3. From Orkut to Brasília: the origins
of the New Brazilian Right

Camila Rocha

Years before the ascension of Jair Bolsonaro to power, New Right activism had occupied the Brazilian streets and social networks, taking by surprise political analysts accustomed to associating social movements and street protests with leftist groups. This process involved the emergence of new leaders and new forms of expression and organisation, as well as new ideas that recently started to circulate with greater strength in the Brazilian public sphere: libertarianism and the denunciation of a ‘leftist cultural hegemony’ in the country.1

In the first section of this chapter, I describe right-wing activities in Brazil in the previous decades, considering their links to the actions of the New Right that emerged years later. In the second section, I indicate how, amid the political transformations that occurred in the country, a new constellation of actors and ideas had been formed which then greatly contributed to Brazil’s political shift to the right.

The traditional right: Hayek and the fight against communism

In Brazil, the promotion of neoliberalism began between the 1940s and the 1950s through a strong campaign against the left that united conservative Catholics and anti-communist businesspeople, who committed themselves to the preservation of private property. In 1946, the Austrian economist F.A. Hayek’s The Road of Serfdom, originally published in 1944, was translated into Portuguese with the support of the businessman Adolpho Lindenberg. Lindenberg’s intention when contacting Hayek and sponsoring the translation and publication of his book was, in Lindenberg’s own words, to ‘scientifically’ make a case for private property and bar the advance of the Catholic left and its main agenda, land reform in the countryside:

Here in Brazil, before the revolution [the 1964 military coup], in the 1950s, there was a leftist, Catholic movement, an important one, which wanted to form communist societies called comunidades de base, [composed of] blue-collar workers, priests, feminists, all of them grouped in these communities . . . And there was another movement, in which I participated, which was called Tradição, Família e Propriedade (TFP), directed by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, a conservative, traditionalist, Catholic movement. From the beginning, we opposed the left-wing movement. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira wrote a book called Reforma Agrária, questão de consciência because land reform was a motto of the Catholic left. They thought it was possible to divide big properties, make only small properties destroying the Brazilian agrarian structure . . . At that time, I wrote in a newspaper named O Catolicismo, which had an extraordinary diffusion in the Catholic milieu, showing how the liberal economy is the true one, the one based on natural law and the right to property, and that Catholics have an obligation to fight the left . . . When I saw the Catholic left advancing too much, I searched for a movement that could beat the left, and I met Hayek, so I got one of his books, got excited, and said: ‘I am going to publish this to give weight to it, something to be respected.’ I wrote a letter to Hayek, and he authorised me to publish the book, and it was good, you see, because Hayek provides a scientific basis to what we defended. Then [Ludwig von] Mises appeared too, and an American, [Milton] Friedman, these three are the main ones (Interview with Adolpho Lindenberg, March 2017).2

Lindenberg, along with Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira (who happened to be Lindenberg’s cousin), was one of the main founders of Tradition, Family, Property (TFP) in 1960, which was intimately related to members of the Brazilian royal family and operated across Latin America.3 At the time, there were many groups and organisations committed to the fight against communism (Motta, 2002). The appeal of such anti-communist discourse may be observed in the massive adherence to the ‘March of the Family with God for Freedom’, a protest organised by conservative Catholic women, which was attended by around three hundred thousand people in the city of São Paulo in 1964 (Cordeiro, 2009).

However, if Catholic conservatism captivated a significant share of society at the time, neoliberalism was confined mainly to the elites who, like Lindenberg, were also concerned with what they viewed as substantial advances of the left. Among them were Eugenio Gudin, the economist who participated in the ninth meeting promoted by the Mont Pèlerin Society in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1958 (Boianovsky, 2018),4 and the businessman Paulo Ayres Filho, whose work with the Foundation for Economic Education began in 1959, and who would later join the Mont Pèlerin Society (Spohr, 2012).5

Ayres Filho was a leading figure in the civil-military coup against President João Goulart in 1964, also backed by Gudin. In 1961, he founded the Instituto de Pesquisa e Estudos Sociais (IPES) in São Paulo, which brought together businesspeople, politicians, the military and intellectuals to resist the advance of the left.6 Among them were Catholics and conservative intellectuals linked to the Instituto Brasileiro de Filosofia (IBF) and the Sociedade de Convívio.7

During the transition to democracy, however, conservative discourses, characterised by aggressive anti-communist rhetoric, lost their appeal due to dwindling public and private support. The fight against communism was not a priority any longer. In fact, the idea of being a rightist was out of fashion at the time since it linked right-wing people and organisations to the military regime. For similar reasons, political scientist Timothy Power (2010) coined the epithet ‘the ashamed right’ to characterise the Brazilian right after the end of the dictatorship.

The unfavourable scenario prompted conservatives, who were saddled with a frayed discourse and could not rely on great funding for their organisations, to defend free markets more organically and less pragmatically than in the 1950s and 1960s. In the words of Ricardo Vélez Rodríguez, a former member of the Conviviality Society and former Minister of Education in Jair Bolsonaro’s government:

In 1979, when I moved to Brazil for my doctoral studies, [Father Adolpho] Crippa offered me a research position in the Convívio publishing house. I accepted it, but I said: ‘Crippa, this is démodé.’ I think that communists must be fought against and criticised, but to dedicate oneself only to this is too little. We need to come up with a proposal . . . He was a staunch anti-communist, but he wanted to change. Why? Because he received financial support from businesspeople from São Paulo, who no longer financed this anti-communist discourse, this discourse became worn out, and they no longer helped that much. I told Crippa: ‘Surely the businesspeople are seeing that things are changing, that anti-communist discourse is not enough, that we need to think about Brazil from a more radical perspective and how to dismantle patrimonialism, so Brazil can really develop’ (Interview with Ricardo Vélez Rodríguez, 2017).

Vélez Rodríguez and other conservative intellectuals started to attend the circuits formed by the Instituto Liberal8 – founded in 1983 in Rio de Janeiro by the Canadian-Brazilian businessman Donald Stewart Jr and José Stelle, Hayek’s translator and chief editor at Henry Maksoud’s magazine Visão – and by the Institute of Business Studies, created in 1984 by the businessmen Winston Ling and Willian Ling. The Instituto Liberal had eight branch offices scattered across Brazil by the beginning of the 1990s, and in 1993 hosted the Mont Pèlerin Society’s annual meeting in Rio de Janeiro. About the same time, other pro-market think tanks were created, such as the Instituto Atlântico, founded by old members of the Chamber of Economic and Social Studies and Debates9 and headed by the economist Paulo Rabello de Castro, who had graduated from the Chicago School of Economics.

Most of the organisations founded at the time had an important connection with the Partido da Frente Liberal (PFL), now renamed Democratas (DEM), which housed politicians that used to be linked to the military regime’s party, the Aliança Renovadora Nacional (ARENA). Roberto Bornhausen, whose brother, Jorge Bornhausen, was a politician affiliated to the PFL, presided over the São Paulo chapter of the Instituto Liberal and the Instituto Atlântico, which was responsible for elaborating the party’s political programme. Intellectuals linked to the former Sociedade de Convívio, such as Antonio Paim and Ricardo Vélez Rodríguez, also circulated in those think tanks and actively sought to influence it ideologically, administering many formation courses to their members.

However, after the sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso, affiliated to the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB), was elected President of Brazil in 1994 and after the end of hyperinflation, the institutes started to face increasing difficulties in keeping their sponsors. Many businesspeople believed it was no longer necessary to finance the dissemination of pro-market ideas since the federal government had already implemented these ideas in practice. According to Winston Ling:

After the Plano Real no Institute could levy any more funds because the sponsors would say: ‘We were already successful, we reached our goal, we are already in liberalism, we no longer need the Institute, inflation is zero, and now the thing is to work and make money, we don’t need that any more’ (Interview with Winston Ling, April 2017).

The New Right: Mises and the fight against globalism

In 2003, amid the withering of Brazil’s pro-market organisations, former union leader Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva’s first presidential term started. Despite his leftist origins, the PT’s leader adopted a more orthodox economic orientation than that of President Cardoso, with the objective of not upsetting the country’s economic elites, especially those related to the financial markets.10 However, the outbreak of a corruption scandal known as mensalão in 2005 altered this perspective.

The scandal was named after the monthly instalments paid to deputies in exchange for their votes in favour of projects which were of interest to the executive branch, and it became one of the best-known corruption episodes in Brazil.11 It received wider media coverage than previous corruption scandals (Miguel and Coutinho, 2007), and it involved high-ranking government officials. In June 2005, Lula’s chief of staff, José Dirceu, resigned from his office and, months later, had his parliamentary mandate revoked. In March 2006, Antonio Palocci, then Minister of Finance, also resigned from his post, despite having become the main actor for the maintenance of the orthodox economic policy of the government, and his successor, Guido Mantega, soon adopted a more heterodox approach.

In addition to the changes that occurred in government, the mensalão scandal also negatively affected the image of the PT, which had historically championed ethics in politics, and contributed to an increase in distrust in the political system as a whole (Venturi, 2006; Carreirão, 2007; Paiva, Socorro Braga and Pimentel, 2007). Amid such a negative impact, the first movement linked to the New Right, the Rightward Brazil Movement (MEB), was founded in 2006 in São Paulo by young lawyers led by Ricardo Salles (currently President Bolsonaro’s Minister of Environment).12 The group intended to promote a campaign for Lula’s impeachment. Nevertheless, the idea did not gain enough support due to the country’s economic bonanza at the time, according to one of MEB’s members, the historian Rodrigo Neves:

The MEB emerged in 2006 as a right-wing lawyers club . . . It was formed by Ricardo Salles and some of his friends from São Francisco, PUC, Mackenzie [prominent law schools in São Paulo] who had recently graduated, who were against the PT and shocked by the mensalão scandal . . . Their idea was: let us mobilise people to achieve Lula’s impeachment. But, at the time, this did not gain support because it was 2006. Brazil was in the hype of an economic bubble that the PT created. Everybody saw an artificial increase in salaries, the economy grew in a frenetic bubble, so it did not gain support. Everybody knew that Lula had committed a crime and everybody knew Lula was corrupt and that the PT had bought votes, and nobody cared (Interview with Rodrigo Neves, April 2018).

Like the members of the Rightward Brazil Movement, most of the political analysts who appeared in major media outlets, as well as opposition political actors, affirmed that, after mensalão, Lula would no longer have any support. However, not only did the ex-unionist get re-elected due to the economic improvement and the support of the poorest people in the country, but also he finished his first term of office with 80 per cent popular approval. Therefore, during his second term (2006–10) there was a wide political consensus around his government, and disgruntled voices, on both left and right, were scarce. The existing right-wing parties (such as Bolsonaro’s party at the time, the Progressive Party [PP], ARENA’s political heir), were part of the government’s legislative alliance, and other opposition leaders, from PFL/DEM or PSDB, did not seem to have great differences with the government’s agenda.

In civil society, dissonant voices also had little support. Opposition to the government in the public sphere was limited to the activity of a few journalists in newspapers, magazines and books criticising Lula and the PT (Chaloub and Perlatto, 2015), and people who decided to express their frustration and resentment in online forums. At the time, the internet became a refuge for anti-PT right-wingers or those who did not see their demands reflected in Lula’s policies. Feeling cornered in mainstream publics, these individuals turned to the digital space to explore and sympathise with strangers through forum interactions, blogs, websites and digital communities, encouraging the creation of discursive spaces that existed outside the dominant pro-government currents.

Thus, in addition to the subaltern counterpublics that were active at the time, such as those formed by feminist activists (Medeiros, 2017), LGBT+ and queer people, for example, there were also non-subaltern counterpublics formed by traditionalists, anti-globalists and supporters of the military regime, among others, who influenced the formation of the Brazilian New Right (Rocha and Medeiros, 2020).

The emergence of the online social network Orkut was crucial in the emergence of right-wing counterpublics. In 2004, the network became one of the main spaces for forming the Brazilian New Right. The first step in this direction was taken in the 1990s by the philosopher Olavo de Carvalho, who, by the early 2000s, stopped writing for mainstream media outlets and focused only on his online activities. In 2002 he created a collaborative website called Mídia sem Máscara. In 2004 there were already two Orkut forums dedicated to the discussion of Carvalho’s ideas. Two years later, he started broadcasting a podcast, and in 2009, he began offering online philosophy lessons for a fee.

Significantly influenced by a marginal, esoteric and anti-modern current of thought called traditionalism, also shared by Steve Bannon and Aleksandr Dugin (Teitelbaum, 2020), Carvalho argued that the left had established a cultural hegemony in Brazil through the more or less conscious adoption of a political strategy developed by the Italian communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci. Such a process supposedly began during the re-democratisation era in the mid-1980s. It involved the activity of mainstream media outlets, NGOs, publishers, universities, organisations that operated in the arts and humanities field, and international entities that defended progressive agendas such as feminism, LGBT+ rights and human rights in general. All those organisations were, according to Carvalho, part of an ongoing worldwide revolutionary process called ‘globalism’. For globalists, only the intervention of a global authority, invested in an unprecedented power concentration, could solve the main contemporary issues, hence Carvalho’s call for liberals and conservatives to unite in the fight against the leftist cultural hegemony and the upsurge of a ‘universal Leviathan’ (Carvalho, 2009).

Today, references to globalism and leftist cultural hegemony can be found in most discourses associated with contemporary right-wing leaders and groups, especially in the United States. In Brazil, these references were incorporated by readers of foreign authors and users of American internet forums, then adapted to the national context, and eventually shared with a larger audience through the translation of texts into Portuguese and dissemination in national digital forums. In this sense, Olavo de Carvalho’s activity was fundamental for the emergence of the New Right in Brazil. Around 2010, when Facebook became a popular social network in Brazil, Carvalho’s ideas had been circulating on the internet for some years, and it was possible to find four communities that bore his name. According to Marcus Boeira, a philosophy professor at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, who was also a reader of Carvalho’s work and a user of these Orkut communities at the time:

Back then, it seems to me that there was a stronger Gramscian hegemony than there is today . . . It was harder back then, we were no more than 20 persons working in these media, and the rest was practically 99 per cent of the people saying the same things . . . He [Carvalho] said what we all wanted to say to journalists, university professors, people that worked in the media, people in the third sector, etc. He was saying everything that many people would like to say but had no voice. So he, in a certain way, channelled all those voices (Interview with Marcus Boeira, June 2018).

Initially designed for the American public, Orkut rapidly became popular in Brazil. It is estimated that in January 2006, 75 per cent of all its users were from Brazil (Fragoso, 2006), which indicated an early engagement of Brazilians in this type of social network in comparison to people in other countries. Between 2005 and 2007, the peak of Orkut’s popularity in Brazil, internet access was limited largely to groups of educated young people and adults, mostly from the middle and upper classes, and located primarily in the southern and southeastern regions of the country (Comitê Gestor da Internet no Brasil, 2007). Using Orkut, one could create communities about the most varied subjects, in which internet users could interact with each other through conversation topics. However, the use of fake profiles was quite common, and it contributed to the chaotic and sometimes violent development of debates (Fragoso, 2006).

The environment provided by Orkut ended up fostering the constitution of right-wing counterpublics – debate arenas characterised by disruptive and indecorous language to the detriment of rational-critical arguments, which are the basis of dominant publics’ legitimacy (Warner, 2002). Olavo de Carvalho used this kind of language consciously, to attract attention through shock and indecorous behaviour and to counteract the rational-critical argumentation used by dominant publics through the defence of the use of swear words:

THE USES OF SWEARING:

I swear because it is NECESSARY.

It is necessary in the Brazilian context for demolishing polite language, which is

a straitjacket that traps people, making them respect what does not deserve respect.

So, sometimes, when you disagree with someone but disagree respectfully, you are giving them more strength than if you agreed with them.

Because you are going against his idea, but you are reinforcing his authority.

Authority is respectability.

The problem of those people, those crooks I am talking about, is not their ideas. It is precisely the fact that they are scoundrels.

They are scoundrels, they are crooks, they are thieves.

G-O- F-U-C-K-Y-O-U-R-S-E-L-V-E-S! (Carvalho, 2015).

Not only was the language disruptive, but the very ideas that circulated in such forums were also so contrary to the dominant perspective that, if they were uttered without qualifications in dominant publics, they were very likely to cause hostile reactions. Among the most recurrent ones was Carvalho’s idea that Brazil was dominated by a ‘Communist Gay dictatorship’, that the Brazilian military dictatorship and its fight against so-called ‘terrorists’ should be praised, and the idea expressed by young libertarians that ‘taxation is theft’.

Although there were glaring differences and acute tensions between groups that met in those forums, they shared the fight against globalism and ‘left-wing cultural hegemony’ in Brazil to a lesser or greater degree. Thus, although the defence of traditionalist and anti-modern ideas was restricted to a small group, the traditionalist counterpublic led by Olavo de Carvalho created a shared political language and constituted a broader discursive field (Alvarez, 1990) that could unify different groups that had strong tensions among themselves. According to the then libertarian economist Joel Pinheiro da Fonseca:

[Olavo de Carvalho] influenced many people. Many free-marketeers today have much more of a ‘right-wing bent’ than a progressivist one, and he has played a significant role in that, I’m pretty sure of it. The thing about left hegemony, of forming this combative instrument, I think there is a lot there. Maybe he wasn’t the only one, but I think he helped foster that. Without that kind of belief, perhaps we wouldn’t have had that desire to fight and make things happen. Maybe, on a more practical level, he had a vital role in giving form to the vision that ‘we’re in a lean, half-educated minority, without representation, we have to fight’ (Interview with Joel Pinheiro da Fonseca, May 2017).

Libertarianism, which promotes free-market capitalism more radically than neoliberals linked to the Chicago School such as Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, was almost non-existent in Brazil until then. However, it was through Orkut that university students such as Filipe Celeti, and independent professionals like the economist Rodrigo Constantino, were able to contact each other to share ideas and to translate and share texts:

In my last college year, I started to discover this new universe that, in a certain way, was all but non-existent in Brazil. The majority of texts were in English, so it was hard to have access to information. During that period [2005–6] many free translation projects arose due to public interest. Many people created blogs to translate small texts and articles. So the need to disseminate those ideas was bubbling, and this brought people together: ‘Look, let’s share these ideas, we need this.’ At Orkut, you typed the name of an author, and you had communities with 20, 30 people, and most were not people from Brazil, [but] the Brazilians started to take over these spaces. So Orkut, with its communities, enabled people’s meeting, the exchange of information, and promoted great debates on ideas (Interview with Filipe Celeti, April 2016).

I started working in the financial market and had a boss who was a known liberal in Brazil, Paulo Guedes [currently Brazil’s Minister of Finance], who held a PhD from Chicago. And he started giving me tips, ‘read this thing here, you will like it,’ and that thing was the Austrian School. So I discovered authors like Mises and Hayek very early on, and started, in parallel, working in the financial market, which is a propitious environment to fight against socialists, . . . to broaden my horizon of readings. Around my twenties, I was already, let’s say, a libertarian. I always liked a good controversy too . . . When I discovered Orkut and these communities where everybody spent the day debating, it was convenient, and we had endless debates there. Those were wonderful times. I loved the quarrelling and polemics. Orkut was a life lesson, I loved debating, defending the ideas that I believed in, and I started to find an echo. I began to find people that were willing to discuss with me as well (Interview with Rodrigo Constantino, December 2016).

Highly active on the internet, the militants started to promote their ideas on YouTube channels, forums, blogs and social networks. This strategy, combined with the creation of study groups and participation in student movements and organisations throughout Brazil, ended up aggregating a growing number of like-minded people:

I met some friends who told me about Olavo de Carvalho and Rodrigo Constantino. I began reading some of their texts, and we discussed them between ourselves, not only the texts they recommended but also some that we chose on our own. I think I started to get in touch with this around 2009 and 2010, which coincided with when I began to have a political activity at college . . . Many debates started after we began to use Facebook; before that, we were on Orkut. You can see that some people disagree with some types of thinking, ideologies or political practices. [But they are] completely alienated from decision-making processes. [We ran for the students’ committee elections] and we had many supporters (Interview with Fernando Fernandes, March 2017).

Simultaneously, militants also circulated in older forums and organisations, such as the Fórum da Liberdade, promoted annually by the Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies (IEE). Here it is possible to highlight the roles of Bernardo Santoro, Rodrigo Constantino and Fábio Ostermann. While Ostermann had a fundamental role in structuring new key organisations dedicated to pro-market militancy, such as the Free Order and Students For Liberty (Brazil) (EPL), Santoro and Constantino were responsible for the restructuring of the former Instituto Liberal in Rio de Janeiro. The contact between different generations provided access to already established pro-market contact networks inside and outside the country and new sources of funding, and helped to forge new community bonds (Polletta and Jasper, 2001):

When I attended EPL’s national conference in 2013 in Belo Horizonte, the sense of family within the movement became very clear to me. Because of a group of crazy people who started doing this on Orkut, you get a ride in a crowded car, and people treat you well, there’s a lot of chatting: ‘How do you do it in your state?’, and so on. Suddenly, I had this sense of belonging, and it was great (Interview with Gabriel Menegale, January 2017).

Pro-market and libertarian ideas dominated the then-emerging New Right. According to Rodrigo Neves from Endireita Brasil, conservatives had less success mobilising civil society than attracting young free-market defenders. This continued the trend where conservatives circulated in think tanks and pro-market organisations:

I arrived at the Fórum da Liberdade with the reputation of being a conservative, a person from the Endireita Brasil movement, a person that had started a conservative movement at the University of São Paulo. People came to talk to me about conservatism. So, on the first day of the Fórum I was already Mr Conservative. The warm-up to the Forum was at the First Conference on the Austrian School. I received the invitation for free from Helio Beltrão, because of our [operation on the] Tax Freedom Day. [There were] anarcho-capitalists, libertarians, me, a staunch conservative, and Marcel Van Hattem, who was also a conservative. Marcel says he is a free-marketeer, but he always had some conservative ideas, because he is very religious with a strong conservative bias. [Question: At the time, who else would you call a conservative that attended these spaces?] Me and Ricardo Salles. Both of us were swimming against the tide, because this new right-wing movement was formed mainly by libertarians and free-market defenders. Ricardo used to call himself a right-wing free-market defender, or he could not sell his product. But I declared myself: I am a conservative. I was one of the people who started to change this setting. Marcel, he used to hold back because he was more focused on bringing the debate to free-market economics, even if he had some conservative values. Ricardo did the same (Interview with Rodrigo Neves, April 2018).

However, by the end of Lula’s second term, the ‘pro-market and libertarian hegemony’ of the New Right gave way to the conservatives.

Breaking with the system: Bolsonaro’s rise to power

After 30 years as a legislator, former army captain Jair Bolsonaro appeared on the political scene as a palatable leader for the emergent New Right in 2014, when he received a record 464,000 votes in Rio de Janeiro’s legislative elections, four times the amount he obtained in the previous election. In the same year, one of his sons, Eduardo Bolsonaro, was elected as a Rio de Janeiro federal representative for the first time, with eighty-two thousand votes. The vast difference in the number of votes comes from two main factors: the early engagement in social networking13 and an emphasis on consistently defending conservative values, especially from 2011 onwards.14

Bolsonaro historically has always sought to meet the demands for better wages from the low-rank military, his electoral base, and position himself frontally against human rights, not afraid of asserting himself as an anti-communist, right-wing politician. In the 1990s, he asserted that Congress should be closed down and that President Fernando Henrique Cardoso should be shot dead. However, in 2002, when he lobbied to nominate the communist Aldo Rabello to the Ministry of Defence, he claimed that he had voted for Lula. In an interview, he ironically stated that communists nowadays drink whisky and live well (Folha de São Paulo, 2002). At the time, Bolsonaro’s party was part of the PT’s coalition, and political pragmatism spoke louder than ideologies.

But things changed in Lula’s successor Dilma Rousseff’s first term. In only four years, Brazilian society went through a ‘progressivist shock’. In 2011, the National Truth Commission (CNV) was created to investigate the state’s crimes during the military dictatorship. The same year, the Supreme Federal Court (STF) recognised the right to same-sex marriage. The following year, the STF also recognised the right to abortion in foetal anencephaly cases and confirmed the validity of the racial quota system in public universities. A project for a constitutional amendment to widen labour rights to domestic workers, known as PEC das Domésticas, and a law prohibiting physical punishments and cruel and degrading treatment to children and adolescents, known as Lei da Palmada, were promulgated in 2013 and 2014, respectively. Simultaneously, Brazilian versions of the Canadian Slut Walks popped up throughout the country between 2011 and 2012, popularising feminism among young women and fostering new feminist activism on the streets and social networks (Medeiros and Fanti, 2019).

Facing such a scenario, Bolsonaro did not hesitate to lead the reaction to the so-called progressivist shock. Flanked by other conservative legislators, he managed to bar the printing of leaflets of the programme Escola sem Homofobia, formulated as early as 2004 and derogatorily called gay kit (Soares, 2015). However, he was unsuccessful in his attempt to bar the installation of the Comissão Nacional da Verdade and the approval of the same-sex marriage bill. And there was still the possibility that Dilma Rousseff, if re-elected, would dedicate herself to the legalisation of abortion, once she had claimed in 2007 that the practice should be decriminalised (Pires, 2010).

Due to Bolsonaro’s activity during this period, which was extensively publicised in his social media accounts, many conservatives, previously more dispersed in forums and free-market organisations, started to flirt with the former army captain. At the same time, Orkut libertarians, such as Bernardo Santoro and Rodrigo Constantino, began labelling themselves liberal-conservatives, pointing to a historical tendency of free-market defenders who adhered ideologically or pragmatically to conservatism (Constantino, 2018).15 Such positioning caused discomfort among conservative groups for some time, as the label liberal-conservative seemed like an oxymoron, and, eventually, caused tensions in various groups, especially relating to matters such as abortion rights. According to the lawyer José Carlos Sepúlveda, member of the Plínio Corrêa de Oliveira Institute, the organisation that succeeded the old TFP:

The leaders of pro-market movements defended liberal ideals. Still, many people – and I noticed a lot of this in northeastern Brazil – who found shelter there were not exactly liberal. I see this as a border, a wide border of the conservative-liberal movement . . . The pro-market movement ended up gathering many conservative people. Some ended up breaking with the movement. Others stayed, but with ideas that tended more towards conservatism . . . One thing that Plinio [Corrêa de Oliveira] always defended in his books is that if we take an ordinary, uneducated woman, she has her inner world. If we speak to her, she probably holds conservative ideas. Still, she is unfamiliar with both the conservative and liberal movements, or anything at all, but her mentality is conservative. Also, PT’s Fundação Perseu Abramo recently published research showing that even people from the outskirts of big cities are conservative. Well, they are figuring out what was obvious, right? And it seems to be the following: contrary to other countries, things here are more fluid. Sometimes I see that people want to put a straitjacket on the talk about Brazilian reality, as if we were in America, for example (Interview with José Carlos Sepúlveda, April 2017).

In 2014 Bolsonaro had established himself as one of the leaders of the conservative reaction that had taken over the country. In the following years, his political prominence reached new heights, peaking during the protests for the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff. During the presidential elections of 2014, the militants of the emerging New Right pragmatically campaigned for PSDB candidate Aécio Neves, and they all supported him in the run-off. At the time, Rousseff’s defeat was taken for granted by the opposition due to the report of a corruption scandal related to the most prominent state company in the country, the oil giant Petrobrás (Singer, 2018). Thus, the shattering of expectations with the announcement of her re-election was such that soon it was suggested that the election was rigged. Opponents of the PT began to express outrage, which provided a welcoming environment for anyone who wanted to protest against the situation.

The first pro-impeachment protest was called only six months after the re-election of Dilma Rousseff. The call for the protest was made on the Facebook page of Paulo Batista, a state legislator candidate from São Paulo also known as Raio Privatizador. His campaign was coordinated by libertarian militants and members of the Movimento Brasil Livre (MBL), the main pro-market movement in the country.16 In humorous videos shared on YouTube, Batista was shown firing ‘privatising rays’ on supposedly communist cities. Although Batista was not elected, around 2,500 people attended the protest, which was supported by Olavo de Carvalho. For the first time, it gathered all the representatives of New Right groups in the streets of São Paulo, including legislator Eduardo Bolsonaro. The protests continued being called by different movements, until 15 March 2015, when, according to Datafolha Institute polls, more than 250,000 people, bearing the national flag’s colours, filled the streets of São Paulo to demand Rousseff’s impeachment, encouraging the organisers to call new protests later in the year.

According to opinion research conducted by Esther Solano, Márcio Moretto Ribeiro and Pablo Ortellado during the protests in São Paulo in August 2015, 96 per cent of the protesters were dissatisfied with the political system. Seventy-three per cent said they did not trust political parties, and 70 per cent claimed that they did not trust politicians (Rossi, 2015). Thus, beyond sharing the rejection of the PT and its leaders (Telles, 2016), rejection of the political system as a whole was widespread among protesters, probably due to the generalised perception that the political system was corrupt.

After the 2005 mensalão scandal, which affected the PT’s leadership, only 5 per cent of the population considered corruption the country’s main problem. However, in October 2015, these numbers had increased to 34 per cent (Singer, 2018). This increase resulted from a series of protests against corruption that took place between 2011 and 2012, after the mensalão scandal trial, and especially after the massive street protests of June 2013. The 2013 uprisings, started by the Movimento Passe Livre (MPL), demanded reduced public transportation fares and were violently repressed by the police. They gathered millions of people throughout Brazil in dozens of protests that turned against the political system as a whole, perceived as impermeable to the population’s appeals (Nobre, 2013).

The outrage against the political system increased the following year due to the beginning of a huge anti-corruption operation, responsible for the imprisonment and condemnation of several politicians and businesspeople. Initiated in March 2014 with a money-laundering report at Petrobrás, and inspired by the Italian Mani Pulite investigations of the 1990s, Operation Car Wash soon gained wide mainstream media coverage and rapidly made one of its architects, judge Sérgio Moro, the most prominent symbol of the fight against corruption in the country.

Thus, amid a crisis in public trust aggravated by the worsening economic situation, it is understandable that 56 per cent of the protesters agreed with the statement ‘Someone outside the political system would solve the crisis.’ For 64 per cent of the interviewees, this person could be an ‘honest judge’, and for 88 per cent an ‘honest politician’. When asked who inspired more trust, 19.4 per cent affirmed that they strongly trusted Jair Bolsonaro, who headed the list. Only 11 per cent said they trusted PSDB, the party most of them had voted for in 2014, and only 1 per cent said they trusted the Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (MDB), the party of the then Vice-President Michel Temer, who would occupy the presidency if the impeachment demanded by protesters was successful.

Bolsonaro was one of the few politicians who could participate in the anti-impeachment demonstrations and be applauded by the crowds, unlike other opposition leaders. Thus, at the end of 2015, the former military captain, considered by part of the population as one of the few honest politicians in the country, became a natural presidential candidate by defending law and order, advocating anti-system rhetoric, and attacking the PT and the left in general. His military background and consistent support for the death penalty, the reduction of the age of criminal responsibility for minors, and the injunction of forced labour among prisoners were seen as some positive attributes among his supporters. He was regarded as the only one capable of reducing violence through repressive measures and disciplining society in the face of moral degradation in a country where the rights of leftists, gays and Black people were supposedly better protected than those of the ‘ordinary citizen’.

The former army captain, who married an evangelical woman in a ceremony presided over by the conservative televangelist pastor Silas Malafaia in 2013, gained prominence for opposing ‘gender ideology’ and supporting discipline in schools. His appeal to the conservative Christian public increased when, in March 2016, Bolsonaro formally joined the Partido Social Cristão (PSC), which incorporated a significant number of conservative Christian leaders in Brazil, and was baptised in the River Jordan by Pastor Everaldo, the party’s candidate in the 2014 presidential elections.

However, Everaldo’s presidential campaign became less known for its exaltation of Christian values than for the exhaustive repetition of the motto ‘let’s privatise everything’. The motto was a brainchild of Bernardo Santoro, director of the Instituto Liberal at the time, who was Liber’s ex-president and an active participant in Orkut counterpublics in the mid-2000s. Santoro joined PSC in 2014 and became a self-styled ‘liberal-conservative’. He focused on actively influencing Jair Bolsonaro and his sons to embrace free-market radicalism. In his own words, Santoro intended to diffuse free-market radicalism to broader sections of the population, such as members of the impoverished middle class and ‘Uberised’ labourers.17

Santoro’s mission was a tough one. At the time, free-market defenders saw Bolsonaro as an adept of national developmentalism, a set of state-centred economic policies advocated by the military dictatorship in the 1970s. Santoro did not give up, and his efforts soon started to pay off. In March of that year, Jair’s son Eduardo Bolsonaro enrolled in a course on Austrian economics offered by the Instituto Mises Brasil, established by Hélio Beltrão Jr, the creator of the Orkut community ‘True Liberalism’. His brother, who served as a municipal councillor in Rio de Janeiro, decided to run for mayor in the elections of that year with a message strictly aligned with the agenda of Santoro.

Bolsonaro seemed less inclined to market radicalism than his sons, although he decided to participate in events promoted by the market circuit as a presidential pre-candidate. In 2017, he was introduced to Paulo Guedes by Winston Ling, founder of the IEE. Guedes, a Chicago School graduate and a well-known figure of the financial market circuits, founded the Instituto Millennium in 2006, a pro-market think tank based in Rio de Janeiro, with Rodrigo Constantino and Hélio Beltrão Jr.

But the pro-market milieu was initially suspicious of Bolsonaro and tensions grew among his new party’s political leaders, whose extreme political pragmatism often sacrificed the right-wing public agenda. The last straw was PSC’s alliance with the Brazilian Communist Party (PC do B) in the 2016 gubernatorial elections in Maranhão, forcing Bolsonaro and his sons, staunch anti-communists, to search for a new party.18 In August 2017, the Bolsonaros announced their affiliation with the Ecology Party (PEN). To house the former captain’s presidential aspirations, the party changed its name to the Patriot Party. As general secretary of the party, Bernardo Santoro introduced Bolsonaro to a young economist called Adolfo Sachsida, who has a PhD from the University of Brasília and worked as an analyst at the federal government’s Institute of Applied Economic Research  (IPEA). Sachsida, at Santoro’s request, formed a group of 11 economists that met weekly with Bolsonaro.

The opposition of free-market defenders to Bolsonaro seemed to decline gradually. In December 2017, Rodrigo Constantino publicly suggested that Paulo Guedes should be Minister of the Economy in a future Bolsonaro government. However, in early 2018, the pre-candidate decided to leave the Partido Patriota and affiliate to the Social Liberal Party (PSL). The sudden change in affiliation to a new party quickly caused discomfort among the libertarian militants of PSL that had gathered since 2016 at the group LIVRES. Staunch antibolsonaristas, LIVRES militants left the party shortly after Bolsonaro joined it, adhering to the Partido Novo.

The pre-candidate eventually caused another shock when he shunned participation in the presidential debate organised by the Fórum da Liberdade, an annual gathering of right-wing leaders and ideologues. In order to end lingering suspicions due to his erratic political movements, Bolsonaro decided to seal his alliance with the pro-market defenders by announcing in the first half of 2018 that Paulo Guedes would be his Minister of the Economy. Despite all sorts of suspicions, tensions and resentments, most market fundamentalists actively supported Bolsonaro’s presidential campaign, bringing together the New Brazilian Right around a libertarian-conservative amalgam.

After the first round of the elections ended in October 2018, Bolsonaro had won more than half of the valid votes in 12 states and the Federal District, which surprised many political analysts. Bolsonaro was disappointed by the results, as he felt he could win the elections in the first round. On the other hand, the counterpublic militants were impressed by the votes he had received and leaders of the pro-impeachment protests, such as law professor Janaína Paschoal, journalist Joice Hasselmann and then federal legislator Eduardo Bolsonaro, all PSL candidates, received more than a million votes each. The party became the second-largest in Congress, with 52 members, a six-fold increase.

Conclusion

Bolsonaro’s victory, as well as that of many New Right activists, was a result of a long political and social process that can be traced back to the mensalão corruption scandal in 2005 and culminated with a firm electoral rejection of the PT and Lula’s arrest in 2018. Even though many factors explain Bolsonaro’s victory – economic and social crisis, rampant violence and crime, Lula’s imprisonment, and the disappointment with the PT and the political system as a whole, including intense sharing of political content on social networks (Brito Cruz, 2019)19 – it is of paramount importance to consider the formation of emerging New Right militancy networks which diffused new ideas during a series of critical moments between 2011 and 2016: the progressivist shock (2011–14), the protests against corruption (2011–12), the mensalão scandal trial (2012), the uprisings of June 2013, Operation Car Wash (2014), Dilma Rousseff’s re-election (2014), and pro-impeachment protests (2014–16).

Bolsonaro came to symbolise the burgeoning outrage against the PT and the political system, and the desire for law, order and discipline in Brazilian society. His closeness to evangelical leaders, Olavo de Carvalho’s followers and radical pro-marketeers delivered him a wide-ranging mixture of personnel ready to serve in government, apart from those recruited into the army that also exalted the military dictatorship. The disruptive and indecorous language characteristic of counterpublic discourse became frequent in official communications, as in Donald Trump’s administration (Thimsen, 2017), contrary to Michael Warner’s hypothesis that counterpublics would normalise if their members became part of dominant publics.

However, there are significant tensions between the new right-wing groups. In this sense, the first two years of Bolsonaro’s government were a game-changer for the New Right, which subsequently has begun to show signs of division between unconditional Bolsonaro supporters who still employ disruptive and indecorous language in social networks, critical supporters, and a few opponents, who consider him a threat to Brazilian democracy.

Considering the horizon of (im)possibilities that this book addresses, it is possible to say that while the emergence of counterpublics facilitated by digital media (Downey and Fenton, 2003) points to increased representation of certain groups in the public sphere, to the extent that it allows more people to participate and influence the public debate, it can also have harmful effects. The increased fragmentation of the public (Sunstein, 2017) and the formation of the so-called ‘bubble effect’, a process of feedback of ideas and information by internet users through filters and algorithms (Pariser, 2011), may lead to the intensification of political radicalisation (Downey and Fenton, 2003), and counterpublicity may facilitate the popularisation of authoritarian ideas incompatible with the democratic regime.

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