The Silence of the Guilty
The cancellation of Globo’s final presidential debate exposed an election in which the leading candidates preferred more controlled environments to direct confrontation before a shared audience.
Fernando Fagundes Ferreira ·
The last major presidential debate before the first round did not end badly; it simply ceased to exist. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva decided not to attend, Flávio Bolsonaro withdrew a few hours before the broadcast, court decisions altered relevant aspects of the format and, faced with this set of circumstances, Globo cancelled the event. The outcome was more revealing than many of the answers that might have been given in the studio: the 2026 presidential campaign reached its final stretch without its two main poles sharing the same arena, under the same rules and before the same audience.
Lula's absence had already been announced. The president preferred to appear on Flow Podcast and justified the decision by saying he considered the format of debates with many candidates unproductive, since in them, according to him, attempts to produce sound bites would prevail over substantive discussion. The choice may be electorally rational, and Flow has a nationwide audience, but that does not make the two situations equivalent. On a podcast, the candidate takes part in a long conversation without the simultaneous presence of opponents; in a debate, he must respond not only to the interviewer but also to the challenges raised by those competing against him.
There is also a symbolic aspect to this choice that deserves attention. Lula traded the country's largest televised journalistic arena for a conversation hosted by Igor Coelho, known as Igor 3K, founder and leading figure of Grupo Flow. Igor has no training in Journalism: an academic record cited in research from the Federal University of Bahia states that he holds a degree in Letters, with a specialization in English, and his professional career began in the world of video game channels and digital content production.
This does not prevent him from interviewing a president, nor does it constitute irregular practice of a profession. Since 2009, when it ruled on Extraordinary Appeal 511.961, the Federal Supreme Court has considered it unconstitutional to require a specific Journalism degree as a condition for practicing journalism.
The interest of the episode lies precisely elsewhere. A President of the Republic declined an arena organized according to the traditional logic of television journalism and chose an environment originally created outside newsrooms, journalism schools and the classic structures of news production. It is not necessary to diminish Flow in order to recognize the magnitude of this shift. Brazilian political mediation is being transferred, in part, from journalistic institutions to platforms and personalities whose authority arises from audience, community identification and the ability to produce long conversations and later distribute them across networks and algorithms.
If Lula's absence was known, Flávio Bolsonaro's produced a more immediate political contradiction. His campaign intended to exploit precisely the president's empty chair and present Flávio's presence as a contrast to Lula's absence. The strategy was dismantled over the course of the day by two court decisions: the TSE prohibited the display of the empty podium reserved for the president, and the STF authorized the participation of Renan Santos, of Missão, in the event. Shortly afterwards, Flávio also withdrew.
The public justification was that court decisions had altered the rules agreed upon for the program and created a situation of interference in the debate. This is the formal explanation presented by the candidacy and should be recorded as such. But behind-the-scenes accounts published by the press add a relevant piece of information: Folha reported that Flávio's advisers feared attacks from other candidates if he took part. Days earlier, Renan Santos himself had already publicly anticipated his reading of the scenario by saying that, if he were included in the debate, he believed Flávio would not show up.
Renan was not a neutral participant in this calculation. He had been adopting a particularly aggressive strategy against Flávio and had already turned his opponent's absence from the Band debate into material for political provocation, going so far as to bring adult diapers to the studio to attack both Lula and Flávio for not attending. When he managed, through the courts, to enter the Globo debate, therefore, it was not merely one more candidate arriving on stage: it was an opponent who had made direct confrontation with Flávio part of his electoral strategy.
There is no public document that allows one to state categorically that Flávio withdrew because he was afraid of Renan. That would be turning a plausible interpretation into fact. But it would also be journalistic naivety to ignore the sequence: the campaign intended to exploit Lula's absence, advisers feared attacks, Renan was included by court decision and, immediately afterwards, Flávio abandoned the debate. At the very least, his entry made the environment considerably less predictable for a candidacy that expected to use the night to confront an absent opponent.
The political irony remains regardless of the explanation adopted. Flávio spent part of the campaign accusing Lula of avoiding confrontation and intended to use the Globo debate to emphasize that absence. He ended the night outside the studio as well.
It is in this sense that the title “The Silence of the Guilty” holds. "Guilty" does not mean criminal culpability, nor does it seek to distribute moral equivalences among those involved. It designates political responsibility for the disappearance of a public arena that should have existed three days before the vote. Lula decided not to attend; Flávio decided to leave after the court-ordered changes; the Judiciary modified relevant components of the format a few hours before the broadcast; and Globo concluded that conditions no longer existed to hold the program as planned.
Each of these decisions has its own justifications. The democratic problem appears when one observes the aggregate result. For the first time in two decades, the first round of a Brazilian presidential election ended without a televised confrontation between the candidates leading the race.
For decades, the televised debate functioned as a kind of artificial public square. It was imperfect, theatrical, often superficial and subject to the editorial choices of broadcasters, but it forced incompatible candidates, narratives and electorates to coexist for a few hours. No one fully controlled what they would hear, who would challenge them or which question would come next.
Platformized politics offers a different architecture. Podcasts, live streams and proprietary channels allow extended conversations and can produce far more interesting discussions than the compressed blocks of television. At the same time, they give candidates greater ability to select environments, interlocutors and audiences. Adversarial exchange no longer necessarily takes place before the voter and comes to be reconstructed afterwards, through clips, commentary, influencers, journalists and algorithms.
For this reason, the problem is not deciding whether Flow is better or worse than Globo, nor determining who has sufficient credentials to interview a presidential candidate. The more important question is another: when each candidacy can choose its own stage, its own audience and its own degree of exposure to challenge, who preserves the common arena in which incompatible versions of political reality must confront one another before the same public?
On the night of October 1, 2026, that arena disappeared. The candidates kept talking, the platforms kept broadcasting, the courts kept deciding and the campaigns kept producing their own narratives. What was missing was precisely the space in which none of them could fully control the conversation.
Perhaps that is the true silence of the guilty.