Editor’s note (August 31st): Shortly after this piece was published, José Antonio Dias Toffoli, a Supreme Court justice who also sits on Brazil’s Electoral Court, suspended the candidacy of Renan Santos.
Mr Toffoli said that the Santos campaign had failed to register its social-media handles correctly. The Santos campaign said it would appeal.
In 2014 he founded a political group, the Free Brazil Movement (MBL by its Portuguese acronym), to advocate for a minimal state in a country with a long tradition of big government. Name recognition came after he organised mass protests against the government of Dilma Rousseff, a former left-wing president who was impeached by a hostile Congress in 2016. Only in 2025 did MBL register as a political party, under the name Missão (Mission). As well as Mr Santos’s presidential run, the party is fielding 57 candidates for Congress in Brazil’s general elections in October.
Mr Santos’s rise has parallels with that of Javier Milei, Argentina’s firebrand president. Like Mr Milei, he is obsessed with free-market economics. Like Mr Milei, Mr Santos mixes his dogmatism with rock music, fronting a band that extols the virtues of competition and low taxes. (Mr Santos claims to be the superior musician. And like Mr Milei, Mr Santos is a political outsider. It has one Congressman in office, Kim Kataguiri. Walking into the Missão offices reveals a project focused on cultural revolution as much as political power. The entrance is littered with copies of Revista Valete, the movement’s magazine, which has run features on Elon Musk and critiques of Judith Butler, a queer feminist philosopher. The mood is more start-up than party headquarters. Programmers type code furiously behind large black screens, while down the corridor is a studio to shoot snappy videos for dissemination to the movement’s 4m online followers. Mr Santos distances MBL from Donald Trump’s MAGA movement. Economics remains its most important cause. “It is naive to think that if you remove the state from all activities and privatise everything, things will fix themselves. The state must be present in many areas, especially in a country like Brazil,” with gaping inequalities. The party now believes that companies like Petrobras, Brazil’s state-owned oil firm, should not be privatised, but that the government’s influence should be reduced.
His aide says both politicians’ bands are “equally awful”.) Poll tracker: Who will be Brazil’s next president? But the cultural battle “is not our core identity”. The movement was spurred towards new thinking by “the failure of a childish form of economic liberalism” influenced by American libertarians, he says. Mr Kataguiri, who oversees the party’s economic proposals, calls this “pragmatic, non-dogmatic liberalism”.
Mr Kataguiri travelled to Denmark to study its patenting laws and to Japan to learn about its system of evaluating local governments based on performance indicators. Germany’s apprenticeship system, China’s infrastructure spending and the United States’ light-touch approach to AI regulation all feature. Mr Santos is polling in the single digits, but his willingness to propose bold ideas is winning him prominent backers on the Brazilian right. “Renan is well-read, informed and can speak about lots of different subjects. Flávio doesn’t know anything. Mr Santos attacks the Bolsonaro family for being intellectually mediocre and corrupt.
Mr Santos wants to turn Brazil into a great power within 30 years through deep structural reforms. Many are disheartened by the candidacy of Flávio Bolsonaro, a son of Jair Bolsonaro, a populist former president who is serving a 27-year sentence for attempting a coup after losing his re-election bid in 2022.
The transformation is sketched out in the party’s “Yellow Book”, a 350-page manifesto which applies lessons for Brazil from successful public policies around the world. “We definitely don’t want the EU model, which is more obsessed with controlling and regulating than with developing its own AI,” says Mr Kataguiri. “Flávio is extremely weak,” says one supporter.
