This article by Oscar Campora was published at Palladium Magazine on November 12, 2026.
Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our non-profit publication.
Taking over a country is not easy. The internet and social media have made it possible for individuals starting with little money or public standing to reach millions, but turning ephemeral attention into durable political energy is just as difficult as it was when Vladimir Lenin wrote What Is to Be Done in 1917. You and your friends can assemble an enormous following, fill the streets to the brim with supporters, and even help elect a president, yet real power can still elude you. To acquire power you can actually exercise—power to reform or refound a state—you need an organization whose members can dedicate their lives to accomplishing a common goal.
Political organizations need to be durable in periods of both success and failure. Once the ballots are cast and you lose, will you keep working, give up, or run away? If you want to win in the long term, you need to be able to reassess when you’ve made a mistake, to be willing to go out and evangelize even when your cause is unpopular, and to inspire your followers towards a common goal. If you’re not willing to do all of this and more, politics might not be for you. Enthusiasm is not enough.
But if, even considering the hardships and struggle involved, you do want to take over a country, then you should pay attention to Brazil. A third-world country par excellence, Brazil has become in the international imagination a byword for inequality, dysfunctional politics, and favela squalor. But though Brazil illustrates all the characteristic failures of 21st century democracies, one new Brazilian party shows a possible path forward for those who want to avoid “Brazilification” in their own countries.
Renan Santos has spent the past decade confronting the problem of building and using power. He is chairman of the Mission Party (Missão), leader of the Free Brazil Movement, and president of the magazine Valete. His recent fourth-place finish in the 2026 Brazilian presidential election was hardly an electoral triumph. Entering the contest with a public presence largely confined to viewers of his livestreams, Santos emerged ahead of two governors with more than eight years of experience and practically tied with the third-place candidate. Most importantly, his political project endured, and is already preparing for 2030 and the years beyond. Throughout over a decade of struggle, Santos and his movement demonstrate a new way of doing politics.
Party Politics Down South
In 2014, the beleaguered Brazilian middle class had coalesced around the milquetoast campaign of Aécio Neves, a former governor of the state of Minas Gerais. When Neves was defeated in that year’s election by President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, abbreviated PT) and subsequently linked to a series of corruption scandals, it was the last straw for many Brazilians who still had hope for orthodox electoral politics.
In the days following Rousseff’s reelection, Renan Santos and his brother Alexandre Santos, then young businessmen in São Paulo, began organizing an online group that would later become the Free Brazil Movement, or MBL (Movimento Brasil Livre). It started as an event page the brothers posted on Facebook in their frustration after the PT win: “Either Dilma falls, or São Paulo stops.”The Santos brothers went to sleep and woke the next morning to a massive outpouring of support from similarly angry Brazilians. A hundred thousand people signed up on the event page, and thousands joined Renan to march through the streets of São Paulo on November 1st. The protests kept increasing in size—the Free Brazil Movement had been born.
The goal of the Santos brothers and the MBL was to build a combative and authentic opposition to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s Workers’ Party, which had governed the country since 2003 and to which Rousseff belonged, and to the “Big Center” (Centrão), a diffuse bloc of non-ideological political machines that trade congressional support for access to public funds. The Free Brazil Movement’s popularity was bolstered by the course of Brazilian politics following the 2014 election: Rousseff’s second term was consumed by the end of the 2000s commodities boom and Operation Car Wash, a sprawling investigation into corruption at Brazil’s state-owned oil company Petrobras, that implicated much of the Brazilian political elite. As Operation Car Wash proceeded and Brazil’s financial markets receded, Rousseff’s popularity collapsed. The Free Brazil Movement began demonstrations calling for her impeachment.
Not content to rest on their successes in São Paulo, Renan Santos led MBL members on a march more than six hundred miles on foot to the capital in Brasília. Along the way, it rallied its supporters and built political momentum. They brought their demands to Congress and pressed legislators, camping in the Three Powers Plaza for months. In April 2016, 367 of the Chamber’s 513 deputies voted to authorize impeachment proceedings against Dilma Rousseff, and in August the Senate removed her from office.
Naively, MBL thought things would only get better once the Workers’ Party was ousted from the presidency. They became complacent, a mistake that would have serious consequences.
In the chaotic aftermath of Rousseff’s impeachment, Jair Bolsonaro, a longtime congressman and former military man with little legislative accomplishment, saw an opportunity to brand himself as the leader of Brazil’s incipient right wing. He became the vessel for popular exhaustion with the political establishment. In the 2018 presidential election, buoyed by his Trumpian charisma and his lucky survival of an assassination attempt, Bolsonaro won in a landslide.
The Free Brazil Movement had supported Bolsonaro in the second round, but its relationship with the new president soon deteriorated. Throughout his presidency, Bolsonaro aligned himself with the same deeply corrupt Centrão politicians that Dilma had depended on. These figures, in turn, asked for favors. Funneling money through obscure budget allocation backchannels, Bolsonaro embarked on a massive, sophisticated vote-buying operation that kept him in power and the Big Center insulated from public scrutiny.
In Brazil, this phenomenon is nothing new. Since Brazil’s redemocratization and the adoption of its 1988 constitution, its Chamber of Deputies and Senate have been controlled by the Centrão. This bloc thrives in an electoral system where mayors deliver votes in their municipalities in return for political and financial favors from congressmen in Brasília.
Consider this: a mayor in a poor town in Maranhão or Bahia has a brother-in-law who owns multiple local radio stations and a construction company. During election season, this mayor instructs his network to vote for a particular federal congressman or senator, guaranteeing a predictable bloc of voters in a state where margins are decided by a mere few thousand votes. In return, the congressman then sends a congressional amendment for a bridge to be built in the mayor’s town. The procurement deal for the bridge coincidentally falls to the brother-in-law’s construction company. The bridge is never completed, and the spare bricks are then given to voters. The voters use these spare bricks to build their houses, and the cycle continues for the next four years. This is politics in the Centrão: Tammany Hall à la brésilienne.
The more congressmen a party has, the more money it receives from the state to run its political campaigns. The Electoral Fund, sometimes reaching hundreds of millions of dollars, is financed through the federal budget using tax revenue. This creates a self-reinforcing loop and a political elite that is independent of private donations.
The crucial piece to this puzzle is that all these arrangements are negotiated within political parties. The fundamental unit of Brazilian democracy is the party, not the individual. Politically speaking, if you do not have a party, you do not exist. Because the bureaucratic process of creating a political party is intentionally onerous, costly, and a logistical nightmare, aspiring politicians almost always join parties that already exist. Parties receive public campaign funds in proportion to how many congressmen they have elected—you have to be plain stupid or a little crazy to even consider creating a party ex nihilo. It is simply more rational to join a big party, create your clique there, use its money, and eventually coup the incumbent party chairman.
You cannot run as an independent in Brazil. Party leaders maintain tight entry barriers against any serious threat to the establishment, and the requirements for party affiliation ensure outsiders are shut out. Bolsonaro himself was a victim of this feature of the Brazilian system. He changed parties ten times, even trying and failing to create his own party, Alliance for Brazil. In November 2021, at the end of the two-year deadline to gather signatures from voters, the Alliance had 158,317 valid signatures, falling short of the 492,000 required at the time for Alliance for Brazil to be approved as an official party.
By 2022, Bolsonaro’s tenure had left the Brazilian right in ruins. Lula was back in power and, instead of considering alternatives to Bolsonarism, the Right chose to double down on the cult of personality, protesting for the army to intervene in favor of the recently defeated incumbent. “Bolsonarismo” was popular enough that it killed any alternatives on the Right, but rejected so strongly by voters that it might never reach the 50% needed to win the presidency again. It became a house built with high floors and low ceilings.
After years of Bolsonarismo, the Free Brazil Movement had no party or power center of its own. As a political movement, it was weak and heavily dependent on the goodwill of mercenary figures from the Big Center who gatekept the party system and, through it, the Brazilian government. Bolsonaro, while still the sitting president, tried to create his own party but didn’t get far. To anyone watching from the sidelines, it seemed obvious that the Movement, so small compared to Bolsonaro’s following, would never succeed. They had already hit rock bottom—what did MBL have to lose?
Political Action Requires Institutional Independence
In 2023, the MBL announced that it would begin the process of creating its own party: Missão, or the Mission Party. Under the onerous federal regulatory standards, they needed to collect 547,000 valid signatures, distributed across at least nine states and meeting minimum quotas in each. Since many signatures are typically rejected during validation due to errors or duplications, they had to be very sure that the paperwork survived scrutiny and that they collected far more than the minimum.
While the party formation work proceeded, the MBL received another painful reminder of its impotence. In 2024, the movement’s member Kim Kataguiri attempted to run for mayor of São Paulo, but the party he’d affiliated himself with, União Brasil, chose instead to support the incumbent Ricardo Nunes. The message was obvious. Without a party, you are something between a hostage and a slave.
Partly motivated by this episode, the Mission Party’s organizers made the registration process considerably more methodical. Victor Couto, the party’s secretary-general, developed custom software to manage the signature notarization process. Every signature collector had to register and upload their files by day’s end. The best-performing volunteers would climb the rankings and earn rewards. By digitizing and heavily gamifying the process, they made the volunteers’ work much easier and created incentives for new ones to join the effort. The best of them were fast-tracked into roles within the nascent party.
By the end of its registration period, the Free Brazil Movement had collected five times more notarized signatures than Bolsonaro ever did.
The signature registration drive was a microcosm of the organizational efficiency built into the structure of the party apparatus. The Mission Party crafted its entire political organization from scratch as a closed system. All the elements necessary to sustain a political movement, from the production of ideas and theory to activist mobilization and party candidacies, originate from and are directed by the executive core. Unlike its counterparts in the United States, the Mission Party believes that outsourcing any of these functions, even when doing so would be easier and considerably faster, leads to deradicalization and allows the movement’s agenda to lose its focused, direct character.
Missão is simultaneously a think tank, an activist movement, a magazine, a social media company, and a government entity. It is a “vertically integrated political party.” The Yellow Book, the Free Brazil Movement, Valete Magazine, Valete Plus, and the Mission Party together form a composite structure that is hard to conceptualize in any other Western country. Imagine if the Economic Policy Institute, Democratic Socialists of America, Politico, Substack, and the Democratic National Committee were all under the management of a single executive.
The Yellow Book is the “brain” of the entire operation. A 360-page governing program for 2026, the Yellow Book drew on six initial research volumes produced by more than 200 volunteers. One of the most significant programs therein is the Managerial Responsibility Law, which directly tackles the decentralized patronage networks that give rise to the Big Center. The proposed law regulates the disbursements of the federal Electoral Fund, which would henceforth be distributed according to the quality of each party’s mayoral administration. The variable to be maximized by each party would thus no longer be the number of congressmen, as it is under the current system, but rather improvement in municipal key performance indicators (KPIs). Mayors will be required to meet specific goals to improve electrical infrastructure, sanitation, education, and other KPIs set by a Central Bank-like committee of independent unelected professional civil servants. Mayors who fail to meet these criteria will have their federal funding taken away and incur heavy fines for their parties.
In the Yellow Book, the Mission Party also suggests that mayors should have the option to call on a group of federal commissioners who would act as “Forward Deployed Engineers” to help them improve their KPI ratings. Better education, sanitation, and infrastructure would thus lead to the development of a middle class whose votes cannot be bought with bricks from an unfinished bridge. This reform would cause the parasitic formations of the Centrão to be fully aligned with their own destruction.
The Centrão is not the only adversary in the sights of the Mission Party: In the Yellow Book, Santos and his party argue that cartels should be judged not as citizens, but as terrorists. Brazilian criminal organizations are no longer mere gangs, but large conglomerates that move billions of dollars and act as sovereigns of their own fiefs. A program of favela pacification would take place alongside a “de-cartelization” campaign that would include erasing gang symbolism, banning pro-cartel music, and humiliating narco bosses, in an echo of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s anti-gang policies. The political program ultimately aims to physically destroy the favelas and develop planned neighborhoods with proper sewage systems, infrastructure, schools, and housing.
Economic success in developing nations does not happen by accident, or by the action of an invisible hand. The agribusiness sector is central to Brazil’s future prosperity, and the Mission Party proposes that the Brazilian state take on an active developmentalist role. Through the work of the state-owned Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA), the once-barren Cerrado region has been converted into a distributed network of high-tech operations, with farms run by satellite-guided tractors and genetically engineered crops adapted specifically to tropical conditions, such as tropical wheat developed in the wake of the Ukraine war. The success of this R&D-fueled terraforming effort is difficult to overstate. Agribusiness exports reached $164 billion in 2024, with China and Saudi Arabia now significantly relying on Brazil for their soy and poultry imports.
The Mission Party intends to play to this strength by further modernizing the sector. Through investment in EMBRAPA’s research capabilities and a substantial expansion of Brazil’s practically nonexistent inland railway network, the Yellow Book proposes to integrate supply chains from the seed in the ground to the port where the cargo is loaded. Furthermore, by leveraging its large domestic farming consumer market, they intend to scale production to more complex products, such as harvesting machines and fertilizers, and thus into more sophisticated economies such as chemical processing and robotics. More ambitiously, the Mission Party aims at the creation of Special Economic Zones in strategically located cities, following the example of Shenzhen in the 1980s. In parallel with this industrialization of the agricultural sector, the Party intends to use similar logistical optimizations to further reduce the cost of production in rare earths mining and processing.
Any governing project requires skilled personnel to not only develop policy, as in the Yellow Book, but also to take power and to execute the political program. The Free Brazil Movement and the Mission Party didn’t wait around until they attracted members perfectly fitted to carry out their projects. Rather, they chose to form their own cadres from scratch through Academia MBL. The “Academy” takes in high-quality, motivated members and trains them for specific roles in the party apparatus, depending on their dispositions and their political ambitions. Students are divided into three phalanxes: “Spartans” staff the party organizational apparatus, “Alexandrians” research and write the policy positions and political philosophy of the party; and “Athenians” are taught rhetoric while developing their social media profiles, to prepare themselves as Mission Party candidates for electoral office.
Across the country, teams of one Spartan, one Alexandrian, and one Athenian coordinate to solve problems in their area. Along with mentorship from local party leaders, the party gives these student teams missions, ranging from publishing an article in their local newspaper, to cleaning up trash, to helping police locate criminals, to bringing a legislative proposal before their city council. It is up to the students to figure out how to do so. Many Academy students have organized demonstrations against corruption at their city councils and appeared in their local press. Through collective action, party members going through the Academy began to feel like a group, to develop bonds and loyalty, and to see themselves changing things in their towns. Those who distinguish themselves can participate in campaigns, hold legislative offices, or become one of the many contributors to Valete and the Yellow Book.
The “gamification” of political organizing becomes recursive. Give someone a position within a hierarchy, companions, work to complete, and opportunities to advance, and their engagement will bring even more prospective members. For a political project that needs people to keep working maniacally through 2030 and beyond, making that experience as enjoyable as possible is a priority. The goal is for students in the Academy to be addicted to the movement, to think about the project 24-7.
Both Free Brazil Movement and, by extension, Academia MBL echo the organizational structure of the Mission Party. Guidelines decided nationally must be followed by volunteers, and digital content production must align with the movement’s principles. Failure to meet these guidelines results in immediate expulsion, even if the member in question is an elected official or has millions of followers on Instagram. In the corrupt blocs of the Centrão, ideology hardly matters as long as a candidate can help secure federal funding. The Mission Party, in contrast, demands absolute loyalty to the party executive and to the party line. With the in-house political formation provided by the Academy, this discipline becomes an enforceable standard, one that would be impossible to hold if the Mission Party and Free Brazil Movement had to rely on outside institutions to train and form their members. To this end, party members cannot run a branch of the party or movement without first going through the Academy.
In January 2023, Renan Santos and the MBL launched Valete Magazine, giving the movement a direct channel to bypass the legacy press. Santos described Valete, the MBL, and the Mission Party as a “Holy Trinity” of their political project: “Valete, our cultural initiative, seeks to foster thought; MBL, as a movement, is the provocation, the innovation in discourse: it takes the ideas we discuss in Valete and turns them into that provocation; and Missão is the institutionalization of our political action.” Valete is already Brazil’s second-best-selling cultural publication, and brings sustained attention to topics that rarely surface in mainstream coverage, from the economic role of satellites in agribusiness to Lee Kuan Yew’s defavelization of Singapore.
The vision behind Valete was not limited to print. Under the leadership of Santos, it has transformed into a social media platform, Valete Plus, with more than 10,000 paid subscribers. Valete Plus is a proprietary crossbreed between Substack, Twitter, and YouTube. A user could move from an investigative dossier to a documentary and from there to a course on Brazilian literature, one of Renan’s livestreams, or a podcast by congressman Kim Kataguiri. The same application also hosts Academia MBL’s activities and exams, alongside dedicated chats for the Academy and individual book clubs.
Unlike the media arms of many Western political parties, Valete is not a cost center. Rather, the subscriber base of Valete brings in enough funding to help finance other aspects of the Free Brazil Movement. The incredible signature drive that allowed the creation of the Mission Party was only possible because Valete revenue helped pay for the required logistical infrastructure.
Become the Center of your World
The outcome of the election in October was not a surprise: Lula and the Partido dos Trabalhadores have mobilized a lifetime of accumulated loyalty, while Renan’s Mission Party is still building its cadres. Fourth place in one’s first election leaves a Herculean amount of work to do. But Santos’ project continues through 2030 and beyond. Its supporters have time to become experienced organizers and develop their own ideas. They will have to keep working for years when nobody outside of very niche circles is paying attention—the Brazilian Right has seen what happens when a movement gets comfortable after an apparent victory.
The key to victory in 21st century representative democracies is to not treat your political movement as just one actor within a broader network—be it “populist left” or “tech right”—but as a unitary monopoly grounded in intellectual and technological superiority. If your project is truly radical and ambitious, you cannot outsource any part of your organization.
Generate your own funding, develop your own theory, spread it through your own media channels, and mobilize your own activists. Do not dismiss any new idea, and choose your staff not for their public-sector experience but for their loyalty and alignment of vision. Train them in your own institutions, and teach them your own ideology. Most importantly, develop your own public policies and meticulously plan their implementation. If this requires money, spend it.
If you can successfully accomplish all of this, the gravitational pull created by the grandeur of the movement will naturally attract the best minds and the best personalities. Do not waste them; welcome them in the best way possible and make the “party experience” inside the organization significantly more engaging than that of other political parties. Everyone in the party needs to wake up thinking about politics.
The 20th-century Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci correctly understood that people do not dedicate their lives to politics simply because someone has presented them with well-thought-out policies. A political movement requires organic cohesion. The leadership and its members need to have a living relationship, one where political understanding and popular passion reinforce each other. The leadership must understand what moves its supporters. Supporters, in turn, must recognize their own concerns, and sometimes very intimate anxieties, in the broader context of the project, collapsing the distinction between public and private life.
Valete and Renan’s daily livestreams can be understood in this way. A listener arrives for the entertainment and gradually acquires a vocabulary, an interpretation of Brazilian politics and history, and an ambition to do something about it. “Engagement-maxxing” and gamification can be made into organizational principles. People need reasons to keep returning, useful work to perform, and opportunities to rise in the ranks. If these actions have a daily rhythm, one builds a habit not dissimilar to smoking. Someone who begins as a fan of Santos’ public YouTube videos can become a subscriber to Valete, then a student at Academia MBL, then, if successful, a member of the party leadership. Building the party of the future requires a total fusion of entertainment, political formation, ideological structure, and electoral politics.
When Lula and Bolsonaro are gone, the Mission Party will be there to pick up the pieces and build Brazil anew. Whether they will succeed or fail depends on too many variables to entertain today. What we can say for sure is that the parties that outsource will be outcompeted by parties that vertically integrate—the parties of the future.
Oscar Campora is an Argentine-Brazilian political consultant based in São Paulo.
PALLADIUM is the first magazine of the third millennium. We are non-partisan, non-profit, and on a mission to discover what the future of governance and society will look like.
Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our mission.
We thank Pardon, for underwriting our work in 2026 with their generous gift.