As Brazil goes to the polls on 4 October, surveys show Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the 80-year-old incumbent, running neck and neck with Flávio Bolsonaro, whose father remains in prison for plotting a coup after losing the presidency in 2022.

From the outside, it might be difficult to understand how Lula and his Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), which has done more than any other party in Brazilian history to uplift the poor and enact welfare measures, can be challenged by the heir of Jair Bolsonaro, under whose watch violence, inequality and criminality soared across the country. But the appeal of the contemporary far right is never straightforward.

Few figures are better placed to make sense of this contest than the political philosopher Rodrigo Nunes. An early participant in the World Social Forum, he made his name as an analyst of the pitfalls and possibilities of left-wing organising – the subject of his first book, Neither Vertical nor Horizontal (2021). He has since emerged as one of the most incisive critics of Bolsonarismo – a phenomenon he places within a broader international context in his new book, Anatomy of Disintegration: What Brazil Reveals About the Global Far Right.

Carlos Pérez spoke to Nunes about the coming election, the achievements and disappointments of Lula’s third term, and the forces that brought Bolsonarismo into being and sustain its appeal.

Carlos Pérez: What is your assessment of Lula’s third term? How does contemporary Lulismo differ from the politics that brought him to power more than two decades ago?

Rodrigo Nunes: In the 2022 election, the best president in Brazilian history ran against the worst and won by a very small margin. That gives you a sense of the challenges Lula faced when he returned to office. Brazilian society today is very different from what it was in 2003. Anti-PT, and even specifically anti-Lula sentiment runs very deep. Conversely, the Bolsonarista vote has a very high floor.

So, when Lula returned to power, he did so from a much weaker position. Politically, he was facing what is usually described as the most right-wing Congress of all time. Economically, he didn’t have anything that resembled the commodity boom of 20 years ago, which had allowed him to increase government spending on social programmes without increasing taxation – a win-win formula that made the rich richer and the poor less poor.

Under these new, strained circumstances, his government achieved two main things, which could be seen as somewhat contradictory. First, it pushed through tax reform that shifted the tax burden upwards – not something that has won hearts and minds, since its effects won’t be felt for years. Second, it adopted a new fiscal framework, committing the state to limits on spending, which strengthened its alliance with the capitalist class, but weakened its capacity to fund social programmes. André Singer and Fernando Rugitsky have described the result as “Lulismo in slow motion”. Meanwhile, as in the US under President Biden, the macroeconomic indicators have improved but people don’t feel it, because private debt has soared and there is an epidemic of online gambling.

This government was a welcome respite from ten years of institutional turmoil, but mere normality was never going to be enough to challenge the social appeal of Bolsonarismo. That is why, even with Jair in jail, his less competent son Flávio might still defeat one of the greatest political leaders the world has known since the middle of the last century.

The polls show a technical tie between Lula and Flávio. What would a Flávio victory mean for Brazil?

Of Jair’s four sons, Flávio is the sanest, keeps the lowest profile, and holds the most traditionally right-wing views – in that he has less time for MAGA posturing than his brothers Eduardo, Carlos and Jair Renan. He is an old-style politician. He excels at cutting deals. ‘Tell me how much you want, and we’ll sort it out.’ Like other old-style politicians, he has been involved in many corruption scandals, including the big one unfolding right now, the Banco Master case – a multibillion-real bank fraud. (One of the operators at the heart of this scheme was the biggest donor to Jair Bolsonaro’s 2022 campaign.)

Almost everyone implicated is on the right but the scandal has somehow hurt the left more since it reached the Supreme Court – five justices have been tied to the guilty banker. Since the Bolsonaro trial, the court has been associated with the left, though it isn’t left-wing by any stretch of the imagination. As always, anti-corruption discourse works selectively.

We can expect a few things from Flávio. The first and most important would be a realignment with the US, as during his father’s presidency. There has been a lot of back and forth between Washington and the Bolsonarista camp, much of it through Eduardo, a former Congressman who abandoned office and moved to the US, where he has lobbied the Trump administration, with enviable dedication, to place sanctions on his home country. In June, a public letter from Marco Rubio to Flávio implicitly suggested that the latter had offered to put his transition team at Washington’s disposal should he win.

In exchange for Trump’s support, Flávio has signalled his intention to surrender to US interests in areas like rare earths, energy, and agribusiness. But Trump’s intervention goes beyond the economic realm. Earlier this year, again after much lobbying from the Brazilian right, the US declared Brazil’s two largest criminal groups, the PCC and the Comando Vermelho, terrorist organisations – a move normally used to justify subsequent political and military intervention, as in Colombia, Ecuador and, more recently, Venezuela. The point of the ‘war on drugs’ is not to fight crime per se, but to assert US interests in the region, often by picking sides among local political factions as well as criminal factions.

On the domestic front, there will be even more predatory capitalism than under Jair, when there was a boom in illegal mining, land-grabbing and logging in the Amazon; increased murder of Indigenous people and environmental activists; and an intensification of organised crime: Flávio and his inner circle have well-documented ties to both the drug trade and the private militias, which are run by active or retired policemen, and now control entire areas of Rio de Janeiro.

So we can expect that organised crime will penetrate much deeper into politics under Flávio. This, combined with democratic backsliding, and the assault on education and public services, will make it difficult, should he make it to office, to get rid of him. Brazil might even turn into a quasi-failed state within the next decade.

And what would you expect from Lula 4.0, if he gets re-elected?

This is the question on everyone’s mind. Will he think: ‘damn it, since this is my last shot, I might as well do as much as I can.’ Or will it be: ‘I need to cement my alliance with the traditional right in order to ensure the far right stays out of power’? The latter route would require many concessions; it would essentially pave the way for an even more centrist successor. Lula’s natural inclination has always been towards negotiation. But now his legacy is at stake – and that might affect his decisions.

Let’s take a step back to consider the origins of Bolsonarismo. Some commentators claimed that it was a reaction to the epochal June 2013 protests, when millions of Brazilians took to the streets to oppose rising bus fares – a movement that eventually grew into a bigger challenge to the PT. Do you agree with this reading? What do you see as the true significance of those protests, which you witnessed firsthand?

It is undeniable that 2013 changed the balance of political forces. The protests put the first real dent in the image of the PT, which had been extremely popular for a decade. That said, the protestors were not against the government as such. They rather demanded that the PT push its reforms even further. They were saying: ‘yes, our purchasing power has increased; yes, access to higher education has expanded; yes, there’s been a quantitative improvement in our lives. But the situation is still bad when it comes to public services, institutional accountability, and access to the city.’ Public transport, their immediate target, is a good example: it is poor quality, expensive, and controlled by private-sector mafias.

The PT could have sided with the protestors and said: ‘we have achieved a great deal in these first ten years, but it’s not enough – now we need to push through long-overdue structural reforms’. Instead, it did the opposite: in order not to upset the traditional right and the centre-right elements in its political coalition, it repressed the protests. And so it confirmed the protestors’ worst suspicion: that the party’s progressive momentum was spent.

The following year, the “Operation Car Wash” police investigation revealed a massive corruption scandal that implicated pretty much all major political parties. At the same time, the sudden slowdown in Chinese growth – a belated result of the global financial crisis – brought the commodity boom to an abrupt end. In many people’s minds, the two phenomena became intertwined: if there was an economic downturn, it was because the PT had presided over a public money free-for-all during the decade prior.

With the PT and opposition equally tainted by this dual crisis, the emerging far right was the only force that could position itself as the heir to the indignation of 2013.

So yes, you could say that the 2013 protests led to Bolsonarismo. But that would at best be a partial truth. In fact, this argument has traction only on two parts of the political spectrum. One group is the Petista left, which can be very uncritical of the party – to the point of blaming the protestors who took to the streets for irresponsibly enabling the far right. The other group, of course, is the far right itself, who reasonably concluded: ‘since the left is accusing the people of supporting us, let’s agree – certainly, they supported us all along!’ Engaging in this kind of discourse was an incredible self-own on the part of the PT.

What is the social and political base of Bolsonarismo?

Let me begin with a claim that might seem paradoxical: there is no necessary link between Jair Bolsonaro, the man, and Bolsonarismo, the political movement. Indeed, I believe that there have been perhaps only two elections in Brazilian history that a figure like him could have won – 1960, when Jânio Quadros, another outsider candidate, ran on a populist, anti-corruption platform, and 2018. For five years the PT had been wracked by political turmoil and corruption scandals and had made concession after concession to an emboldened right, until there was no more left-wing ground to cede. In the process it had shed much of its institutional credibility. Its allies in the traditional right and centre-right were likewise discredited by “Operation Car Wash”.

This created a completely exceptional situation, which called for a completely exceptional candidate. Bolsonaro simply happened to be there at the right time; he took advantage of a groundswell that had begun a good three years earlier. His achievement was to provide this groundswell with leadership and an identity.

Now, to your question. Ever since Brexit and Trump, when the political weather changed so dramatically, the left has responded with two narratives: we either paint the far right as a revolt of the elites without a real popular base, or as a revolt of the left-behind, of a working-class betrayed by liberal elitism.

Neither of these narratives persuades me. Rather, I believe the contemporary far right is a cross-class phenomenon. One way to understand it is as a movement that brings together an underclass that has given up waiting on the promises of modernisation – formal work, accountable institutions, real equality before the law – and an elite who no longer even pretends those promises are on offer.

Between them lies the hardest core of true believers – not the largest group statistically, but the most passionate – which I call, borrowing a phrase from Orwell, the “lower-upper-middle class”. These are people who fall between two stools: they have a good standard of living but lack the assets or social capital of the true elite. They are not only haunted by the fear of downward social mobility, but also threatened by any minor upward mobility achieved by those below them, as during the Pink Tide in Latin America, when the poor became less poor – began attending university, travelling internationally and so forth. This generated a feeling of resentment that was easily instrumentalised.

The appeal of the contemporary far right changes depending on where you stand. The ruling class sees it as offering the most predatory form of capitalism and neutralising all challenges from below. The popular base is drawn to the discourse of law and order and the prospect of a more deregulated economy that will ‘get the state off their backs’, allowing them to compete more efficiently in the market. For an irregular cohort drawn from both camps, it’s also a career opportunity: you can now make good money as a far-right agitator.

How does Bolsonarismo work at an organisational level?

Bolsonarismo, as a movement of the far right, has three structural advantages.

First, it is far more compatible with the interests of capital, so it can count on support from big business and the corporate media in ways the left never could.

Second, rather than change society, it wants to maintain existing power differentials, even intensify them, which makes coalition-building much easier. Each partner has its own sphere – the landowning oligarchy its land, the financial oligarchy its economic levers – and so long as everyone’s interests are met, they can work together. They don’t usually argue about a hierarchy of needs, or about strategic differences – exactly the problems that beset the left.

The third advantage stems from social media, which structures the public sphere as a market in which people compete individually for likes and shares, which are tokens of attention. This results both in hyper-individualisation of politics and the privileging of online participation over offline organising. It profoundly shapes how most of the contemporary far right is organised: as a sort of pyramid scheme whose building blocks are ‘political entrepreneurs’ – people who, from a position of prominence on social or traditional media, produce content that at once accrues attentional, social and political capital.

Through a constant stream of attention-grabbing content, they keep their base continuously engaged, but also atomised, deprived of channels for non-digital participation. As such they can be mobilised and demobilised more or less at will. It’s telling that Bolsonaro never bothered to build a real party of his own – neither did Farage or Trump. They view the party structure not as a goal per se, but only a vessel for a politics that is really done elsewhere.

When politics is colonised by the attention economy, then public discourse becomes a constantly shifting sea of outrage. Today, this; tomorrow, that. It is a state of affairs entirely inimical to emancipatory politics, which is predicated on bolstering people’s capacity to take decisions about their collective fate and participate in sustained efforts to change the status quo. Trump keeps us busy with headlines and late-night posts, while the real work of destruction goes on in the background.

At an ideological level, what does Bolsonarismo stand for? How does it differ from the traditional right?

We misread the far right by taking its discourse at face value. It is an error to believe Trump, Bolsonaro et al when they speak of taking a step back from ‘globalism’, of returning to a Fordist dream of industrial jobs, turning back the clock on the sexual revolution and re-sacralising the nuclear family and traditional gender roles. These ideas have an obvious psychological appeal to certain voters, but they are not borne out by the actions of the contemporary far right. On the contrary, it is a movement that feeds off the social disintegration produced by decades of neoliberalism, and accelerates that process towards a certain horizon.

In my book, I characterise this horizon as a “privately managed, differentially distributed state of nature”: a situation in which the state relinquishes ever more responsibility for mediating social conflict and instead enshrines the rule of brute force.

Let me provide one revealing example. In 2019, illegal loggers in the Amazonian state of Rondônia set fire to a fuel truck serving a federal enforcement operation, which then had to be called off; two weeks later the environment minister travelled to the town to meet the loggers and hear their demands. The explicit message was: ‘I’m on your side. It’s okay if you burn government property, kill the Indigenous people whose land you are logging and collaborate with the drug traffickers who use the same routes – all of that is private enterprise, and we don’t interfere with private enterprise.’ The same idea informs Trump’s relationship with Big Tech.

This can take the form of what I have called “overseer capitalism”. In plantation economies like Brazil and the American South, policing was a public function that grew out of a private one. The overseer hired to discipline the plantation workforce became, after abolition, the police officer keeping the freed men and women in place. Today that public function is turning private once again. Wagner and Blackwater, the narcos in Mexico, the militias in Rio – such non-state actors increasingly exercise the monopoly of force over the areas they control. Overseer capitalism entails the alliance between capital and these free agents of repression, who join the coalition not merely as guns for hire but as equal political partners. Such a convergence was presaged in the first Bolsonaro government and could easily establish itself under Flávio.

It’s clear why the powerful would be attracted to such a model that promises them untrammelled enjoyment of power. But why do the weakest also vote for it? Because of the psychological compensations included in the package. The promise is: ‘even if you remain hyper-exploited at your job, even if your life expectations are daily shrinking, we will ensure that there is at least one sphere of life in which your power runs free. At home, you can take it out on your wife or your kids, no one will interfere; and no one can tell you not to make jokes about Black people or gay people.’

Your new book promises to explain “what Brazil reveals about the global far right”. What do we see when we look at the world system from the periphery? In what sense is the world being Brazilianised?

Latin American and particularly Brazilian social thought has been concerned with recasting western conceptions of the centre-periphery relationship. This tradition begins in the 1960s with ’dependency theory’, which was born as a critique of modernisation theory – the notion, popularised by the likes of Walt Rostow and Seymour Martin Lipset, that peripheral countries could, if they played their cards right, reach the same happy place as the advanced countries – to pass from backwardness to full modernity.

The critique said: ‘this idea is false, because we are not outside capitalism, or behind it, we were always included in it as peripheral. Our function has always been to supply natural resources and cheap labour for core economies, and thus, any development we can have is always going to be subordinate to theirs.’ So the argument of the 1960s and ’70s ran: ‘it’s wrong to think of the core as the periphery’s future, the peripheral condition is one in which the modern and the backward are always combined – and this combination is instrumental for capitalist development.’

The tables turned in the 1980s and ’90s, when the US and European countries began in certain ways to resemble the periphery, with growing inequality, precarity, informality and ‘favelisation’ (a rise in slums like the Brazilian favelas). And so people both in Brazil and in the Global North started to describe them as ‘Brazilianised’.

What explained the reversal? The heirs of dependency theory now historicised modernisation theory itself – arguing that it had been the ideology of a period of capitalist expansion, when the horizon of expectations was permanent growth. Now, in a period of contraction, of shrinking horizons, the Global North would increasingly come to resemble the periphery.

This idea can be extended to the realm of politics. The idea that the far right corresponds to an acceleration of disintegration is much clearer in Brazil under Bolsonaro, or in Argentina under Milei, or in El Salvador under Bukele than it was even in Trump’s first term, or with the AfD in Germany or the RN in France.

You said that “mere normality” is not going to defeat Bolsonarismo. So what might a radical response to the contemporary far right look like?

Let me begin with a paradox from information theory: for a signal to be received as information, it must be different enough from the background noise, but not so different that it doesn’t register as a signal at all. When we apply this idea to politics, we realise that radicalism is not fidelity to a principle in its purest, most abstract form; it’s rather a departure from the norm that is still legible.

You find a tactic that takes you furthest from – yet can still be incorporated into – the existing situation: a tactic that inspires people’s confidence, that convinces them to participate, that produces real effect.

The problem today is that all the things that actually need to be done appear extremely radical. Take the concentration of power. We live in a world where a businessman can switch off part of a country’s army, as Elon Musk did when he cut Starlink coverage to Ukrainian forces in the middle of their 2022 counteroffensive – something that would’ve been a James Bond plot in the 1970s. The sensible response is to pass government policy that prevents private individuals from wielding such power. But if you propose such a policy today, you will be accused of calling for expropriation, or infringing on personal rights. We have gone so far in one direction that you can only intervene by pulling very hard in the other.

Here we can learn something from the far right. Things are said today – for example, that citizens with the wrong skin colour should be deported – that were unthinkable a short time ago. Since 2016 the unthinkable hasn’t stopped happening and the unsayable has become common sense. The far right has forced the limits of the possible in the direction of what it believes really needs to be done.

Maybe none of what we really need to do is possible today – but we won’t be able to do it tomorrow either, unless we start building the conditions now. We have to build a social base for our goals. We cannot only provide rational arguments and credible policy; we have to instil a desire, rooted in people’s everyday experience, for that other, better world. People have to feel not only that they would live better in a reshaped world, but that they start living better by joining the movement to get there.