On a knife edge

The Brazilian right is walking a tightrope. It needs to maintain the support of the popular base mobilized by Bolsonarism, but at the same time wants to rid itself of the stench of Bolsonaro himself. The equation is uncomfortable: how to guarantee the vote of the popular classes without abandoning the agenda of austerity, privatization, and dismantling of social rights? The solution sought is a hybrid engineering—maintaining the language of popular appeal, the moralistic rhetoric, and the cultural agitation, but entrusting structural execution to fiscal orthodoxy and the interests of big capital.

This ambition demands a juggling act. Bolsonarism revealed the existence of an electorate willing to defend order, even when it comes disguised as brutality and loss of rights. But capital doesn't need chaos; it wants efficiency and subservience. Institutional blunders, paranoid rhetoric, and flirtation with permanent chaos have become inconvenient for those managing the project. What is now sought is a reliable operator: someone who knows how to dialogue with the popular base, but who accepts playing the macroeconomic tripod score without going off-key.

This is not an improvised plan. The moves are meticulous. The elite wants to preserve the right-wing momentum in the popular vote, but without giving space to a leader who gets out of control. The ideal is a palatable figure, with an appearance of balance and a conciliatory spirit, but who, in practice, is functional to the market's agenda. A weak president, neutralized from the start, or—better yet—an institutional arrangement that removes any effective power from the Executive branch. The main expression of this is the triad: secret budget, Central Bank autonomy, and the judicialization of politics.

The containment of the Executive branch no longer depends on formal changes to the political regime. It already operates effectively through a silent triad: the secret budget, which shifts the center of decision-making to the Centrão (center-right bloc); the autonomy of the Central Bank, which hands over monetary power to a core shielded from public debate; and the judicialization of politics, which transforms the Judiciary into a permanent instance of veto and/or concession. Together, these mechanisms compose a blocking architecture—designed to neutralize any attempt to reverse, even partially, the neoliberal program. The vote continues to exist, but its transformative power is amputated from the outside.

However, there is a complexity that cannot be ignored. It is not a matter of an elite dominating against the people, but one that frequently obtains the active consent of significant segments of the population. The adherence of popular segments to the neoliberal agenda—marked by aversion to institutional politics, the idealization of order, and conservative moral codes—does not arise by chance. It is cultivated by a web of symbolic mediations that shape worldviews, affections, and everyday values. In this terrain, the struggle for meaning precedes and shapes the struggle for power. This is where the culture war comes in: not as a rhetorical diversion, but as an essential cog in the project. Through it, neoliberalism presents itself as a moral value and the market as superior justice—not imposed, but desired.

Bolsonarism, in this sense, is not an accident: it is the expression of capital's capacity to translate its project into shared affections. It combines cuts to rights with rhetoric of redemption. It dismantles public policies while claiming to protect the family, security, and freedom. The logic is brutal and effective: it is possible to lose income, health, housing—as long as one maintains the feeling of belonging to a hierarchical order that punishes the "others." The right understood this. And now it wants to repeat the formula without the unpredictable element: Bolsonaro himself.

There is no simple contradiction here between popular vote and the neoliberal project. There is a dispute—and capital has learned to win it from within. Through the media, churches, apps, algorithms, and concrete networks of sociability, it shapes political desires and fantasies. The vote becomes a response to a pre-constructed narrative: whoever manages to name the fear and identify the enemy most clearly wins—even if their program is a continuation of the dismantling. It is the victory of politics as the management of resentments.

Social liberalism, a pale specter of reconciliation between growth and inclusion, has been corroded from within and without. It no longer convinces capital, nor does it excite the people. Its promises of justice within the established order have become anachronistic in the face of the radicalization of rent-seeking and the erosion of forms of social protection. The center-left, cornered, hesitates between defending what still remains or adapting to the new rationality of capital. Meanwhile, the project of domination advances—more technical, colder, more shielded.

What's at stake is not just the choice of the next president, but the political function of the vote. The elite seeks a new arrangement: where people vote, but don't decide; where the Executive branch becomes ceremonial and Parliament, a condominium of interests shielded from the popular will. Democracy becomes an empty form, useful only for validating a program that has already been pre-defined. The people participate—as long as they don't interfere.

The left needs to confront this system without illusions. It's not enough to combat the figures of authoritarianism; it's necessary to dismantle the system that produces consent to inequality. This involves contesting the meanings of everyday life, collective values, and the languages ​​of the common good. It involves rearticulating solidarities, denaturalizing suffering, and creating openings where listening and desire still exist. The right balances on a razor's edge, oscillating between open authoritarianism and technocratic control. It doesn't walk blindly—it gropes with calculation, accumulates trial and error, and tests the limits of the political possible as one who knows that time, if not strained, leans in its favor. What it cannot encounter is passivity disguised as lucidity and pragmatism.