Research: Between improbable scenarios and ongoing hybrid warfare

By Reynaldo Aragon and Sara Goes - The Quaest survey released today (2), with its “all scenarios” for 2026, is an excellent example of contemporary operation of research — this logic in which opinion polls cease to be tools for interpreting reality and become instruments for its fabrication. Polling is the aestheticization of politics as simulation: a war of narratives waged with numbers and graphs that, under the guise of scientific neutrality, operates within the spectrum of hybrid warfare and psychological warfare (psyops). Psychological operations, or psyops, are strategies used to influence the emotions, beliefs, and behaviors of entire populations without them realizing they are being manipulated—the goal is not to convince with arguments, but to induce perceptions that serve specific power interests.

We are witnessing a sophisticated re-edition of old destabilization techniques, now boosted by the apparatus of Big Tech and disguised as democracy under the banner of unrestricted freedom of expression. This dispute takes place on the symbolic, affective, and perceptual planes. The war is informational, but its target is common sense. This is where the... FrenCyber — The Parliamentary Front for Cybersecurity — not only as an institutional body, but as part of a larger ecosystem of discursive manipulation and ideological surveillance. The new Big Tech lobby, as we have warned, acts in the instrumentalization of digital politics and the legitimization of psyops, directly interfering in popular sovereignty through conditioning stimuli that gradually shape social perception and, consequently, collective behavior.

What the research accomplishes, in this context, is not merely a survey of intentions. It is a simulation of a state of affairs. The normalization of the candidacy of a country music singer, the persistence of names like Pablo Marçal and Eduardo Bolsonaro in repeated scenarios, and the absence of any mention of grassroots activism or popular movements reveal a broader operation: the progressive replacement of politics by algorithmic avatars, focusing on diffuse affections, hate speech, and media identity. It's as if the research doesn't collect opinions, but rather... plants.

Hybrid warfare takes advantage of precisely this: legal tools, traditional vehicles, and established methodologies to produce profound distortions in social perception. In this context, polls are not merely demonstrations of the current state of affairs—reliable or not—but direct reflections of a deeper phenomenon: in recent years, the electoral behavior of the Brazilian people, even in the face of concrete and effective public policies, has lost part of its capacity to understand objective reality, plunging into a profound state of cognitive dissonance, detached from reality. What has prevailed is a volatile perception, fragmented by digital bubbles, fake news, and mass-manipulated emotions. Polling ceases to be an instrument of analysis and becomes a mirror of the collapse of rational mediation—and polling zeal feeds precisely on this.

The war is already underway. And it's not just being fought at the ballot box—but in the minefields of perceptions. With each new round of numbers, the real political structures—unions, social movements, grassroots collectives—are being pushed out of the picture. In their place come the influencers, the performative outsiders, the algorithm-candidates. It's the progressive replacement of politics by avatars compatible with surveillance capitalism. And, in this game, polling is the technique of erasure. 

Therefore, it's not about discrediting all research, but about breaking with the naturalization of research-based methods as the official language of politics. The Quaest survey is yet another warning: the field of debate is already contaminated by mechanisms of perceptual manipulation. And there is no possible defense of democracy without denouncing this mode of reality production.