Survey analyzed 6 presidential elections and found that aggregate voting was below 4% in 4 elections
From 2002 to 2022, Brazil had 32 presidential candidacies from outsiders, according to a survey released by ReDem in March. Outsiders These are names that ran, sometimes more than once, outside the typical route of major parties and that mobilized a discourse contrary to the current political order or the established government. Here is it (PDF – 384 KB).
The idea that these candidacies antiestablishment represent a force in Brazilian politics and has been disseminated in press coverage, among political commentators and in academic analyzes as a sign of change in the pattern of presidential disputes in the country.
However, before considering the emergence or electoral growth of an outsider candidate as a symptom of a crisis in our political system, it is necessary to analyze the historical pattern of these candidacies. That’s what we did. When analyzing voting between 2002 and 2022, we discovered that outsiders are not a sporadic event, nor are they a sign of profound change in the national political-electoral landscape. On the contrary, they are a pattern.
Over the 20 years studied, we found great fluctuations in this type of applications, resulting from specific economic conditions. But some isolated peaks began to be read as a trend. Confusing specific events with an upward trajectory is the main mistake of the analyzes that project a crisis of permanent representation from 2013 onwards.
“Pulp politics”
The American political scientist Glenn Richardson Jr. showed in “Pulp Politics: How Political Advertising Tells the Stories of American Politics (2008)” that North American electoral propaganda used the audiovisual conventions of popular culture to narrate politics in a simple way. In this model, campaigns transform opponents into horror, threatening villains, while candidates are presented as thriller heroes, protagonists capable of restoring order. Richardson called this phenomenon pulp politics.
The argument applies beyond the United States. When outsider candidates mobilize a language of rupture with the system, explore corruption scandals and present the election as a moment of collective salvation, they begin to operate within the same narrative grammar. The dispute is no longer presented as part of the routine functioning of institutions and takes the form of an extraordinary event, marked by the confrontation between opponents portrayed as criminals and candidates who present themselves as honest and trustworthy.
This framework, characteristic of pulp politicscan produce significant electoral spikes. The problem is that it also tends to distort the subsequent interpretation of the data, transforming effects associated with a specific situation into apparent signs of a permanent structural trend.
In the Brazilian case, 2006 and 2018 are the clearest examples of this mechanism. In 2006, Heloísa Helena, a dissident expelled from the PT, channeled the left’s discontent with the government (PT) and obtained almost 7% of the valid votes.
In 2018, the phenomenon was more complex. João Amoêdo used his personal fortune and a liberal-technocratic discourse to attract voters disillusioned with both the PT and the PSDB, reaching 2.5%.
But the most emblematic case was that of (PL). He introduced himself as someone outside the “system”despite having a long institutional trajectory — 28 years of office as a federal deputy —, albeit quite obscure.
What 2018 offered was an exceptional conjunctural window: Operation Lava Jato brought the issue of corruption to the center of the political debate and delegitimized the main parties that had dominated the political scene since the 1990s. It would not be appropriate, therefore, to project the 2018 elections as destiny, but to understand them as a large and decisive event, although not cumulative.
Peak or trend?
After this event, a retrospective reading was consolidated according to which Jair Bolsonaro’s victory would have crowned the escalation of the anti-establishment vote. As if dissatisfaction with the system had accumulated over successive elections until it boiled over in this election.
The analysis we carried out of the aggregate vote of candidates classified as outsiders in the Brazilian presidential elections between 2002 and 2022, however, does not point in that direction.
This reading is appealing because it offers a unified explanation for a complex event and because it seems to speak to an international climate of contestation by established political elites and a crisis of representation. The problem is that it confuses peak with trend.
In 4 of the 6 elections in the period studied, the aggregate vote of all outsider candidates was below 4%. However, the added value changes radically depending on whether or not Bolsonaro is included. With it, the outsider vote reaches 52.5%; without it, it drops to 6.5%, a value close to the 2006 peak (7.1%).
This is why the year 2018 shapes the most recent collective perception. However, it is a particularly misleading case for inferring a “trajectory”. This is not to deny that 2018 was an inflection point, but there is a basic distinction to preserve: an extreme event is not a structural trend.
The temptation to turn a peak into an upward trajectory is precisely the mechanism by which the myth of anti-establishment escalation takes hold. The historical series suggests something else: the vote for outsiders remains low most of the time and rises significantly only at critical junctures, before retreating.
The general pattern observed is closer to what the political science literature calls “punctuated equilibrium”as defined by Baumgartner and Jones: long periods of stability interrupted by ruptures, followed by retraction.
This idea was imported from evolutionary biology: instead of slow, continuous change, there is long stability and concentrated disruption. For most of the period (2002-2022), voting for outsiders remains at low levels. After the 2018 peak, the vote outsider returned to very low levels in 2022 (0.7%), practically the same value as at the beginning of the series (0.5%).
Necessary questions
When politics is framed by the grammar of pulp politicsthe consequences appear in 2 ways. Normatively, political responses emerge designed as if the country were on an inevitable march towards anti-politics that tend to miss the target. Analytically, it makes more sense to investigate the conditions that open specific cyclical windows for vote escalation antiestablishmentand why they close quickly.
The climbing myth antiestablishment in Brazil is, in part, a statistical misreading and, in part, a dramatic political effect of 2018. The relevant question we must ask ourselves is not “why the anti-establishment vote is growing”but why does he almost always remain marginal and what exceptional conditions allow, on occasion, a candidate outsider break the electoral ceiling that the political system normally imposes.
This text was originally published by , on May 11, 2026, at 9:51 am. The content is free for republication, the source is cited, and has been adapted to the standard of Poder360.
