidates. And in his efforts to maintain influence over the search for his successor, he has at times publicly criticised potential presidential candidates like São Paulo Governor Tarcisio de Freitas for being too willing to work with the left.
Bolsonaro “has no future, but he does not want to abandon his role as a hegemonic leader yet,” said Andrei Roman, head of the São Paulo-based polling firm AtlasIntel. “They’re in limbo whenever they need to make decisions, because there’s always a fear of alienating Bolsonaro.”
Bolsonaro allies say they need him to play a key role in the looming election cycles. The January 8 criminal cases have left supporters “afraid” to take to the streets, right-wing congresswoman Bia Kicis said in an interview, with planned rallies meant to re-energise the movement failing to generate large crowds. But no one is more capable of jarring them out of that slumber than Bolsonaro.
“His ability to mobilise people and transfer votes will have significant weight in defining the elections,” Ronaldo Caiado, the governor of Goiás state and another potential presidential candidate, said in a phone interview.
But that carries the risk of undermining efforts to tone down the rhetoric: Bolsonaro rose to the presidency by blasting the political class, praising Brazil’s military dictatorship and targeting opponents and minority populations. When his popularity waned, he often returned to that posture, attacking Covid-19 vaccines during the pandemic and spreading conspiracy theories about Brazil’s voting system ahead of the election.
Energy from abroad
Bolsonarismo is far from dead, analysts and its opponents say. Elements of its socially conservative agenda are broadly popular, and more Brazilians now identify as right-wing than left, Roman said.
Lula is facing a potential economic slowdown in 2024 that could hit approval ratings that have so far remained relatively stable: 38 percent of Brazilians rated his government great or good, and another 30 percent regular, in a December 7 Datafolha poll, against 30 percent who call it bad or terrible. His allies regard Bolsonarismo as a lingering political force the left must fight head-on.
“We see the far right not only opposing, but trying to impose an agenda on the country,” Senator Humberto Costa, the coordinator of the Workers’ Party’s (PT) 2024 electoral strategy, said. “We must be ready to do national political confrontation.”
Bolsonaro has also drawn energy from recent victories for right-wing figures like Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders and Argentina's new President Javier Milei. The right-wing movement could make significant gains again in 2024, when 40 national elections — including a US presidential race in which Trump is the Republican frontrunner — will take place.
Bolsonaro has put particular stock in Milei, attending his December inauguration and betting the Argentine will give Brazilians proof that a right-wing government is preferable to its leftist predecessor. That poses its own challenges, especially if Milei’s combination of radical rhetoric and shock therapy for Argentina’s ailing economy fail.
But to Flavio Bolsonaro, the “positive moral effect” of victories like Milei’s outweigh any potential governing perils.
“It’s a risk we have to take,” he said.
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by Daniel Carvalho & Andrew Rosati, Bloomberg
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