The dark horse presidential candidate Brazil’s authorities are trying to ban | World News

Editor’s note (August 31st): Shortly after this piece was published, José Antonio Dias Toffoli, a Supreme Court justice who also sits on Brazil’s Electoral Court, suspended the candidacy of Renan Santos. Mr Toffoli said that the Santos campaign had failed to register its social-media handles correctly. The Santos campaign said it would appeal.RENAN SANTOS is cocksure. “I am the greatest orator of my generation in the world,” he claims in his small office, only half-jokingly. He has boasted of learning fluent Swedish in order to chat up girls on an annual pilgrimage to Europe that his friends have dubbed “the blondes tour”. He writes off his rivals as “infantile”, “pathetic” and “mediocre”. Yet for all his bragging, Mr Santos is no charlatan. The 42-year-old is running to become Brazil’s next president on a wonkish platform that sketches out a bold vision for the country.Mr Santos’s rise has parallels with that of Javier Milei, Argentina’s firebrand president. Like Mr Milei, he is obsessed with free-market economics. In 2014 he founded a political group, the Free Brazil Movement (MBL by its Portuguese acronym), to advocate for a minimal state in a country with a long tradition of big government. Like Mr Milei, Mr Santos mixes his dogmatism with rock music, fronting a band that extols the virtues of competition and low taxes. (Mr Santos claims to be the superior musician. His aide says both politicians’ bands are “equally awful”.)Poll tracker: Who will be Brazil’s next president? And like Mr Milei, Mr Santos is a political outsider. Name recognition came after he organised mass protests against the government of Dilma Rousseff, a former left-wing president who was impeached by a hostile Congress in 2016. Only in 2025 did MBL register as a political party, under the name Missão (Mission). It has one Congressman in office, Kim Kataguiri. As well as Mr Santos’s presidential run, the party is fielding 57 candidates for Congress in Brazil’s general elections in October.Walking into the Missão offices reveals a project focused on cultural revolution as much as political power. The entrance is littered with copies of Revista Valete, the movement’s magazine, which has run features on Elon Musk and critiques of Judith Butler, a queer feminist philosopher. The mood is more start-up than party headquarters. Programmers type code furiously behind large black screens, while down the corridor is a studio to shoot snappy videos for dissemination to the movement’s 4m online followers.The focus on media is a response to “wokeism”, says Mr Santos. The rise of cancel culture “required responses that classic liberalism didn’t have to offer”, he explains. Many millennials like him, he says, went from supporting gay marriage and legalising drugs to “being labelled a fascist because you don’t want to use certain pronouns…or are expected to accept that a child can change their gender”.But the cultural battle “is not our core identity”. Mr Santos distances MBL from Donald Trump’s MAGA movement. Economics remains its most important cause. The movement was spurred towards new thinking by “the failure of a childish form of economic liberalism” influenced by American libertarians, he says. “It is naive to think that if you remove the state from all activities and privatise everything, things will fix themselves. The state must be present in many areas, especially in a country like Brazil,” with gaping inequalities. The party now believes that companies like Petrobras, Brazil’s state-owned oil firm, should not be privatised, but that the government’s influence should be reduced. Mr Kataguiri, who oversees the party’s economic proposals, calls this “pragmatic, non-dogmatic liberalism”.Mr Santos wants to turn Brazil into a great power within 30 years through deep structural reforms. The transformation is sketched out in the party’s “Yellow Book”, a 350-page manifesto which applies lessons for Brazil from successful public policies around the world. Mr Kataguiri travelled to Denmark to study its patenting laws and to Japan to learn about its system of evaluating local governments based on performance indicators. Germany’s apprenticeship system, China’s infrastructure spending and the United States’ light-touch approach to AI regulation all feature. “We definitely don’t want the EU model, which is more obsessed with controlling and regulating than with developing its own AI,” says Mr Kataguiri.The result is a policy programme packed with new ideas for Brazil. Missão proposes digitising patient health-care records and using AI to improve triage and reduce queues at public hospitals. A new law would create performance targets for local politicians on education, health care and access to sewerage. Officials who hit targets would have access to more money from the federal budget; persistent underperformers would be threatened with a temporary prohibition from holding office. AI would be used to recommend cuts to public jobs. “There is no limit to how AI can be used to improve administrative efficiency,” gushes Mr Kataguiri.Mr Santos is frank about the need for spending cuts. Over 90% of Brazil’s federal budget is tied up in mandatory spending, particularly pensions. The share is growing relentlessly as the minimum wage is indexed to pensions and several welfare benefits. By 2029 discretionary spending is expected to comprise an unworkable 0.1% of the budget. Missão proposes de-indexing the minimum wage and tying spending on education and health care to inflation rather than revenues, which are growing fast. Cuts to lavish civil-servant salaries would follow, and a pension reform. All this, hopes Mr Kataguiri, would make room for growth-boosting infrastructure investments, which he wants to double to 4% of GDP.When it comes to security, populism trumps liberalism. One of Mr Santos’s main slogans is “Prendeu, Matou” (“Catch, Kill”), referring to how he believes police should treat criminals. He frequently praises Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s strongman, who has reduced crime by locking up 2% of the country’s adult population and trampling over democracy. (Mr Santos claims to be “Bukele in style, Milei in substance”.) He promises to call states of emergency and allow a “bloodbath” against gangs. The Yellow Book extols “the doctrine of the enemy”, an obscure criminal theory which argues that criminals do not deserve civil rights. In practice it could be easily abused by an executive bent on repressing its political enemies.Mr Santos is polling in the single digits, but his willingness to propose bold ideas is winning him prominent backers on the Brazilian right. Many are disheartened by the candidacy of Flávio Bolsonaro, a son of Jair Bolsonaro, a populist former president who is serving a 27-year sentence for attempting a coup after losing his re-election bid in 2022. “Flávio is extremely weak,” says one supporter. “Renan is well-read, informed and can speak about lots of different subjects. Flávio doesn’t know anything.” Mr Santos attacks the Bolsonaro family for being intellectually mediocre and corrupt.Mr Santos will struggle to win over women. He has praised manosphere bloggers. One of his closest allies, Arthur do Val, with whom he travelled to Ukraine in 2022, has said that Ukrainian refugees were “easy because they’re poor.” On that trip, Mr Val boasted that Mr Santos had given him tips on how to pick up women. “You’ve got to go to ordinary towns…these poorer towns are the best.”Most Brazilians still have not heard of Mr Santos. He hopes that the campaign period, which started on August 16th, will change that. Yet the depth of Brazil’s political polarisation and the power of established parties’ political machines makes it hard for outsiders like him to gather votes. But even if Mr Santos does not win this time, he has given the Brazilian right something extremely valuable: an alternative to bolsonarismo.