Big things take their time in politics. A murmur under the pavement—until suddenly the ground moves. At the end of November, at the inaugural Festival do Movimento Brasil Livre, the tremor became a quake. Something big is happening on the Brazilian Right, and even its opponents felt the earth shake.
Movimento Brasil Livre, or MBL, was once dismissed as a passing youth rebellion of anti-Dilma street activists. It has, instead, revealed itself as something far more formidable: a political intelligentsia under construction, a cultural engine, a metapolitical workshop producing ideas, cadres, leaders, and ideas with a degree of dynamism that is rare anywhere in the West. It is hardly a surprise, therefore, that the event received the visit of one of the world’s most perplexing, interesting political thinkers of today: America’s Curtis Yarvin, the father of the Dark Enlightenment, also known as the Neo-Reactionary Movement (NRx).
The festival crackled with that rare electricity that accompanies the birth of something that is not merely political, but historical in its importance. Thousands of young people spilled into the auditorium, many of them encountering, for the first time, a right-wing movement that wasn’t ashamed of itself. Brazil’s New Right isn’t a mere derivative of something else; it wants to go beyond recycling used, boring liberalism in conservative disguises. Rather, here is a movement that is determined to craft a nationalism that is natively Brazilian: a political grammar aligned with the country’s cultural and civilisational instincts, not borrowed from foreign manuals. Its proposals are drawn from the history books, but inspired by the opportunities of technology and a thirst for the future.
If last year’s events hinted at this metamorphosis, this year’s festival confirmed it. The MBL, and the Partido Missão into which it has now crystallised, are no longer reformulating Brazil according to imported categories. They are reformulating Brazil according to Brazil, unashamed of the South American giant’s Catholic and Portuguese origins. If Brazil’s Right from 10 years ago, led by the likes of Jair Bolsonaro, was a purely reactive project—an amateurish, unideological movement that arose more from the urgency of replacing left-wing rule with something, anything, else—what is now happening is the birth of an intelligent, thoughtful, constructive right that doesn’t just want to replace the Establishment. It wants to govern and actually do things.
The most striking demonstration of the event’s ambition was, of course, Yarvin. Here is a figure whose controversial, heterodox, and often misunderstood ideas have inspired discussions from Silicon Valley boardrooms to dissident Right reading groups. Yarvin’s attendance was not merely symbolic, however. It was a signal that Brazilian politics is entering the global conversation no longer as a pupil, but as a peer.
What few expected was how naturally Yarvin’s idiosyncratic worldview blended with the MBL’s ongoing intellectual pivot. Once a bastion of free-market activism, the movement is now undergoing its own ideological mutation, recognising that the liberal operating system is insufficient for a country of Brazil’s scale, complexity, civilisational roots, and destiny. Unlike the atomised individualism of the now decaying liberal right, the new Brazilian right is learning to read Brazil’s own, unique political culture inherited from the Portuguese Empire and proposing that vast geopolitical and historical space as Brazil’s manifest destiny, Lusitânia Global. The movement is unashamedly post-liberal and is taking a page out of the Bukele book to offer tens of millions of young men a national project that can snatch the country away from the swamp of corruption, crime, and decay it has been in for decades. They are not shy about saying loud and clear that their Brazil will wage war on the drug gangs, that it will do so without quarter, and that it will win. They are not shy about saying loud and clear that their Brazil will restore itself as a functioning state to finally realise its enormous potential.
The movement’s leader, Renan Santos, is an impressive individual. He’s young, energetic, and highly intelligent. He is cultured. An eager podcaster and early candidate for next year’s presidential election, he’s already polling at some 6-8%. According to a November poll, he would achieve 25% of the vote against left-wing Lula. He spoke with the clarity of someone who knows that history is accelerating and that Brazil has no time to waste. At 41, he is the candidate of millennial and zoomer Brazil—big on the internet, he is a conservative and a nationalist who knows how to speak its language. He might, indeed, be Brazil’s Bukele—or Brazil’s JD Vance.
Another of those present was Orlando Lima. Orlando is a friend and an inspiration. He leads MBL’s stunning monthly magazine, Valete, likely one of the finest publications of right-wing thought in the world today. Valete is in itself symptomatic of the miraculous outburst of energy and ideas taking hold of Brazil: at a time print magazines of culture and ideas are becoming rarer and rarer, Valete sells 10,000 each month. It discusses everything that matters, from good books to whatever is big in contemporary political philosophy, history, geopolitics, and aesthetics. If Brazil gets its act together, it will be through a cultural revolution in which Valete, too, is playing a most crucial role.
Consciously or not, Brazil is preparing for the end of its post-1988 political model. The Nova República is dissolving, its legitimacy evaporating into thin air as the youth grows tired of its ineptitude, its ties to organised crime, its utter inability to give Brazil the prosperity and international clout its continental dimensions demand. What comes next will not be a minor reform or a technocratic patch. It will be a new settlement, a new constitutional era, a new political algorithm built by new people–many of them, those present last weekend in São Paulo.
The tremors are real. Something big is happening on the Brazilian Right. It is time for Europe to start paying attention.
There’s Something Big Happening on the Brazilian Right
ilanwet from Pixabay
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Big things take their time in politics. A murmur under the pavement—until suddenly the ground moves. At the end of November, at the inaugural Festival do Movimento Brasil Livre, the tremor became a quake. Something big is happening on the Brazilian Right, and even its opponents felt the earth shake.
Movimento Brasil Livre, or MBL, was once dismissed as a passing youth rebellion of anti-Dilma street activists. It has, instead, revealed itself as something far more formidable: a political intelligentsia under construction, a cultural engine, a metapolitical workshop producing ideas, cadres, leaders, and ideas with a degree of dynamism that is rare anywhere in the West. It is hardly a surprise, therefore, that the event received the visit of one of the world’s most perplexing, interesting political thinkers of today: America’s Curtis Yarvin, the father of the Dark Enlightenment, also known as the Neo-Reactionary Movement (NRx).
The festival crackled with that rare electricity that accompanies the birth of something that is not merely political, but historical in its importance. Thousands of young people spilled into the auditorium, many of them encountering, for the first time, a right-wing movement that wasn’t ashamed of itself. Brazil’s New Right isn’t a mere derivative of something else; it wants to go beyond recycling used, boring liberalism in conservative disguises. Rather, here is a movement that is determined to craft a nationalism that is natively Brazilian: a political grammar aligned with the country’s cultural and civilisational instincts, not borrowed from foreign manuals. Its proposals are drawn from the history books, but inspired by the opportunities of technology and a thirst for the future.
If last year’s events hinted at this metamorphosis, this year’s festival confirmed it. The MBL, and the Partido Missão into which it has now crystallised, are no longer reformulating Brazil according to imported categories. They are reformulating Brazil according to Brazil, unashamed of the South American giant’s Catholic and Portuguese origins. If Brazil’s Right from 10 years ago, led by the likes of Jair Bolsonaro, was a purely reactive project—an amateurish, unideological movement that arose more from the urgency of replacing left-wing rule with something, anything, else—what is now happening is the birth of an intelligent, thoughtful, constructive right that doesn’t just want to replace the Establishment. It wants to govern and actually do things.
The most striking demonstration of the event’s ambition was, of course, Yarvin. Here is a figure whose controversial, heterodox, and often misunderstood ideas have inspired discussions from Silicon Valley boardrooms to dissident Right reading groups. Yarvin’s attendance was not merely symbolic, however. It was a signal that Brazilian politics is entering the global conversation no longer as a pupil, but as a peer.
What few expected was how naturally Yarvin’s idiosyncratic worldview blended with the MBL’s ongoing intellectual pivot. Once a bastion of free-market activism, the movement is now undergoing its own ideological mutation, recognising that the liberal operating system is insufficient for a country of Brazil’s scale, complexity, civilisational roots, and destiny. Unlike the atomised individualism of the now decaying liberal right, the new Brazilian right is learning to read Brazil’s own, unique political culture inherited from the Portuguese Empire and proposing that vast geopolitical and historical space as Brazil’s manifest destiny, Lusitânia Global. The movement is unashamedly post-liberal and is taking a page out of the Bukele book to offer tens of millions of young men a national project that can snatch the country away from the swamp of corruption, crime, and decay it has been in for decades. They are not shy about saying loud and clear that their Brazil will wage war on the drug gangs, that it will do so without quarter, and that it will win. They are not shy about saying loud and clear that their Brazil will restore itself as a functioning state to finally realise its enormous potential.
The movement’s leader, Renan Santos, is an impressive individual. He’s young, energetic, and highly intelligent. He is cultured. An eager podcaster and early candidate for next year’s presidential election, he’s already polling at some 6-8%. According to a November poll, he would achieve 25% of the vote against left-wing Lula. He spoke with the clarity of someone who knows that history is accelerating and that Brazil has no time to waste. At 41, he is the candidate of millennial and zoomer Brazil—big on the internet, he is a conservative and a nationalist who knows how to speak its language. He might, indeed, be Brazil’s Bukele—or Brazil’s JD Vance.
Another of those present was Orlando Lima. Orlando is a friend and an inspiration. He leads MBL’s stunning monthly magazine, Valete, likely one of the finest publications of right-wing thought in the world today. Valete is in itself symptomatic of the miraculous outburst of energy and ideas taking hold of Brazil: at a time print magazines of culture and ideas are becoming rarer and rarer, Valete sells 10,000 each month. It discusses everything that matters, from good books to whatever is big in contemporary political philosophy, history, geopolitics, and aesthetics. If Brazil gets its act together, it will be through a cultural revolution in which Valete, too, is playing a most crucial role.
Consciously or not, Brazil is preparing for the end of its post-1988 political model. The Nova República is dissolving, its legitimacy evaporating into thin air as the youth grows tired of its ineptitude, its ties to organised crime, its utter inability to give Brazil the prosperity and international clout its continental dimensions demand. What comes next will not be a minor reform or a technocratic patch. It will be a new settlement, a new constitutional era, a new political algorithm built by new people–many of them, those present last weekend in São Paulo.
The tremors are real. Something big is happening on the Brazilian Right. It is time for Europe to start paying attention.
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