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Brazil, 2030: the anatomy of a foretold hell
Editorial Board ·
What is at stake is not merely a presidential election. It is the nature of the Brazilian state, its relationship with its citizens, the distribution of its responsibilities, and the fate of the institutions that should protect society against abuses of power itself.
Flávio Bolsonaro’s government platform does not simply offer an administrative alternative to the current federal administration. Examined together, its proposals outline a much deeper transformation: shrinking public structures, loosening labor regulations, transferring social responsibilities to individuals and families, militarizing part of the education system, and extraordinarily expanding the state’s instruments of surveillance and repression.
The promise is prosperity, efficiency, and freedom. The proposed architecture, however, points toward a state progressively less committed to the population’s economic and social protection and increasingly powerful in its ability to discipline, monitor, and punish it.
We do not need to predict the future to demonstrate the problem. We need only examine the mechanisms announced, compare them with known experiences, and trace the logical progression of their effects, including the conditions necessary for them to work as campaign promises suggest.
The exercise proposed in this article is to assume that Flávio Bolsonaro wins the election, secures parliamentary support, and manages to implement the main elements of his platform between 2027 and 2030. What would change is not merely the composition of the government, but the balance between social protection, individual freedom, economic power, and state authority.
It is within that balance that a democracy sustains itself—or begins to disappear.
1. The Ministry of Prosperity and poverty turned into a business venture
The campaign proposed creating a Ministry of Prosperity, bringing together social assistance, skills training, and support for entrepreneurship. It also announced a two-year transition rule related to Bolsa Família, subsequently clarified as a protection mechanism for beneficiaries whose incomes rise, rather than the automatic termination of the program after that period.
The distinction is necessary, but it does not settle the debate. The problem lies in presenting the transition to economic self-sufficiency as an administrative operation, without sufficiently demonstrating the material conditions necessary for it to happen.
Small entrepreneurs need consumers, capital, a market, infrastructure, appropriate credit, and the ability to withstand periods of insufficient revenue. None of these conditions emerges automatically because the government has decided to encourage people to start businesses. Financing an economic activity does not eliminate the risk of failure either; it merely adds a new financial obligation to the problem of income.
If the state begins treating entrepreneurship as the primary solution to social vulnerability, it must demonstrate how it will prevent already vulnerable families from taking on risks they cannot afford to bear. Otherwise, public protection begins to give way to individual responsibility, shifting onto citizens the burden of overcoming economic circumstances that frequently lie beyond their ability to change.
Success cannot be measured simply by the number of families that stop receiving social transfers, but by how many actually achieve sufficient income, financial stability, and lasting conditions for a secure life.
Reducing poverty administratively does not necessarily mean overcoming it. And turning poor people into entrepreneurs does not eliminate the economic structures that made them poor.
2. The SUS does not need to become Albert Einstein. It needs funding.
The promise to bring the SUS, Brazil’s public health system, closer to the quality standards of Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein was accompanied by proposals for integrated electronic health records, telemedicine, and service modernization. The rhetoric suggests a major technological transformation, but a substantial share of the mechanisms announced already forms part of Brazilian public policy.
The National Health Data Network and Meu SUS Digital are developing mechanisms for sharing clinical information and making systems interoperable. Curitiba offers another important example with Saúde Já, a system that brings together access to patient information, appointments, results, and the tracking of requests. Supplementary participation by private providers is also part of the SUS’s constitutional model, subject to the applicable legal conditions.
None of this means that integration is complete or that services function adequately in every municipality. It means that the real challenge is not to invent an entirely new structure, but to improve and fund the existing system.
An electronic health record can indicate that a patient needs a specialist, but it does not create an available appointment. Telemedicine can extend the reach of certain types of care, but it does not replace every in-person procedure. Artificial intelligence can assist diagnoses and administrative decisions, but it does not build hospitals, hire medical teams, or perform surgeries by budgetary decree.
If technological modernization is not accompanied by sufficient funding to expand care capacity, the country will merely improve demand management without resolving the shortage of care.
The question Flávio Bolsonaro needs to answer is straightforward: how much additional funding does he intend to invest in actually expanding SUS services, where will the resources come from, and how will that expansion be reconciled with the announced fiscal adjustment?
Brazil does not merely need to know precisely how many people are waiting for treatment. It needs the material resources necessary to treat them.
3. One million cameras: Big Brother can recognize the king’s enemies, too
The platform proposes a substantial expansion of public security infrastructure, including 500,000 new prison places, five new federal prisons, and more than one million smart cameras integrated with identification systems.
The stated purpose is to strengthen the fight against crime, but the scale of this infrastructure requires examining not only its operational effectiveness, but also the new capabilities it places at the state’s disposal.
A prison entails more than the investment required to build its facilities: it demands ongoing spending on personnel, security, food, healthcare, and maintenance. Likewise, a smart camera is not simply a piece of equipment installed on the street. When integrated with facial recognition systems and databases, it enables the identification of individuals, the cross-referencing of information, and the reconstruction of their movements.
The technology that identifies a fugitive from justice can also identify demonstrators, members of social organizations, journalists, trade unionists, and political opponents. Its operation does not inherently distinguish between a criminal and a citizen legitimately exercising a constitutional right. That distinction depends on rules governing its use, the purposes for which information is accessed, and the existence of independent oversight.
Expanding this infrastructure requires independent audits, data protection, logs and traceability of searches, strict purpose limitations, and effective accountability mechanisms. Without these safeguards, the capacity to observe society grows faster than the democratic capacity to control those operating the systems.
There is therefore a question that must precede any celebration of the installation of one million cameras: who will prevent infrastructure built to identify criminals from being used to identify those who displease the ruler?
Big Brother does not need to know who is a criminal to recognize the king’s enemies.
4. Vouchers offer choice where there is a market. Militarized schools teach obedience.
The education proposal combines the expansion of civic-military schools, results-linked funding mechanisms, and vouchers for access to private services when public provision is insufficient.
The first contradiction appears in the promise of freedom of choice. International experiences, particularly those of Chile and Sweden, offer warnings about educational segregation and the difficulty of turning competition between schools into widespread improvements in learning.
The fundamental problem lies in the difference between market logic and the universal right to education. Private provision depends, among other factors, on economic viability, whereas the public obligation to provide education also extends to isolated locations, low-income communities, and students whose needs require above-average investment.
A voucher does not automatically build a school where there is no economic incentive, nor does it guarantee that a family can cover any additional amount charged by a private school. Freedom to choose depends on the existence of real alternatives, and expanding those alternatives requires planning, regulation, and funding.
The second dimension of the proposal raises an institutional question. School militarization is presented as an instrument for discipline and improved results, although the model’s actual contribution to learning needs to be demonstrated through rigorous evaluations capable of accounting for preexisting differences between the schools being compared.
Military personnel and police officers have specific professional training, which does not automatically amount to the pedagogical preparation needed to work with children and adolescents. Their assignment to school roles also requires public selection criteria, verification of their service status, pay transparency, and mechanisms capable of preventing these positions from being used to provide convenient administrative placements or political favors.
But the debate goes beyond personnel management. Democratic education should develop individuals capable of understanding rules, respecting rights, living with disagreement, and legitimately questioning authority. Incorporating military hierarchies into school life requires special care to ensure that discipline does not become political conformity and that the authority of the state government is not confused with an ideological reference point students are expected to revere.
Public schools do not exist to produce consumers of private services or disciplined subjects of whoever happens to govern. Their purpose is to educate free citizens, including citizens free to disagree with those who govern them.
5. The freedom to negotiate. Or the freedom to accept?
Loosening labor regulations is presented as a way to reduce hiring costs and expand employment opportunities. The problem lies in treating the relationship between employee and employer as though both had equivalent bargaining power.
A company can look for another professional, reorganize teams, and spread risks across different operations. Workers who depend entirely on their wages must continue paying rent, buying food, covering transportation costs, and meeting family expenses even when negotiations fail. This structural inequality explains the existence of unions and the importance of collective bargaining.
Individualizing employment relations, when not accompanied by sufficient safeguards, weakens employees’ ability to press their demands and reduces the effectiveness of collective protection mechanisms. Unions do not have to be formally abolished to be hollowed out: their loss of relevance can result from the gradual replacement of collective bargaining with individual contracts.
Reducing the costs of replacing employees also needs to be examined in terms of the incentives it introduces into business organization. If hiring and dismissing workers becomes more economically advantageous, conditions are likely to favor turnover in sectors where maintaining long-term employment relationships ceases to be a priority.
The social cost of this instability does not end on corporate balance sheets. It follows workers home, shapes consumption decisions, makes financial commitments harder to sustain, and introduces a permanent concern about the continuity of income into family life. The prospect of losing a job becomes an additional instrument of pressure on those who need to keep it at any cost.
And what about civil servants?
The platform also promises to continue administrative reform, but does not sufficiently clarify what changes it intends to make to safeguards governing entry into and continued employment in public service. The universal abolition of competitive civil service examinations and tenure protections cannot be presented as an explicitly announced measure, but the precedent of proposed constitutional amendment PEC 32/2020 makes it essential to demand answers about the intended reform’s scope.
Competitive civil service examinations are a safeguard of impartiality that limits the transformation of government jobs into instruments of political reward. Tenure protections, in turn, safeguard the independent exercise of public duties without preventing accountability or dismissal in circumstances provided for by law.
Imagine an auditor who identifies irregularities involving the governor’s allies, an environmental inspector who needs to cite a politically influential company for violations, or a civil servant responsible for reporting the diversion of public funds. If their continued employment begins to depend on the convenience of political superiors, what is compromised will be not only their job security, but the independence of the administration itself.
Making private-sector work more precarious weakens citizens’ economic autonomy. Weakening civil servants’ institutional safeguards also affects the state’s ability to resist pressure from those who temporarily govern it.
In both cases, the question is the same: who gains power when individuals become progressively more replaceable?
6. The Great Slashing: Argentina as the laboratory and Brazil as the scale
The promise to streamline state structures, eliminate at least ten ministries, reduce spending, and reform public administration requires an examination that cannot end with a presentation of the intended savings.
The disappearance of a ministry does not automatically eliminate the public responsibilities within its remit. Likewise, reducing administrative spending does not, by itself, guarantee the resources needed to finance prison expansion, technological infrastructure, essential services, and the other commitments announced in the platform itself.
Argentina’s experience under Javier Milei offers a concrete reference point for the social costs that can accompany accelerated economic adjustment, although the two countries’ circumstances and the two candidates’ policies are not identical.
In the first half of 2024, during the initial shock of Argentina’s adjustment, poverty reached 52.9% of the population surveyed by INDEC, while extreme poverty reached 18.1%. The indicators subsequently fell, but the first half of 2026 still recorded poverty at 32.3% and extreme poverty at 7.5% across the 31 urban agglomerations surveyed.
It would be wrong to ignore the recovery observed after the initial shock, just as it would be intellectually dishonest to erase the human toll of that period in the name of subsequent macroeconomic results.
The difference in scale between the two countries helps explain the problem. With approximately 214.2 million inhabitants, Brazil has a population around 4.6 times that of Argentina, estimated at 46.5 million.
If we hypothetically applied the poverty rate recorded at the height of Argentina’s 2024 shock to Brazil’s population, we would arrive at approximately 113.3 million people below the poverty line, of whom nearly 38.8 million would be below the extreme poverty line.
Even using the more recent Argentine rates, the simulation would correspond to approximately 69.2 million Brazilians in poverty and 16.1 million in extreme poverty.
This is not a statistical forecast for 2030, nor does it automatically equate distinct national methodologies. The proportional calculation demonstrates the human scale that similar rates would represent in a country as large as Brazil.
Insufficient income compromises food, housing, education, access to treatment, family planning, and prospects for social mobility. Its effects span generations and do not automatically disappear when fiscal indicators improve.
Unemployed workers have no household ministries to abolish. Children cannot suspend their nutritional needs while waiting for economic recovery, just as indebted families cannot indefinitely postpone their obligations until the benefits of a reform reach their incomes.
Argentina’s experience therefore forces us to examine what the rhetoric of the Great Slashing pushes into the background: who will bear the costs of the transition, for how long, and with what protection mechanisms?
If reductions in certain public expenditures are not offset by an actual expansion of economic activity and adequate social policies, the population will be pushed to seek greater protection precisely when the state is reorganizing its capacity to provide it.
An economic policy that balances government accounts by transferring unsustainable costs onto millions of families has not necessarily solved the fiscal problem. It may merely have shifted its cruelest dimension into workers’ homes.
7. Judicial reform and wholesale political capture: the risk of institutionalizing lawfare
The proposed reorganization of the judiciary must be examined within a broader institutional question: what mechanisms will prevent the government responsible for the reform from using the new structures to expand its own influence over the bodies charged with overseeing it?
Limiting single-judge rulings, reviewing the jurisdiction of the Federal Supreme Court, and discussing criteria for appointing justices are legitimate subjects of institutional reform. None of these measures, taken in isolation, constitutes political capture, but their implementation requires safeguards to prevent judicial independence from being replaced by the convenience of those temporarily in power.
The current controversy surrounding electoral court decisions, including those involving judges appointed during Jair Bolsonaro’s administration, reinforces the need for this discussion. Decisions favorable to a particular candidate do not automatically prove bias, but any pattern of unequal treatment demands transparency, consistent reasoning, and effective avenues for review.
The problem, however, is not limited to the Federal Supreme Court (STF) or the Superior Electoral Court (TSE). Democratic integrity also depends on the independence of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Federal Police, state police forces, intelligence agencies, internal oversight bodies, courts of accounts, the Federal Revenue Service, the Financial Activities Control Council (Coaf), the Office of the Comptroller General (CGU), and other investigative and oversight structures.
These institutions need the conditions necessary to examine wrongdoing committed even by the government responsible for appointing their leaders. When appointments, investigative priorities, the allocation of powers, budgets, and disciplinary mechanisms begin to respond predominantly to criteria of political loyalty, institutions may remain formally intact while their actual independence deteriorates.
An investigation stops progressing, a report loses priority, an internal oversight body acts selectively, or an intelligence structure focuses its attention on particular groups. Institutional capture does not necessarily require suspending the Constitution: it can also develop through the strategic use of apparently regular procedures.
This is the terrain on which lawfare finds the conditions to become a permanent mechanism for exercising power.
If the political weaponization of investigations and legal proceedings threatens democracy, that threat does not simply disappear because its operators or beneficiaries belong to a different political group. Combating lawfare requires universal guarantees of impartiality, a lawful, pre-established judge, due process, prevention of conflicts of interest, transparency, and accountability for abuses of purpose.
A reform that reorganizes the judicial system without establishing adequate safeguards against its political use does not eliminate the problem. It changes the conditions under which the problem reproduces itself.
Regulatory narco-state capture
Institutional capture takes on even more serious consequences when examined in relation to organized crime.
A captured state does not necessarily have criminals openly occupying its top leadership positions. Its deterioration can also occur through influence networks connecting illicit economic interests, political actors, and segments of the institutions responsible for overseeing them.
The existence of these connections must be demonstrated through investigation, not presumed on the basis of partisan affinities. But that is precisely why preserving the independence of investigative and oversight structures is a central requirement in confronting organized crime.
Regulatory narco-state capture, as a critical hypothesis, describes a process in which the state’s coercive capacity grows while its oversight mechanisms become vulnerable to selectivity and capture by private interests, potentially criminal ones.
In this scenario, expanding prisons and surveillance systems does not guarantee an effective confrontation with criminal organizations. The state may become extraordinarily efficient at identifying and punishing minor offenders while encountering persistent difficulties in reaching the financiers, economic beneficiaries, and institutional protection networks behind illicit activities.
The gravity of this hypothesis becomes apparent when we connect the platform’s different components. A national facial recognition infrastructure expands the capacity to identify the population; weakening employment safeguards reduces certain public officials’ resistance to hierarchical pressure; and reorganizing judicial and oversight mechanisms, if their independence is not preserved, compromises precisely the structures responsible for preventing abuses.
The extreme result of this convergence is a state highly equipped to monitor society and institutionally vulnerable to the selective protection of powerful interests.
There is no need to assert that this is the candidate’s declared intention to demand that his platform provide concrete safeguards against such an outcome.
The democratic test of any reform lies not in the strength it gives the government to confront its opponents, but in the capacity it preserves within institutions to prevent the government itself from abusing its power.
Lawfare is for everyone. Justice is not.
8. Brazil, December 2030: the nature of the state
We have reached the point at which the proposals cease to represent isolated initiatives and begin to reveal a conception of how society should be organized.
Citizens are encouraged to assume individually economic risks previously cushioned by collective protection mechanisms. Workers face contractual relationships more vulnerable to instability, while union representation must preserve its relevance amid the expansion of individualized forms of bargaining. Civil servants once again see the extent of their institutional safeguards called into question, and education begins combining market instruments with military-inspired administrative models.
The health system receives promises of technological modernization, but still faces the decisive question of the funding needed to actually expand care provision. At the same time, the state announces an extraordinary expansion of its prison and surveillance structures, accompanied by proposals for judicial and administrative reorganization whose consequences will depend on the institutional safeguards preserved.
The central problem lies in the relationship between these developments. Reducing the capacity for social protection, when combined with expanding the state’s capacities for control, changes the distribution of power between the rulers and the ruled.
That is the nature of the transformation under discussion.
Democracy is not limited to holding periodic elections, just as freedom cannot be measured solely by the number of responsibilities the state transfers to individuals. A democratic society must ensure minimum material conditions for living, collective mechanisms of representation, and institutions sufficiently independent to protect citizens, including against those legitimately exercising governmental power.
The social tragedy we identify does not result from a single measure, but from the convergence of choices that weaken economic protection, increase families’ exposure to instability, and concentrate capacities for control within state structures.
A tragedy of this kind does not have to be announced as a political objective. It can be methodically constructed through decisions presented individually as instruments of efficiency, freedom, discipline, and security.
What is at stake, therefore, is not choosing between a large state and a small state, but determining for whom it will be strong, for whom it will be absent, and in the face of which interests it will cease to fulfill its constitutional obligations.
Brazil does not need a state that is minimal when protecting its citizens and maximal when monitoring their movements, much less a justice system whose independence ends where the ruler’s convenience begins.
A society can restore fiscal indicators, change administrative structures, and replace political leaders. Restoring trust in institutions, families’ economic autonomy, and the opportunities lost by an entire generation is a far more difficult task.
That is why the 2026 election must be understood in its true dimensions. We are not merely discussing changes of government, but choices capable of redefining the relationships between power, citizenship, and fundamental rights.
It is the nature of the state that is at stake, in a contest whose consequences, for millions of Brazilians, belong to the concrete realm of life or death.
BUY ME A COFFEE, NOT A COFFIN!
Because Brazilians need income to buy coffee, health to keep drinking it, education to build their own futures, and democratic institutions that prevent their existence from being turned into a variable of economic adjustment or an object of political surveillance.