La frattura emergente nella destra brasiliana _ di Bruna Frascolla
La frattura emergente nella destra brasiliana
24 luglio 2026
Quest’anno Lula da Silva, l’attuale presidente del Brasile, si candiderà per un quarto mandato. L’uomo che ha sconfitto nel 2023, Jair Bolsonaro, è in carcere, quindi a candidarsi al suo posto è il figlio dell’ex presidente, il senatore Flávio Bolsonaro. Un’indicazione di quanto sarà serrata la competizione elettorale è arrivata il 24 giugno, quando la moglie di Jair, l’ex first lady Michelle Bolsonaro, ha pubblicato un video su Instagram in cui dichiarava che non avrebbe sostenuto il figliastro perché lui si era mostrato scortese nei suoi confronti durante una telefonata.
La disputa è stata trattata come una telenovela politica, ma ha avuto reali ripercussioni sull’esito delle elezioni. Il primo mandato di Lula (2003-2006) ha provocato una reazione politica che ha dato origine a una propria ideologia: antipetismo (“anti-PT-ismo”), caratterizzata dall’opposizione al Partito dei Lavoratori (PT) di Lula. All’epoca, l’antipetista archetipico era una persona dell’alta borghesia che si lamentava del fatto che Lula, un ex operaio metallurgico senza istruzione, fosse maleducato e ignorante. Gli antipetisti esprimevano nostalgia per la presidenza del sociologo poliglotta Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Quando Bolsonaro è entrato in carica nel 2019, l’antipetismo ha iniziato la sua evoluzione verso l’antibolsonarismo. Le stesse persone della classe medio-alta che leggevano gli stessi giornali hanno iniziato a lamentarsi del fatto che Bolsonaro fosse maleducato e ignorante. L’odio era così profondo che molti brasiliani di destra hanno fatto campagna per esprimere voti nulli nel 2022 invece di scegliere tra Lula e Bolsonaro.
Persistent elite nostalgia for the Cardoso years points to something more essential than the former president’s polished manners and language skills. In 1999, Cardoso instituted a policy regime known as the Macroeconomic Tripod, which remains in force. It consists of three things: inflation targeting, which usually leads the Central Bank to increase interest rates to lower inflation; a floating exchange rate, in which the value of Brazil’s currency is determined by market value instead of national policy; and primary surplus targeting, meaning the Brazilian state must collect more revenues than it spends, without taking into account the interest on national debt.
In order to achieve a primary surplus, Cardoso’s administration sold state companies and weakened public services. In practical terms, this meant firing public officials in favor of private contractors, while reining in spending to pay the public debt. Although Cardoso also introduced income redistribution policies, his platform was unpopular, which is why he failed to secure a successor. An economic crisis during his second term paved the way for Lula’s first successful run for the presidency in 2001. While criticizing aspects of Cardoso’s economic program from the left during the campaign, Lula also published a famous “Letter to the Brazilian People,” in which he reassured the public that he would maintain his predecessor’s prudent approach.
In Lula’s first and second presidential terms, he maintained Cardoso’s Tripod, helped by an influx of dollars from the growing Chinese market for Brazilian agricultural goods. By combining fiscal probity with redistributionist policies, Lula earned the love of both the people and the bankers. In addition, he paid off the IMF debt by selling government bonds at an interest rate of 12 percent. At the time, the IMF interest rate stood at 4 percent, but what mattered was the anti-imperialist performance of independence from the Washington Consensus.
Bolsonaro defeated PT candidate Fernando Haddad to win the presidency in 2018, but like his predecessor, he preserved the Tripod. To be sure, the administrations of Lula and Bolsonaro had important differences. Bolsonaro privatized state companies, while Lula’s administrations have a history of plundering them, thereby strengthening the allegation that Brazil cannot have good state companies. No matter how much Lula denounces privatization in his speeches, his administration has never bought back the assets sold under Cardoso and Bolsonaro.
Given that both administrations continued to favor bankers’ interests, it is hard to understand why some bankers sought to undermine both Lula and Bolsonaro. One answer is that they would prefer an unpopular president, like Cardoso or Michel Temer, who was in office between 2016 and 2019. Unlike Lula and Bolsonaro, old school politicians who want to be loved by the people, such leaders do elites’ bidding without much concern for approval ratings.
This year, the bankers’ favored presidential candidate was São Paulo governor and Bolsonaro ally Tarcísio de Freitas. He sold off São Paulo’s water company while the state was already suffering the bad consequences of its energy company privatization, and kept the police officers understaffed and underpaid while crime soared. Michelle Bolsonaro was mentioned as a possible running mate who would help him gain Bolsonarista support. But then, Flávio Bolsonaro became his father’s stand-in, leaving Tarcísio without a path to the presidency. It was in this context that Michelle’s family feud with Flávio became an exploitable resource for elites who would prefer a weak president over Lula—or Lula over a Bolsonaro loyalist.
But a more interesting feud is emerging around economic policy. While the mainstream right espouses standard free-market views, there is a small dissenting group centered around the Youtube channel 5º Elemento. One leading figure in this milieu is Arthur Machado, a banker who has recently been attacked by leading Bolsonaristas like the economist and former banker Rodrigo Constantino. Machado, with fewer than 40,000 followers on X, is far less influential than Constantino, who has nearly a million X followers and writes for the two major right-wing Brazilian outlets, Revista Oeste and Gazeta do Povo. But Constantino has devoted considerable effort to attacking Machado, accusing him of being a follower of the Putin-aligned Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin and even a worshiper of the African deity Eshu. While Machado enthusiastically supports Flávio’s candidacy, Constantino is aligned with Michelle.
Why has Machado attracted such ire? One explanation is that the Brazilian right’s internal disputes are about the future of the Macroeconomic Tripod—which Lula promises to maintain, but some in the right-wing camp are beginning to question. When I contacted Machado to ask him about the Tripod, he told me the economic conditions assumed by its architects—the globalizing world of the 1990s—have given way to a world defined by rising economic nationalism and tariff wars. The United States and Europe are adapting themselves to this new scenario with selective tariffs. The new landscape, Machado says, may require Brazil to take a new approach, involving “tariff barriers and increasing government spending in order to develop the productive sector.” This spending, he adds, “should be done at the expense, not of government size, or of basic things, but rather of the banking system. That is our big problem.”
Constantino ha rifiutato di parlare con me. Adolfo Sachsida, un economista molto stimato che ha fatto parte del primo governo di Bolsonaro, si è mostrato meno reticente. Quando gli ho chiesto del futuro del “Tripode”, mi ha risposto che “molti esponenti della destra vorrebbero vedere l’aggiunta di un progetto nazionale a questo quadro economico” in risposta al mutare del panorama globale. L’evento che ha innescato questa evoluzione ideologica, aggiunge, è stata l’invasione russa dell’Ucraina, che secondo lui ha messo in luce come «l’accesso a mercati sicuri vicini alla base produttiva sia diventato sempre più importante». Pur continuando a ritenere che il Tripode debba essere mantenuto, Sachsida vede anche una transizione verso «una visione nazionale che dia maggiore enfasi alla geopolitica» come un’evoluzione naturale.
Di fronte alla resistenza opposta da parte di esponenti dell’establishment politico e finanziario, determinati a preservare lo status quo, Flávio potrebbe ritrovarsi più vicino a coloro che cercano di definire un nuovo paradigma. In tal caso, un secondo mandato presidenziale di Bolsonaro potrebbe rivelarsi ben diverso dal primo.
«Si sta delineando una disputa più interessante in materia di politica economica.»
Bruna Frascolla è una scrittrice e traduttrice che vive nella sua città natale, Bahia, in Brasile.