Party Bus

While the world’s attention was focused on the United States presidential election that would deliver Donald Trump a decisive victory and a second Presidency, Brazil’s municipal elections in October were signalling the political balance for the coming years within the second largest country in the hemisphere. Elections for city council and mayoralties take place all on the same date, and—much like the Congressional midterms in the US context—are often read as an indication of the health of the ruling government’s support, and weigh heavily on intraparty disputes over strategy for incumbents and opposition alike. In São Paulo, Latin America’s largest city and Brazil’s largest single electorate, some trends asserted themselves: namely,  the concerted success of centrist forces to defeat the favored candidate of the left, and the surprising rise of a non-Bolsonarista far-right candidate in Pablo Marçal.

To discuss the election results and Brazil’s current position on the global stage, PW editor Hugo Fanton spoke with political scientist André Singer. The wide-ranging interview addresses Singer’s recent writing on Brazilian party politics, class structure and political behavior, varieties of autocracy, and striking similarities between the United States and Brazil. Singer is Professor of Political Science at the University of São Paulo (USP), former spokesman for President Lula Inacio da Silva (2003–2007), and the author and editor of numerous books, including O segundo círculo: Centro e periferia em tempos de guerra, released in Brazil last September.

An interview with André Singer

Hugo Fanton: Pablo Marçal’s performance in São Paulo’s mayoral election drew nationwide attention. Who is Marçal, and what does his candidacy tell us about the Brazilian political scene, and the prospects for the 2026 presidential election?

André Singer: Pablo Marçal, an internet influencer, was completely unforeseen by the major political players. He came out of nowhere, backed by a political party that has no representative in the National Congress, and yet secured 1,700,000 votes. It was an extraordinary result in the most important electoral contest of the year: the city of São Paulo. By a difference of just 50,000 votes—a very small margin—he didn’t make it to the second round. In addition to the general shock, Marçal’s success exposed unforeseen issues on the right of the political spectrum: a young man, thirty-seven years old, with no support other than his own communication skills, was able to mobilize São Paulo’s far-right electorate away from former President Jair Bolsonaro. Marçal became a far-right figure, independent of Bolsonaro and his chosen candidate, the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB) candidate, as well as the city’s incumbent mayor, Ricardo Nunes.

In order to get re-elected, Nunes nominated a Bolsonaro appointee as deputy mayor, confirming that there was a formal alliance not only with Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party (Partido Liberal, or PL), but with Bolsonaro himself. Once Marçal began to climb in the polls, Bolsonaro found himself in a difficult situation. At first, he tried to disqualify Marçal in order to boost Nunes’s campaign. But this backfired, and Bolsonaro’s own supporters forced him to retreat and reconcile with Marçal. This shocking grassroots defection seriously threatened Nunes’s prospects.

In that moment, I believe, it became clear that the main winner of the entire 2024 electoral process was São Paulo state governor Tarcísio de Freitas. Tarcísio supported Nunes’ candidacy and was in debt to Bolsonaro, who made him his gubernatorial candidate in 2022 and delivered him a victory on the back of his strong base in the countryside. Now, two years later, in the middle of this situation, Tarcísio found himself faced with a decision: to stand with Nunes, or with Marçal and Bolsonaro. Tarcísio opted for the former, saving Nunes’s bid for re-election, which eventually caused Bolsonaro himself to retreat from supporting Marçal and take a more or less neutral stance. Tarcísio, despite opposing Bolsonaro and Marçal, asserted throughout that the former president needed to come back to Nunes—understanding that if the right unified, it would be competitive.

Tarcísio represents what I called “Shrek-like Bolsonarism” in a recent article for piaui: a right-wing politician that seems friendly in contrast with extreme figures like Bolsonaro and Marçal. He is a hybrid figure who is originally from the monstrous extreme right but presents himself in a more palatable way for the non-extreme right. Mayor Ricardo Nunes has the same profile. He does not appear as an extreme right-wing figure, but embraces several of their slogans and pursues unity across the right.

São Paulo’s municipal election was widely covered in the national media and can be viewed, relatively speaking, as a preview of elements that may return in the 2026 presidential elections. Of course, Brazil is different from São Paulo and there should be no automatic transposition. But some of what happened here may prove useful in understanding certain elements of 2026. The 2024 election demonstrated the power of the far right after its defeat in 2022. It was the first time that the far right returned to the polls, after Lula’s victory and Bolsonaro’s exile from the electoral system, and it proved to be powerful—not enough to win, but enough to compete. Crucially, it proved that if there is unity, the right can win the election.

HF: The parties that performed best in these municipal elections are called the partido do interior—parties of the interior, or rural areas in Brazil. These are parties like PMDB, PSD, and so on, which perform well in the local governments of the countryside and are closely associated with regional elites. What does their success reveal about the traditional right wing and the Bolsonaro coalition? Is there a realignment taking place?

AS: In 2006, I described an electoral realignment that had taken place through the election and government of the Workers’ Party (PT).¹ That realignment was characterized by the decisive shift of the bottom of the social pyramid—households earning zero-to-two times the minimum monthly income—from the array of Brazilian parties and toward a strong alignment with Lula and the PT. This fundamental alignment is still intact. Datafolha’s assessment of Lula’s government at the beginning of October is an indicator of this: 36 percent of the electorate as a whole rate his government as “good and excellent.” But at the bottom of the pyramid, this proportion rises to 46 percent. For everyone else who isn’t at the bottom of the pyramid, it’s around 27 percent. That’s a big difference. It’s as if the country were divided into two blocs, two great social halves, with the bottom half supporting the government and the top half tending not to support it. Numbers like this lead me to believe that Lulism is still standing. Another element that points in this direction: the only major victory for the PT in the municipal elections was in Fortaleza, one of the main Northeastern capitals, which is the center of the subproletariat, that fraction of the class that is technically at the bottom of the pyramid. So, in that sense, the alignment from the early-2000s remains. What is new, however, is that there is a shift within the middle class from the point of view of party identification, which began with the depletion of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB) and the migration of these sectors to the extreme right from 2016 onwards.²

One of the ongoing factors—which was also very apparent in the 2024 municipal election—is Bolsonaro’s attempt to build up a party to organize and replace the PSDB, and that is the PL. Bolsonaro first joined the Social Liberal Party (Partido Social Liberal), which he left while in office. Then he launched his own party, which was abandoned along the way and dissolved. Finally, he joined the Liberal Party which had been around for a long time, and whose top leader was willing to become the main organizer of Bolsonarism. Therefore, Bolsonarism now has a party vehicle that did well in the elections. It’s the party with the most state resources for campaigning, because it holds the largest caucus in the Chamber of Deputies, and it did very well in October.

However, this comes at a price: like any force that joins the institutional game for real, there is a normalization effect. Somehow, it is drawn into the implicit or explicit rules of the electoral game. The implicit rule in the Brazilian case is that these parties need to behave like what former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, when he was just a political scientist forty years ago, called a partido ônibus, or “bus party”—meaning you can join and leave at any time, and the parties don’t necessarily have a homogenizing influence on their members, such that regional and local sections can bear very different characteristics. This “bus party” form leads to some very odd cases, like local alliances between the PL and the PT. It’s rare, but it has happened—just to give foreign readers an idea of the complexities of Brazilian party politics.

The PSDB was partly replaced by the PL, but also partly by the Social Democratic Party (PSD), which is led by a very traditional politician, Gilberto Kassab. In São Paulo state, especially in the countryside, the PSD has absorbed the old PSDB machine, a very strong structure in a very powerful state. As a result, we’re witnessing a reshuffling of the right of center. On the one hand, the extreme right has acquired a party apparatus with some robustness; while, on the other, there is the strengthening of a party from the so-called centrão—the large, ideologically thin, and highly transactional group of parties that make up the center of Brazilian politics. The PSD, a partido do interior, is a more moderate force that has grown in size with the potential to dominate the centrão. The right’s problem is whether it will be able to produce an alliance between the PSD and the PL. In the elections in São Paulo, the right and the far right were separated in the first round but combined in the second. The question is whether they can do this on the national stage in 2026.

So what uncertainties hang over the election next year? Firstly, whether Bolsonaro will insist on being a candidate, even though he is legally barred from running. There are several signs that he will run, and in this he would mirror what President Lula did in 2018 while facing a prison sentence for now-annulled corruption charges: he waited until the very last moment to acknowledge that he could not be an eligible candidate and nominated Fernando Haddad to run in his place. If Bolsonaro does this, it will create problems for alternative candidates. For example, if Tarcísio wants to run, he will need to build his name nationally, which requires mobilizing earlier rather than later. But to do so would mean stepping into the open and confronting Bolsonaro, thereby contradicting one of his premises: the right will lose if it is not unified. Tarcísio’s problem is this equation. The second major uncertainty is whether Marçal or a candidate like him would have a chance of reproducing, on a national level, what happened in the city of São Paulo. It’s a very difficult question, because Brazil is not São Paulo. Brazil is a giant, heterogenous country, with a wide range of different characteristics across region, religion, age, gender, and so on. But it’s not impossible, as demonstrated by the previous phenomena of Jânio Quadros, Fernando Collor, and Bolsonaro himself.

HF: Can you say more about the relationship between these shifting political forces and the country’s class structure?

AS: I’m going to start from the bottom up and talk about four population segments. First, there’s the base of the pyramid. As I said before, looking at this section shows that Lulism still stands. For example, one of the most significant victories in Brazil was that of João Campos (Brazilian Socialist Party, or PSB) in Recife, who was leading the coalition that supported Lula in 2022 and who was supported by Lula now in 2024. Recife is one of the largest cities in the poor region of the Northeast, and historically the home of many national political leaders. We’ve already talked about the PT’s victory in Fortaleza, also in the Northeast, and then there’s Eduardo Paes’s (PSD) triumph in Rio de Janeiro, where, with Lula’s support, the winning coalition inflicted a defeat against Bolsonaro in his political stronghold. This is no small feat, as Bolsonarism remains very strong in the South of the country, where it won in all three capitals, and obtained expressive victory in the Central-West, in addition to its performance in some capitals in the Northeast. Nevertheless, the election and the polls show that the base of the pyramid still remains with Lulism.

The second tier is what social scientists refer to as those with a monthly family income ranging from two to five times the minimum wage. Here, a sharp divide begins. Marçal’s candidacy in São Paulo had a significant advantage in this group, although it was not his core support, which was among higher-income voters. Support for the far right increases up the income ladder. It was the same with Bolsonaro: the higher the income in these middle sectors, the more they oppose the base of the pyramid. In this respect, it is a class opposition to Lulism. From a social point of view, this is the fundamental clash at play. Those earning from two to five minimum wages are very important from a numerical point of view, representing more than 30 percent of the Brazilian electorate, while over 40 percent of the electorate remains at the bottom at two times the monthly minimum or lower. These two segments decide the election, as rich Brazilians don’t have the numbers to be decisive. But the two to five wage sector is divided. The extreme right does hold sway there, but it remains under dispute, and I would even say that this is the sector that will decide the election in 2026.

Next, we have the third tier, made up of those with a monthly family income above five minimum wages. Here, too, there is a threefold split: the far right, the right, and a small middle-class progressive fringe. The left-wing candidate in São Paulo, PSOL’s Guilherme Boulos, who was backed by Lula, faced difficulties at the base of the pyramid, but his support grew in the third tier—somewhat similar to the distribution that the PT could achieve until its breakthrough in 2002.

Finally, the fourth tier would be the dominant classes, who don’t even feature in opinion polls. They are not important from a numerical standpoint, but from a class structure perspective. It’s clear that part of the ruling class supports the extreme right, particularly in the agribusiness sector. The PL, for example, did very well in the cities with the highest agribusiness revenues—where that sector determines employment and is politically integrated in local government. This is also true among those in business and construction, which are economically important sectors. The major question is what the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie will do, given that it was difficult to get them to side with Lula in 2022. The bankers, financiers, and cosmopolitan business elites backed Lula’s candidacy in an environment of considerable tension, and the subsequent two years in office have been marked by a central governmental dispute: the problem of austerity. This sector of the bourgeoisie wants public spending to be cut, ostensibly to create a fiscal balance that will generate peace of mind for investors. Their support for Lula is accordingly very fragile, so a right-wing candidate seemingly without extreme right-wing characteristics could emerge and appeal to this cosmopolitan bourgeoisie.

HF: You’ve written about the idea of “autocracy with a fascist bias” to understand the phenomena of Trump in the US and Bolsonaro in Brazil. Could you explain this idea, and how it helps us understand the election of a more radicalized Trumpist movement in the US, the Marçal phenomenon, and the impacts of Bolsonaro’s ineligibility?

AS: From an empirical perspective, what we saw during the Bolsonaro administration was a tendency toward an autocratic regime—in a specific sense, it aimed at consolidating governance around Bolsonaro himself. This is unlike, for example, what became known as the techno-bureaucratic military regime of 1964, which had no prominent leadership and instead organized around an apparatus. By “autocratic” I mean something very particular because, by contrast, we don’t have any empirical evidence to say that he was moving towards a fascist-type regime. The fascist bias lies in having activated, or perhaps having sought to activate, the unconscious of the masses. Following the Frankfurt School’s analysis of historical fascism, communication that can activate this unconscious across class divisions are part of the “delusional system” of right-wing nationalist and fascist politics.  There are many episodes of this kind of irrational, mass, communications-driven far-right movement in recent history. To give one example, in 2021 Bolsonaro’s networks started spreading the word that most of the Supreme Court (STF) ministers were receiving Chinese money to enable the legal rehabilitation of former president Lula and thereby enslave the Brazilian people to China. This was spread not as a metaphor, but as a fact. And this fact is completely delusional, outside of the realm of logical dialogue. This didn’t exist in Brazilian politics until Bolsonaro came along. It’s a novelty that typifies what I call the fascist bias.

My analysis is for Brazil, but since the question has been posed, I’m risking an opinion on the United States. From a distance it seems to me that Trump’s victory last November took place amid an intensification of this fascist bias. The promise to deport millions of people and fables about Haitian migrants eating pets in the middle of the country take part in this delusional system. This newfound phenomena presents us with challenges we aren’t accustomed to in political analysis, so it’s difficult to predict what will happen when Trump takes office, but I would expect a further deepening of both authoritarianism and this fascist bias.

Back to Brazil, it’s my view that the fascist bias was fully at play in Marçal’s campaign in the São Paulo election. It was an extremely aggressive candidacy, characterized by vicious attacks on other candidates, and viral falsehoods. He was so offensive and provocative that, in a televised debate during the campaign, another candidate hit Marçal with a chair. The scandal became known as cadeirada, roughly meaning “chairing.” In a subsequent debate, one of Marçal’s advisors punched another candidate’s publicist. Generally perceived as random explosive moments, these events were rather, in my opinion, part of a communication strategy: acts of expressive violence that activate the unconscious of the masses. That’s why the Marçal phenomenon is very significant—it represents the existence of a social environment for this type of politics.

HF: You launched a book last September, The Second Circle (O segundo circulo), which seeks to place Brazil in the world. Where does the country stand today compared to the early 2000s? How do you view Brazil in the context of increasing competition between China and the US?

AS: As a peripheral country, Brazil is subject to determinations coming from the center of the global system, but at the same time it processes these determinations through its domestic dynamics and class structure. As Professor Fernando Rugitsky has argued, Brazil’s position in the global trade system is primarily as a supplier of roughly processed raw materials for industrial use in Asia. Brazil is once again the breadbasket of the world—or a part of the world, at least. Meanwhile, the third corner of this triangle, the United States and Europe, dominate the financial and currency system in which Brazil is a subordinate party. What we don’t know is whether or not the polarization between the US and China will lead to Chinese and US-European industrial investment in Brazil. So far, there have been some Chinese industrial investments in the country, such as the BYD and Goldwind plants in Camaçari (both of which used to house American industrial giants, Ford and GE). These investments do not seem to be on a scale that would suggest structural change or a reversal of the trend towards deindustrialization. Nor, so far, have I heard about the transfer of advanced technology, which is essential if we are to think about the possibility of reversing this trend. The same question applies to the bloc led by the US in opposition to China, because Brazil, as an important country on the international stage—diplomatically and economically—could benefit from this division by negotiating concessions from both sides that point in the direction of what is a historical project for part of Brazilian society, which is to seek a definitive exit from so-called economic backwardness.

Compared to the early 2000s, when Lula won the first presidential election, Brazil is significantly more deindustrialized and reprimarized. This partly explains the reason why the Bolsonaro coalition was defeated in 2022 by a margin of less than 1 percent of the vote, despite the humanitarian catastrophe that was Bolsonaro’s management of Covid-19. There is also the further transformation of a country toward services rather than industry, something that has everything to do with Bolsonarism, which brings together ruling class groups linked to agribusiness and services. So today, from the standpoint of a development project, the situation is far more difficult than it was twenty years ago. Precarious work, superexploitation of the workforce, the progressive growth of organized crime—these are the trends from the point of view of income redistribution and the lower classes. The problem of how to organize a new program in this situation is, I would say, one of the most distressing questions of the moment.

HF: You write in this book about parallels between Brazil and the United States, about a “mimicry” across the politics of the two countries. Can you outline the main aspects of this parallelism and its implications for understanding Brazil in the world?

AS: We started with the observation that, since 2016, Brazilian politics has begun to resemble American politics. At the first level, former president Jair Bolsonaro began to literally copy all of Trump’s actions, culminating in the uprising of January 8, 2023, in which a Brazilian crowd invaded and vandalized the headquarters of all three branches of government in Brasilia—mimicking January 6, 2021 in Washington DC. This was a kind of mimetic performance, with extraordinary consequences, because many of these people are in prison to this day, paying a very high price for the delusional rallying cry that led them there.

The philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger says that there is no country in the world more like the United States than Brazil: the extent of the isolation of the two countries, both continental in size, both inward-looking and insolated. It is worth remembering that Brazil also has a historical tradition of turning its back on the rest of Latin America, and looking first to Europe and then to the United States. It is also the case that Brazil has historically copied other US formulas, notably the adoption of presidentialism (although this is true for several other countries in the region as well). But finally, and perhaps most essentially for our discussion, both countries have been deindustrializing in parallel.

Of course, the United States is the center of the system and Brazil is a peripheral country—the starting points are different, and the place of the two countries in productive and financial chains are different. But, curiously, both countries have been experiencing parallel consequences for neglecting domestic industry. Deindustrialization is the starting point for thinking about the strange underlying resonances in the political realm, despite immense differences in social composition, political system, and so on.

HF: What are the prospects for Lulism and left-wing politics in Brazil?

AS: Contextually speaking, I see three major challenges. The first is the fact that budget cuts in programs that provide income and benefits to the base of the pyramid could have a fatal effect on Lulism, which is built entirely on the provision of this support. Possible cuts in the minimum wage, in the Continuous Benefit Program, in salary bonuses, which affect the base of the pyramid directly, need to be carefully observed from a political standpoint. Secondly, there is a perception, common to both the United States and Brazil, that the increase in the cost of living is impacting the base of the pyramid and also the next tier up (the two to five minimum wage monthly family income group), meaning that aggregate economic figures seem to be of little importance on the scale of elections. We may observe economic growth, a drop in unemployment, and an increase in wages, but when surveys are carried out, pessimism about the economy even increases, which seems to suggest that, for ordinary people, life is still very difficult. And this may have something to do with the surge in inflation in the cost of living worldwide, due to the disruption of production chains during the Covid-19 pandemic and perhaps later the wars, as oil and energy prices have a huge impact on the entire price chain and, in particular, on the cost of living. So the second challenge is to design policies to protect the popular economy, to prevent the effects of the global economy from reaching the lower income strata. The third, and most difficult, is to draw up a program that makes it possible to attract this group of voters who receive between two and five minimum wages monthly, who are not at the bottom of the pyramid, but who are workers dealing with precarious incomes and all that come along with them. For example, an app delivery driver who works on a motorcycle in the city of São Paulo is not at the bottom of the pyramid—in the Brazilian case, he is in the middle sector and not among the poorest. What project can fight for this electorate, which has proven quite inclined to support Marçal in São Paulo? It can’t be anything other than a national development plan. But how can we think of a development plan in the adverse global conditions I described earlier? To end on an ironic note, I would say that we need to do this now. But how? I don’t know.

HF: In the first chapter of the book, you defend the use of the word “interregnum” to think about the global crisis. Could you comment on the analytical value of thinking in these terms?

AS: The purpose of the article is to reflect on the notion that interregnum, for Gramsci, means a period of struggle between forces that don’t have hegemony, but seek it. It’s not just the idea that chaotic periods lead to a new settlement. We take a very political angle of looking at the interregnum as a period of dispute between these forces. From our vantage point, we sought to interpret the Biden phenomenon as an attempt to create a new, organizing vision of Americanism. It’s not clear to me that all of these attempts have been lost with the electoral defeat, but it will now be replaced by Trumpism, seeking to put forward a counter-direction to resolve the same set of problems. For example, there are a number of analyses that point to the very difficult living conditions of the average American citizen, not to mention citizens at the very bottom of the US’s own class pyramid. How will Trump deal with this? In global terms, the competition over the new hegemony is taking place in two directions—inwardly and outwardly. For Biden, this was attempting new domestic economic policy while pursuing belligerent foreign policy. When it comes to China, the focus must be on what it is proposing for the global South, and at the same time, for its own domestic economy. Thinking about the “interregnum” is about focusing on the direction of these forces, in a moment when there is no defined hegemony.

This interview was translated from Portuguese to English by Marina Vello.