Rafael Satiê, 38, released a video last month to tell his life story. He says that she alone “dismantles the entire narrative of the left in Brazil”.
In the recording, he says that he is the son of a former drug dealer raised in a Rio community by a single mother, “my princess and my queen”. He has one brother in prison and the other “lost to drug trafficking”.
Then he accepted Jesus, and everything changed. The evangelical also converted to entrepreneurship. He modeled himself on his mother, who sold pizza in Yakult in search of prosperity.
Elected councilor for -RJ in 2024, Satiê entered politics with the man who, in September, received compensation of R$1 million for racist statements made in 2021, such as having compared a black man’s curly hair to a “cockroach farm”.
The former president is a reference for this young man who claims to be a sympathizer of conservatism before becoming fashionable. “My Christian formation has always guided me to defend the family, life since its conception, freedom, order and individual responsibility”, he tells Sheet. “These principles are naturally linked to the right. Over time, I just started to express this more clearly and firmly.”
The councilor was one of the examples given by the PL leader in the Chamber, as a possible candidate for a position in 2026 — state or federal deputy. The hypothesis has symbolic voltage. In the fight for new audiences, the party began to treat diversity not as an ideological enemy, but as an electoral asset. The strategy, according to Sóstenes, is to support candidacies that combine representation and conservatism, and thus compete with the left in this debate.
Satiê’s speech sums up the spirit of the thing well. “When someone comes from a favela, like I did, and is black, the left usually tries to fit that person into a ready-made narrative. They tried to do that to me. They wanted me to present myself as a victim. But I built my life on the fear of God, work, entrepreneurship and believing in meritocracy, exactly the opposite of what they defend.”
There’s more where that came from. Before the search on Friday (19) in an investigation into the deviation of parliamentary quotas, Sóstenes cited other desired additions to this project. The first name that comes to mind is . The former funk singer was even invited to run for the Chamber for PL in the next election. For now it has declined, although affection for the legend remains.
“I think Jojo is a super interesting picture, because there are some identity cards that predict that a fat, black woman from the periphery should necessarily be a candidate aligned to the left”, says the PL leader.
“And do you know what we’re going to work on now too? Right-wing homosexuals”, Sóstenes adds. He mentions Firmino Cortada as a name with potential. The influencer from Mato Grosso do Sul, openly gay and right-wing, has already argued on a podcast that “there is no gay on the left”.
His argumentative path is this: so defenestrated by the other camp, the capitalist system would be essential for homosexuals to acquire rights, “because gay people are a public that consumes the luxury market, it is an important slice of capitalism”.
The hammer for new affiliations and candidacies has not yet been hammered, but the PL seeing diversity as an electoral treasure map does not surprise anthropologist Jacqueline Moraes Teixeira, a scholar linked to Cebrap (Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning) and Iser (Institute of Religious Studies).
She has been researching PL Mulheres since 2023, when she became president of the movement. It was around this time that “an alliance between women who began to declare themselves more directly as right-wing became very evident, based on a specific alliance between evangelicals and Catholics.”
The incursions into the discussion of gender, now from a conservative perspective, include other parties, such as the Republicans of Senator Damares Alves and the PP of Celina Leão, the vice-governor who aims to replace Ibaneis Rocha (MDB), currently a member of the Executive of the Federal District. Both evangelicals.
“I have noticed the production of a specific grammar aimed at disputing the concept of diversity”, says Teixeira. She brings a mix of topics to public debate, ranging from gender-based violence to people with disabilities — an area that Michelle, fluent in Libras, also walks through.
The anthropologist notices that PL Mulheres has boosted female affiliations in an extraordinary way. Almost 1,000% in the last two years, a feat “very linked to Michelle’s figure and her capillarity capacity”.
These are policies that do not dispense with old stalemates of conservatism. This is the case of those who declare themselves anti-feminists, as they “believe that feminist women would only fight for selective rights for women who are also feminists and that, in fact, right-wing women would be fighting for everyone”, says Teixeira.
Similar perception to that of councilor Rafael Satiê when he talks about his own trajectory. The ideological dispute here is the same: the right needs to advance on voters historically associated with the left. Women, blacks, . Minorities, in general.
“I defended my ideas even when they said that black people couldn’t think the way I thought”, says Satiê. For 2026, he says he is prepared for the mission that Bolsonaro and Valdemar Costa Neto, president of the PL, entrust to him. “If it is God’s will and theirs.”
Depending on the agenda, the reception of voters loyal to this spectrum does not always follow this openness. The announcement of influencer Sophia Barclay as a pre-candidate for deputy for Novo illustrates this tension.
She, who defines herself as “right-wing trans, was the target of transphobic attacks, such as one that said he did not recognize her as a woman. Barclay says she received “positive and negative reactions, which is absolutely normal in politics.”
“What draws the most attention is how many people try to delegitimize ideas by attacking personal identity. This says more about the attacker than about me,” she says. Nor does he see any incompatibility between being trans and conservative. “This is only paradoxical for those who believe that trans people need to think in a single way. I am a trans woman, but before that I am a citizen, worker, wife and Brazilian.”
About Nikolas Ferreira (PL-SP), who already went to Congress wearing a wig on Women’s Day to mock the idea that a trans person exists: “I consider him a young man with exemplary vision and I believe that the debate should exist in a mature way. In fact, I will soon have the opportunity to talk more with him, because I believe in dialogue as a tool to move forward, even when there are disagreements.”
