The Antifeminist Paradox: Eduarda Campopiano and the Political Rewards of Reaction in Brazil

The electoral rise of Eduarda Campopiano illustrates how female political entrepreneurship, antifeminism, and cultural backlash converge in contemporary Brazil. Beyond the contradictions surrounding her public discourse, the case reveals how the radical right transforms moral confrontation into electoral capital, while reviving older narratives of national regeneration and cultural enemies. Dr. João Ferreira Dias situates Campopiano’s success within a broader transformation of right-wing politics in which women are not merely participants but active entrepreneurs of reaction. Her trajectory shows how digital visibility, antifeminist identity, welfare deservingness, and culture-war polarization can reinforce one another electorally. The case also raises a wider democratic question: how liberal institutions can empower actors who use those same freedoms to challenge pluralism, minority rights, and the legitimacy of political opponents.

By João Ferreira Dias

How does a young woman turn antifeminism into a political career? In October 2026, Eduarda Campopiano, a 23-year-old politician from Jair Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party (PL), was elected to São Paulo’s Legislative Assembly with nearly two million votes. Her political identity has been built around opposition to feminism, abortion, racial quotas, and what she describes as progressive cultural domination. Following her victory, searches about feminism surged across Brazil (UOL, 2026a). 

The paradox is evident. Campopiano exercises political freedoms historically expanded through women’s struggles while rejecting a movement associated with those achievements. Yet the contradiction is more complex than it first appears. She explicitly supports women’s suffrage, and opposing contemporary feminism does not necessarily mean opposing female political participation. The question is how antifeminism itself has become a resource for female political emancipation within the radical right.

When Reaction Becomes Political Capital

Campopiano belongs to a generation for whom political participation begins not in party organizations but in the digital marketplace of ideological confrontation. Provocation produces visibility, visibility builds an audience, and an audience can become an electorate. Her election demonstrates that the culture wars are no longer merely symbolic struggles surrounding politics. They can provide a direct route to political power.

Norris and Inglehart’s (2019) concept of cultural backlash helps explain this development. Social transformations involving gender, sexuality, religion, and identity can produce counter-movements seeking to restore familiar moral hierarchies. In Brazil, Bolsonarism has articulated these anxieties through a language combining Christianity, nationalism, anti-communism, and hostility towards progressive cultural movements (Ferreira Dias, in press).

Women are not simply passive participants in this process. Some become prominent entrepreneurs of the reaction itself. The digital environments associated with tradwife culture and pink pill discourse illustrate how traditional femininity and antifeminism can be repackaged as personal liberation. 

This produces a distinctive political inversion: emancipation becomes the instrument through which the emancipatory project is contested. The conservative woman need not remain confined to the domestic sphere she may idealize. She can become a public figure, accumulate political influence, and exercise institutional authority while advocating more traditional understandings of gender.

There is no need to assume insincerity. Conservative women may genuinely regard feminism as incompatible with their beliefs. Nevertheless, the political marketplace rewards those who transform cultural rejection into an identifiable public persona. What matters is less whether an activist believes her own discourse than how that discourse functions politically. 

The Moral Boundaries of Social Protection

A second controversy surrounding Campopiano reveals a related contradiction. In October 2026, Brazilian media reported that her mother had received the Benefício de Prestação Continuada (BPC), a public assistance benefit, since 2019. Campopiano has meanwhile criticized social assistance policies (Folha de S. Paulo, 2026).

The available evidence does not establish improper receipt of the benefit, and having a relative who depends on public assistance does not prevent legitimate criticism of welfare programmes. The political significance lies in the tension between the private need for social protection and public narratives that morally distinguish deserving from undeserving beneficiaries. 

Radical-right politics does not necessarily reject the welfare state. It often seeks to redefine the moral boundaries of solidarity. Protection may be legitimate for those considered hardworking, respectable, or culturally deserving, while other beneficiaries are portrayed as dependent or privileged. 

The same political grammar operates across apparently different questions. In debates about gender, family, immigration, or welfare, complex institutional problems become conflicts between morally legitimate and illegitimate groups. Political belonging increasingly depends on identification with the supposedly virtuous side.

This is particularly effective in societies experiencing insecurity and distrust. Rather than explaining structural difficulties, the narrative identifies groups whose alleged conduct or values prevent national recovery.

A New Generation, an Old Political Grammar

Brazil has encountered versions of this political language before. In 1964, conservative women’s organizations played an important role in mobilizations against João Goulart, particularly the Marcha da Família com Deus pela Liberdade (Cordeiro, 2021). Appeals to family, Christianity, national salvation, and anti-communism helped create a climate favorable to military intervention. 

Contemporary Bolsonarism is not a repetition of 1964, nor does every conservative movement belong to the fascist tradition. Nevertheless, the recurrence of national regeneration, moral purification, and the identification of internal enemies invites historical comparison (Stanley, 2020).

The language of cultural restoration becomes especially troubling when political opponents cease to be treated as legitimate competitors and are instead represented as threats to the nation’s moral existence. This is where conservatism can move towards illiberalism. The distinction matters: defending traditional values is compatible with liberal democracy; denying the political legitimacy of those who reject them is not. 

Campopiano’s election therefore represents something larger than the success of an antifeminist influencer. She belongs to a growing category of ideological representatives whose electoral appeal is organized around national cultural conflicts rather than territorial constituencies. Reporting on the 2026 São Paulo elections identified a substantial increase in these so-called deputados de opinião (UOL, 2026b).

Such representatives are democratically elected. Yet when political careers depend upon permanent confrontation, compromise can appear as betrayal and institutional restraint as weakness. The radical right has discovered that it does not need to exclude women from political power to defend traditional gender hierarchies. Women themselves can become some of the most effective representatives of that project.

The central question is consequently not whether Campopiano is personally contradictory, politically ambitious, or ideologically sincere. It is how a political environment has emerged in which antifeminism, moral polarization, and cultural antagonism can generate extraordinary electoral rewards.

Brazil’s challenge is not to prevent conservative women from exercising democratic rights. It is to preserve a political order in which the exercise of those rights does not become a mandate to delegitimize the rights and freedoms of others.The paradox of contemporary reaction may be precisely this: liberal democracy provides the opportunities through which some of its most determined cultural adversaries acquire power.

References

Cordeiro, J. M. (2021). “A Marcha da Família com Deus pela Liberdade em São Paulo: direitas, participação política e golpe no Brasil, 1964.” Revista de História (São Paulo), (180), a01720.

Ferreira Dias, J. (in press). “The struggle for Brazil’s soul: Culture wars and the fight for hegemony.” In: C. Royer (Ed.), Culture wars from a global perspective: Mountain or molehill? Routledge.

Folha de S. Paulo. (2026, October 10). Crítica de programas de assistência, Eduarda Campopiano tem mãe que recebe benefício.

Norris, P. & Inglehart, R. (2019). Cultural backlash: Trump, Brexit, and authoritarian populism. Cambridge University Press.

Stanley, J. (2020). How fascism works: The politics of us and them. Random House Trade Paperbacks.

UOL. (2026a, October 6). Após eleição de Campopiano, buscas sobre feminismo atingem maior patamar desde 2023.

UOL. (2026b, October 11). ‘Deputados de opinião’ crescem 48% na Alesp e regiões ficam sem parlamentar.