Brazil's influencer right is one election away from the presidency

Brazil votes on Sunday in a presidential runoff that polls call tight, and the campaign that got the country there has been run as much on social media as on the stump.

Flavio Bolsonaro, the eldest son of former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, edged incumbent left-winger Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in the first round of voting on October 4. He is favoured to win the October 25 runoff. The first round was held on the same day as Brazil’s general election, and it produced a crop of new officeholders who built their followings online before they built a party machine.

Eduarda Campopiano is the clearest example. The 23-year-old was elected to the assembly of Sao Paulo with nearly two million votes. She describes herself as “feminists’ worst nightmare” and thanks God for the colonisation of Brazil by Portugal, which she credits with saving the country from “cannibalism.” She has three million followers on Instagram. “My mission is to ensure that Flavio Bolsonaro wins,” she said in a recent video.

She is a practising Catholic who wears trendy oversized glasses, and she has caused controversy by declaring that she “owes feminism nothing” and that femicide, the killing of women and girls by someone known to them and often because of their gender, should not be a separate category of crime. Speaking to AFP on the sidelines of a pro-Bolsonaro rally in Sao Paulo, she said, “We have to reinforce the traditional family model.”

That argument about family, gender and identity is the live wire in this election, and it is being carried by people who learned politics as content creators rather than as ward councillors. Brazil has more influencers than any other country, according to sociologist Gabriela Mayall of Federal Fluminense University. “Social networks have stopped being mere instruments for campaigning and become spaces for training new leaders,” said Mercia Alves, a researcher with the public policy think tank CEBRAP.

During the general election campaign Campopiano teamed up with 28-year-old federal congressional candidate Lucas Pavanato in a video mocking the trans community. Pavanato, who was elected to the National Congress with three million votes and who wore a blonde wig in the post, attacked trans women being allowed to use women’s public toilets. “I can’t bear this masquerade any longer, a man is a man and a woman is a woman,” he declared, ripping off the wig. Several right-wing influencers have been accused of transphobia for attacking trans MP Erika Hilton, who is a social media star in her own right.

Flavio Bolsonaro has campaigned as a more moderate figure than his father, who had a history of racist, misogynistic and homophobic outbursts. The younger Bolsonaro has railed about “gender ideology,” but he is generally seen as more tolerant than the influencers trying to get the vote out for him. He has, for example, vowed to campaign against femicide, which is a scourge in Brazil, where four cases were reported daily last year. He benefits nonetheless from the echo chamber created by digital activists such as 30-year-old Nikolas Ferreira, who has spawned a host of imitators since becoming the most voted member of Brazil’s lower house of Congress in 2022. The conservative Christian activist, who also opposes “gender ideology” and has tens of millions of followers on social media, was re-elected to parliament by a landslide earlier this month.

“These days, we’re faced with an identity phenomenon both on the right and left. The identitarian left pushes for example LGBT+ demands, which the identitarian right rejects,” Mayall said. Pavanato offers a different reading of the rise of identity politics in Brazil. “For a very long time the Brazilian political class was very timid, it was afraid of expressing itself,” he told AFP. Now, he says, “we say what we think, despite political pressure.”

For a South African reader, the mechanics are familiar even where the names are not. A country of 214 million people, more than three times South Africa’s population, is holding a runoff in which the loudest campaigning happens on the same platforms South Africans use every day, and in which candidates who began as online personalities now hold seats and set the terms of the argument. The questions being fought over, who counts as a family, whether violence against women needs its own legal category, whether public facilities should be organised by gender, are being fought over here too, in our courts, in our schools and in our homes.

What Brazil is testing is whether that online energy converts into governing power. Campopiano’s nearly two million votes and Pavanato’s three million say it converts into seats. Whether it converts into a presidency is the question Sunday answers.

As eNCA reported on October 16, the movement is aiming to seal a Bolsonaro win. The reporting above draws on that account and on the AFP interviews it carries. The Enquirer will follow the October 25 result and what it means for the wider politics of the global right, and will report the outcome from the record.