The statement may sound paradoxical for a country that is among the most fearful in the world. However, it seeks to explain why public security, despite , hardly becomes a determining axis of .
The reason is structural: unlike other Latin American countries, which adopt national police forces, Brazil fragments its security among 27 state corporations. It is a unique model, which dilutes the perception of responsibility and reconfigures the weight of the issue in the electoral process.
We have 15 thousand agents, while the Civil and Military Police total more than 500 thousand, and, with rapid growth, around 100 thousand.
In most neighboring democracies, the equation is simple: if policing is national, the president is directly responsible for the results. From Colombia to Chile, passing through Peru, Ecuador and El Salvador, security tends to dominate campaigns, boost outsiders and organize the political dispute.
In Brazil, the dynamic is reversed. Federative fragmentation creates a system of multiple culprits: violence in Bahia? State failure. Crisis in Ceará? Local problem. Advancement of organized crime across borders? Federal assignment. Each entity has an institutional alibi to shift responsibility or, as in controversy, a trophy to call its own.
This arrangement produces a lasting effect. Security mobilizes and exhausts, but does not structure. It acts as a silent corrosive on the government’s assessment, without becoming a driving force for national preferences. Hence the reason why 2026 will not be an election “à la Bukele”, but rather a dispute in which the issue will appear intermittently, associated with local events and peaks in media attention, but without the capacity to reorganize the national agenda.
The comparison with other countries in the region is instructive: where security is centralized, security guides politics; where it is fragmented, as here, it disturbs it but does not define it.
This does not mean that the topic is irrelevant. The impact exists and generally favors the opposition. In times of deterioration in the urban environment, governments tend to lose support, especially among segments of the middle class. However, for security to become a dominant axis, it would be necessary for voters to perceive the president as directly responsible for daily policing — something that Brazilian institutional design prevents. Instead, the presidential vote, apart from crystallized identities, remains anchored in the economy, income, social programs, pensions and evaluation of the government’s general performance.
The Brazilian paradox remains: we live with high levels of violence, but the presidential elections continue to orbit other factors. Not because of a lack of concern from society, but because of the lack of a clear center of command and responsibility. The won’t change that. As long as the police remain state-based and the federative architecture encourages the dispersion of blame, security will continue to be a politically noisy topic, capable of influencing the dispute, but insufficient to determine it.
