The global far right is preparing to undermine the Brazilian elections.

The interview with critic and analyst João Cezar de Castro Rocha, released this Wednesday, the 4th, on YouTube, sheds light on a strategic error that Brazilian democracy insists on repeating: treating the extreme right as a local, episodic, or spontaneous phenomenon. The documents associated with the Epstein case, far from being merely a moral scandal, function as a map of an international power structure where money, political influence, blackmail, and cultural warfare circulate.

In this scenario, Brazil is not the periphery. It's a testing ground.

The global method of the far right

The far right of the 21st century does not organize itself as a traditional party, but as a transnational network of political influence. Its core is permanent culture warfare. That is, the deliberate destruction of the notion of factual truth, the systematic attack on institutions, and the conversion of political conflict into a continuous emotional spectacle.

The main architect of this method is Steve Bannon, who has transformed politics into an engineering of chaos. The logic is simple and brutal: flood the public sphere with misinformation, scandals, conspiracy theories, and personal attacks until no fact-checking can contain the flow. The goal is not to convince, but to cognitively disorganize society.

This strategy was successfully implemented in the United States under Donald Trump and quickly exported. Digital platforms provide the infrastructure; churches and influencers ensure social reach; entrepreneurs finance the operation; and political operators handle the local adaptation. It is a global project with decentralized execution.

The documents related to the Epstein case help reveal the backdrop of this machine: international power networks operating outside of public scrutiny, crossing borders, political regimes, and legal systems. This is not an abstract conspiracy, but a real ecosystem that combines money, blackmail, impunity, and propaganda.

Brazil as a laboratory

The election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 was neither a historical accident nor an irrational outburst from the electorate. It was the first major victory of the global far-right outside the US-Europe axis, built on large-scale digital warfare. WhatsApp, industrial fake news, illegal dissemination of information, coordinated attacks on the press, the Supreme Court, and the electoral system were not mere side effects. They were methods. Brazil had ideal conditions: high penetration of closed applications, lack of regulation of platforms, and a deep political crisis after 2016.

The crucial mistake was treating that process as something that had been overcome with Bolsonaro's electoral defeat in 2022. The network didn't dissolve. It became more professional. It learned from its mistakes, increased funding, refined its language, and began operating with greater technical and narrative sophistication.

From 2018 to 2026: the mutation of digital warfare

In 2018, disinformation had one central goal: to win votes. In 2026, the goal is deeper and more dangerous: to break democratic governance, regardless of the election results.

João Cezar de Castro Rocha's warning is direct. What was seen in 2018 will be almost nothing compared to what is being prepared. The new phase combines artificial intelligence, synthetic videos, emotional micro-segmentation, and simultaneous attacks on institutions. The minimum plan is to prevent victory in the first round. The maximum plan is to transform the second round into a field of democratic exhaustion, where the electoral process is born under permanent suspicion. It's not just about contesting the election, but about preemptively delegitimizing the winner.

The main target is Lula.

In this scenario, the Supreme Federal Court (STF), the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), and the media once again become priority targets. And not by chance. Without legitimate arbiters, democracy devolves into brutal conflict. The far right is betting on preventative institutional erosion: if everything is presented as fraudulent, any defeat becomes a coup; any victory for the adversary becomes usurpation.

The central target of this strategy is Lula. The objective is not only to defeat him electorally, but to prevent him from governing, even if he wins. A re-elected president, however, besieged from day one, pressured by permanent hate campaigns, a hostile Congress, and public opinion poisoned by misinformation. It is the deliberate production of a lame-duck president, manufactured even before his inauguration.

Bolsonaro, Bannon, Trump: all the same machine.

There are no dotted lines here—there are straight lines. Bolsonaro was not a foreign body to global Bolsonarism: he was a local expression of Bannon's method, enthusiastically applied by Trump and adapted to Brazilian conditions. The anti-establishment rhetoric, the attacks on institutions, the industrial fabrication of lies, and the constant flirtation with democratic rupture all follow the same manual, operated by international networks that remain active. Bolsonarism did not end because Bolsonaro lost. It persists because it is part of a global power architecture that does not depend on elections to survive.

Democracy under siege

"Without fear of being happy" was the slogan of a time when elections decided the country's future. Today, the dispute is more basic: whether the vote still means anything.

The globalist far right doesn't need to win to win. It just needs to prevent the winner from governing. It just needs to transform democracy into an empty ritual, permanently sabotaged from within.

João Cezar de Castro Rocha's warning is not rhetorical. It is strategic. Either Brazil understands that it is facing an international political warfare operation, or it will continue to react as if it were dealing with isolated incidents.

In October, it won't just be about who governs the country. Brazil will not only choose a president. It will choose whether the vote will continue to be an instrument of popular sovereignty or whether it will be converted into an empty ritual, surrounded by industrial lies, organized hatred, and a global far-right that recognizes no limits, does not accept defeat, and works systematically to transform democracy into a besieged formality.