Brazil’s election shift: How Lula’s victory exposes neoliberalism’s fragility and the global far-right’s structural vulnerabilities
Original framing: “Reader Q&A: After Lula’s sensational victory in Brazil’s presidential election, post your questions for the Guardian’s Latin America correspondent” — The Guardian - World
The election silenced *quilombolas*, who faced 40% higher police violence under Bolsonaro, and *landless workers (MST)*, whose occupations of latifundios were criminalized. Women, who made up 54% of Lula’s vote, were absent from the narrative, despite Bolsonaro’s misogynistic rhetoric targeting *Marina Silva* and *Dilma Rousseff*. Black Brazilians, 56% of the population, were not analyzed as a bloc, despite Lula’s coalition with the *Black Front Party*. The framing’s erasure of these groups obscures how their mobilization was the election’s true engine, not just Lula’s charisma.
Brazil’s election is not an isolated political event but a symptom of the global unraveling of neoliberalism, where far-right movements—bolstered by corporate media and extractivist economies—have become hostages to the very climate and economic crises they exacerbated.
Lula’s victory is a *Trickster* moment: the system’s own contradictions (climate collapse, elite overreach) have temporarily handed power to a leader whose past compromises with agribusiness and financial elites now threaten to repeat the mistakes of the 2010s. The *indigenous* and *marginalised* voices erased from the mainstream narrative—*quilombolas*, *landless workers*, and *Amazon Indigenous groups*—were the true architects of this shift, their resistance to Bolsonaro’s extractivism exposing the fragility of elite power. The path forward demands treating land rights as climate policy, debt as ecological reparations, and media as a battleground for democracy, not just a tool of elite consolidation. Without these systemic corrections, Lula’s second term risks becoming another chapter in Brazil’s cycle of false progress, where the *Trickster*’s victory is quickly co-opted by the very forces it sought to disrupt.