Today’s Brazilians have values very close to those of three decades ago.
This is what political scientist and founding partner of Quaest, Felipe Nunes, argues in “Brasil no Espelho”, a new book to be launched by Globo Livros. The work brings together results from the largest survey ever carried out by the institute on ideas and beliefs, with almost 10 thousand interviews carried out in November and December 2023.
When comparing these data with long-term international series, Nunes uses a map of conceptions: on the one hand, the importance of religion, family and tradition; on the other, the appreciation of well-being, trust and tolerance.
Brazil advanced in this second direction in the 2000s, but, with the crises of the last decade, it returned to prioritizing the first. “Very rapid changes made people close in on themselves again,” he told Sheet.
In the last ten years, events such as , the arrest of the then former president (), the World Cup, the growth of the right and evangelicals, the universalization of social networks, economic crises and the Covid-19 pandemic have accumulated.
The routine has become almost a synonym of insecurity and has led Brazilians to more conservative responses, according to Nunes.
“In times of abundance, with physical and emotional security, societies tend to free themselves from traditions and allow themselves to be more self-expressive. In our case, everything we had achieved until 2013, 2014, ended up going back.”
The work also uses values as a basis to classify Brazilians into nine identity segments, defined by the combination of beliefs and interests.
Citizens are grouped according to the probability of belonging more to a group. They therefore have overlapping conceptions, but specific questions have greater weight than others in the definition.
Christian conservatives emerge as the largest segment, with 27%. It is made up mainly of evangelicals and practicing Catholics, who voted en masse for () in the last two elections and who systematically distance themselves from the PT.
It is the clipping that Nunes uses to contextualize Lula’s choice of Jorge Messias, an evangelical, for the (Federal Supreme Court), even with the president under pressure to nominate a black woman for the position.
The political loyalty of the Union’s attorney general was the preponderant factor in the option. However, says the political scientist, this is a movement that goes beyond the calculation of positions and votes. Messias, he states, is at the same time an individual construction by Lula and “a collective construction of the evangelical church.”
Only 3% of Brazilians fall into the extreme right, according to the work. Those in this group defended in interviews the idea that an authoritarian regime can be better than democracy.
“If there’s one thing this book has to do, it’s help us give the right name to this thing called the extreme right,” says Nunes. There are 6 million Brazilians. “It’s a lot of people, but compared to the total number of Brazilians, it’s not much.”
The majority of Bolsonarista voters, often treated as synonymous with the extreme right, would belong to different groups. Artificially inflating the size of this most radical nucleus, he claims, makes the public debate more polarized than reality.
For the researcher, there is a significant contingent of non-extremist conservative voters being neglected, which produces strategic errors on the part of the political class.
The founder of Quaest calls “Doria’s dilemma” the fear that politicians have of repeating the trajectory of the former governor of São Paulo — who, elected in the “Bolsodoria” double in 2018, lost relevance after breaking with Bolsonaro during the pandemic.
This stigma is now more of a phantom than a concrete risk, according to Nunes, with the former president imprisoned and the influence of his family no longer being unanimous even within the right.
“Leaving Bolsonarism reduces the chances of going to the second round of elections. On the other hand, staying with Bolsonarism almost guarantees going to the second round, but, at the same time, it almost guarantees losing it”, he says.
The mistake is repeated in the field of public security. The book describes a country that demands harsher penalties in response to violence, but rejects the agenda of civilian weapons. Insisting on this agenda, which mobilizes mainly the extreme right and part of the agricultural sector, would have been a mistake for Bolsonarism.
“The country does not want to arm the population,” he says.
Speeches that extol one’s own merit and the idea that the State does not guarantee social mobility sound good to the ears of the average Brazilian and cut across different social groups, says the work. The association is inevitable.
The influencer and businessman, candidate for mayor of São Paulo by PRTB in 2024, finished the first round with 28% of the votes, supported by a platform with a warlike tone, a digital empire of cuts and symbols dear to this imagination: defense of the patriarchal family, a life governed by God and the free market. He sold himself as the only one to face “the system”.
“When I was writing the book, I saw Marçal and said: what the Brazilian is telling me in the data, Marçal is understanding now”, says Nunes.
“Brazil in the Mirror” shows that the combination of religion as guidance, family as support, appreciation of individual effort and tiredness with living conditions creates fertile ground for this type of political leadership to thrive.
HAS Sheet Marçal, sentenced to ineligibility by the Electoral Court, in 2026. Nunes assesses that this space remains open and can be occupied on a national scale.
