Brazil’s 2026 Election: How Culture Wars Reproduce Social Division

Brazil’s 2026 presidential election is widely portrayed as another contest between left and right. In this commentary, Dr. João Ferreira Dias argues that this interpretation overlooks the deeper forces shaping Brazilian politics. Rather than replacing social inequalities, culture wars moralize them, transforming disputes over race, religion, gender, education, and social mobility into competing visions of national identity. Dr. Ferreira Dias contends that both Lulism and Bolsonarism have evolved into enduring social identities sustained by negative partisanship, while culture wars function as a mechanism for reproducing political polarization across electoral cycles. The commentary offers a timely framework for understanding why Brazil’s 2026 election is unlikely to resolve the country’s profound social divisions, regardless of which candidate prevails.

By João Ferreira Dias

Four years ago, after Lula da Silva’s narrow victory over Jair Bolsonaro, I described Brazil as a country “without communicating vessels” (Ferreira Dias, 2022). Lula won the election, but he did not defeat Bolsonarism. Bolsonaro lost the presidency, but he did not lose his electorate, his cultural influence or his capacity to define the language of the Brazilian right.

The 2026 presidential election confirms that this division was not a temporary consequence of Bolsonaro’s government. Lula is again the candidate around whom the Brazilian left organizes itself, while Flávio Bolsonaro is attempting to transform his father’s political movement into a family inheritance. The candidates have partly changed, but the political and social frontier separating their respective camps remains remarkably stable.

Brazil is therefore not simply preparing to choose between competing governments. Once again, it is being asked to choose between two moral representations of the country.

Culture Wars and the Social Question

Culture wars are often described as conflicts over abortion, sexuality, gender, religion, education and national identity. Yet in Brazil they cannot be understood as a superficial distraction from economic and social problems. 

Culture wars do not replace the social question. They moralize it.

Brazil remains marked by extreme inequality, racial hierarchy, regional asymmetries and the unequal presence of the state. These divisions are older than Lulism and Bolsonarism. What contemporary political actors have done is translate them into narratives about merit, family, religion, authority and national belonging.

A dispute over access to higher education becomes a conflict over merit. Racial affirmative action becomes “reverse discrimination.” The recognition of LGBT rights becomes an attack on the traditional family. Environmental regulation becomes a conspiracy against agribusiness and national development. Secular public institutions become agents of religious persecution.

Material conflicts do not disappear. They acquire a moral language.

The political importance of this translation became particularly visible during the governments of Lula and Dilma Rousseff. The expansion of higher education, affirmative action and social policies altered the composition of institutions previously occupied disproportionately by white, middle- and upper-class Brazilians. Black, brown and lower-income students gained greater access to universities and other spaces of social recognition (Francis-Tan & Tannuri-Pianto, 2024).

For the beneficiaries, these changes represented an extension of citizenship. For some members of historically privileged groups, however, inclusion could be experienced as the loss of exclusivity. Social democratization was consequently presented as unfair advantage, ideological imposition or the destruction of merit.

It would be simplistic to argue that social inclusion caused Bolsonarism. Bolsonaro’s rise also reflected economic recession, corruption scandals, public insecurity, institutional discredit and hostility towards the political establishment (Hunter & Power, 2019). Nevertheless, his movement successfully aligned these crises with pre-existing divisions involving race, religion, gender and social status (Layton et al., 2021).

Bolsonaro did not invent Brazil’s divisions. He gave them a common grammar.

Lulism and Bolsonarism as Social Identities

Brazilian polarization can no longer be described solely as ideological distance between left- and right-wing voters. It has become affective and social. Citizens increasingly define themselves through rejection of the opposing political camp. Anti-petismo and anti-Bolsonarism operate as negative identities: voters know whom they oppose, fear and distrust, even when their own positive political commitments are less clearly defined (Areal, 2022). 

Lulism and Bolsonarism have therefore become more than electoral preferences.

For millions of Brazilians, Lula represents the memory of increasing wages, social mobility, access to consumption, higher education and recognition by a state that had historically marginalized the poor. Lula is not merely a candidate. He is the political archive of a period during which many citizens believed that their children might live better than they had.

This explains his durability. It also reveals the principal weakness of the Brazilian left. The social memory created by Lulism has not produced an institutionalized political succession. Its principal custodian remains Lula himself.

Lula’s fourth presidential campaign is therefore simultaneously evidence of political strength and proof of institutional failure. The left remains united because Lula is still present. It does not know whether it will remain united when he is gone.

Bolsonarism faces a different succession problem. It has survived Bolsonaro because it is no longer merely the relationship between one charismatic leader and his followers. It possesses parliamentary representatives, evangelical networks, digital infrastructures and a political language through which supporters interpret the world.

Within that worldview, the authentic Brazilian is Christian, productive, patriotic, supportive of the police and suspicious of universities, journalists, artists and progressive movements. Political opponents are not simply mistaken. They are portrayed as corrupt, communist, immoral or hostile to the nation.

Flávio Bolsonaro’s candidacy represents an attempt to transmit this political identity through the biological family. In a movement strongly dependent on personal authority and weakly institutionalized through parties, the family becomes the most credible mechanism of continuity.

The irony is evident. A movement that presented itself as a rebellion against Brazil’s traditional political oligarchies is attempting to establish a dynasty of its own.

A Technology of Electoral Reproduction

Culture wars have consequently become a technology of electoral reproduction. The mechanism is relatively simple. First, social transformation is represented as loss. The extension of rights, visibility or opportunities to historically marginalized groups is interpreted as the dispossession of those who previously possessed greater status.

Second, this perceived loss is attributed to an organized enemy. Feminists, Black activists, universities, journalists, environmentalists and LGBT movements are represented as components of a single progressive project.

Finally, political disagreement becomes a civilizational conflict. Every election is presented as the last opportunity to save Brazil from communism, fascism, moral collapse or authoritarianism.

This mechanism survives both victory and defeat. Electoral success confirms the righteousness of the group. Governmental failure can be attributed to hostile institutions, courts or the media. Electoral defeat becomes evidence of persecution or conspiracy.

Each camp also supplies the other with its principal justification for continuity. The left returns to Lula because it fears the populist right. The populist right returns to the Bolsonaro family because it defines itself through hostility towards Lula and the Workers’ Party.

The two camps are not democratically equivalent. Lulism’s personalism and inability to organize its succession cannot be equated with Bolsonarism’s attacks on the electoral system, nostalgia for military rule and tendency to represent political opponents as illegitimate enemies. Social polarization can be bilateral without democratic responsibility being symmetrical.

Brazil’s problem is not the existence of conflict. Democracies depend upon political disagreement. The problem begins when disagreement becomes evidence that the other half of the country does not legitimately belong to the national community.

The 2026 election will choose a president. It is less likely to resolve the division that makes this electoral confrontation possible. Once again, Brazil will vote on its future by returning to the unresolved conflicts of its past. One side offers the permanence of a leader. The other offers the foundation of a dynasty. Whoever wins may govern the country. Neither has yet demonstrated how to reconnect it.

References

Areal, J. (2022). "’Them’ without ‘us’: Negative identities and affective polarization in Brazil." Political Research Exchange, 4(1), Article 2117635. https://doi.org/10.1080/2474736X.2022.2117635

Ferreira Dias, J. (2022, November 4). "Culture wars in a fragmented Brazil: A guide to understanding what happened in the Brazilian election." European Center for Populism Studies. https://www.populismstudies.org/culture-wars-in-a-fragmented-brazil-a-guide-to-understanding-what-happened-in-brazilian-election/

Francis-Tan, A., & Tannuri-Pianto, M. (2024). "Affirmative action in Brazil: Global lessons on racial justice and the fight to reduce social inequality." Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 40(3), 642–655. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxrep/grae027

Hunter, W., & Power, T. J. (2019). "Bolsonaro and Brazil’s illiberal backlash." Journal of Democracy, 30(1), 68–82. https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2019.0005

Layton, M. L., Smith, A. E., Moseley, M. W., & Cohen, M. J. (2021). "Demographic polarization and the rise of the far right: Brazil’s 2018 presidential election." Research & Politics, 8(1), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053168021990204