This October, 158.7 million Brazilians will be eligible to vote for a new president, vice president, members of Congress and state governors. For those not particularly well informed about the Latin American giant, the coming election may appear neither especially interesting nor worth following: just yet another episode in the decade-long psychodrama engulfing the country, a new chapter in the long rivalry between incumbent left-wing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the right-wing, Trump-aligned Bolsonaro clan. Such a view, however, risks relying dangerously on clichés about Brazilian politics.
Aged 42, Renan Santos is the surprise of the current election cycle: a right-wing nationalist outsider who recent polls have put at around 9–10% of the vote. He is the voice of young Brazilians, drawing 37.9% support among 16- to 24-year-olds in one recent poll. Among that age group, he would beat both Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro, who is running as his father’s political heir after Jair was forbidden by the courts from doing so himself.
His support has also been rising in recent polling. If the trend holds, it could rapidly multiply. If he were to overtake Flávio Bolsonaro in the race for a place in the runoff, victory – and, with it, the presidency of the world’s seventh most populous country and one of its largest economies – would become a real possibility.
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The Movement Behind the Candidate
“Who is Renan Santos?” The clever campaign slogan, a likely reference to “Who is John Galt?” in Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, is the question many Brazilians have been asking themselves lately. Renan is one of the founders of the influential Movimento Brasil Livre, or MBL.
A decade ago, the protest campaign that Santos and his MBL had helped organize culminated in the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s political heir, in August 2016. Shattered by lurid corruption revelations and by Dilma’s disgraceful political demise, Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT) then went on to lose the 2018 general election to Jair Bolsonaro. The rivalry between Lula and Jair Bolsonaro has dominated Brazilian public life ever since.
Disappointment with Jair Bolsonaro’s chaotic and largely ineffective term in office, together with exhaustion at the family dramas and corruption affairs engulfing the Bolsonaro clan itself, has created an appetite for novelty on the right. At first glance, Renan might have appeared an unlikely candidate for the role.
Despite his successful leadership of the movement that eventually brought down Dilma, he had never been a national figure: as a discreet – if effective – organizer, those in the know describe him as uninterested in visibility, keener to work behind the scenes than to monopolize attention. Sources in his recently formed Missão party unanimously say that Renan had no wish to run for the presidency, only agreeing to do so at the request of his colleagues.
So why is he rising so fast in the polls? Early this year, when his candidacy first became known to the press, it was ridiculed by most professional commentators. Some doubted whether Renan would ever rise to a meager 2%. That they have been so spectacularly proven wrong is testament to how badly they have misread the mood of the Brazilian public.
Why the Old Formula Is Losing Its Grip
Brazilians are angry. The 80-year-old Lula da Silva has nothing to offer his people beyond stagnation and a crippling dependence on the state, promising them more handouts when what they really want is a future of prosperity, security and dignity. Flávio Bolsonaro has shamefully chosen to follow the same path, unveiling a plan for free internet access for up to 70 million women and potentially free mobile phones for those unable to afford one.
In a country whose nominal GDP has yet to return to 2011 levels, where the 2022 census counted 16.4 million people living in favelas and where the homicide rate was more than three times the US rate in 2024, it beggars belief that the main contenders for the presidency can find nothing better to offer than ever more state provision. It is this mindless populism that has long sabotaged Brazil’s development. It is no wonder that its younger and more educated population has come to reject it entirely.
Renan Santos’ allure lies in his determination to rescue Brazil from this gray, absurd, depressing swamp. In Democracy in America (1835), Alexis de Tocqueville argued that the countries of South America would eventually become prosperous and developed. The question, he wrote, was “simply one of time”; eventually, their inhabitants would form “flourishing and enlightened nations”.
A Program Built Around Order
Renan understands that Brazil can only come to fulfill this promise with a strong and cohesive state apparatus bent on crushing organized crime, making the country safe for international investment, fostering industrialization and rescuing tens of millions of Brazilians from the bastions of underdevelopment and anomie represented by the favela.
He is not afraid to tell the gangs that have come to control so much of the country, such as the Primeiro Comando da Capital and the Comando Vermelho, that he will wage war on them – an intention colorfully encapsulated in “Prendeu, matou” (“Arrest or kill”), another of the punchier slogans of his campaign. In his understanding that national development is possible only where law and order are guaranteed, he has been compared to El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. Rightly so.
But what is most striking about Santos is how serious, intelligent and cultured he is. Though long derided as a maverick, Renan is a man who impresses with the depth of his understanding of the most disparate subjects. At a time when the world seems submerged by vapidity and amateurism, Renan is one of the most intellectually interesting men running for political office today.
And the movement he leads – meticulously organized, blessed by a caste of highly capable cadres and ideologically disruptive – is certainly one of the most captivating in the Western world. Curtis Yarvin, the American philosopher, has himself spoken admiringly of the movement, describing it as impressive and unusually well organized.
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The Long Game
Brazil is a country of immense, almost unlimited potential. São Paulo, its economic heartland, remains the country’s dominant industrial center. Brazil has demonstrated that it can compete at the technological frontier, with Embraer remaining the world’s third-largest aircraft manufacturer.
After decades of despondency, destructive welfarism and sterile hyper-populism, it appears that its youngest citizens have come to realize what Brazil can be. Santos, with his platform of radical, intelligent reformism, captures that sentiment. He has the wind of history behind him – whether it is now or in four years, he will be Brazil’s president.
