Mr Toffoli said that the Santos campaign had failed to register its social-media handles correctly. The Santos campaign said it would appeal. Editor’s note (August 31st): Shortly after this piece was published, José Antonio Dias Toffoli, a Supreme Court justice who also sits on Brazil’s Electoral Court, suspended the candidacy of Renan Santos.
In 2014 he founded a political group, the Free Brazil Movement (MBL by its Portuguese acronym), to advocate for a minimal state in a country with a long tradition of big government. Name recognition came after he organised mass protests against the government of Dilma Rousseff, a former left-wing president who was impeached by a hostile Congress in 2016. Only in 2025 did MBL register as a political party, under the name Missão (Mission). As well as Mr Santos’s presidential run, the party is fielding 57 candidates for Congress in Brazil’s general elections in October. Many are disheartened by the candidacy of Flávio Bolsonaro, a son of Jair Bolsonaro, a populist former president who is serving a 27-year sentence for attempting a coup after losing his re-election bid in 2022.
His aide says both politicians’ bands are “equally awful”.) And like Mr Milei, Mr Santos is a political outsider. But the cultural battle “is not our core identity”. The movement was spurred towards new thinking by “the failure of a childish form of economic liberalism” influenced by American libertarians, he says. Mr Kataguiri, who oversees the party’s economic proposals, calls this “pragmatic, non-dogmatic liberalism”. “There is no limit to how AI can be used to improve administrative efficiency,” gushes Mr Kataguiri. “Flávio is extremely weak,” says one supporter.
Mr Santos’s rise has parallels with that of Javier Milei, Argentina’s firebrand president. Like Mr Milei, he is obsessed with free-market economics. Like Mr Milei, Mr Santos mixes his dogmatism with rock music, fronting a band that extols the virtues of competition and low taxes. (Mr Santos claims to be the superior musician. It has one Congressman in office, Kim Kataguiri. Mr Santos distances MBL from Donald Trump’s MAGA movement. Economics remains its most important cause. “It is naive to think that if you remove the state from all activities and privatise everything, things will fix themselves. The state must be present in many areas, especially in a country like Brazil,” with gaping inequalities. The party now believes that companies like Petrobras, Brazil’s state-owned oil firm, should not be privatised, but that the government’s influence should be reduced. The result is a policy programme packed with new ideas for Brazil. Missão proposes digitising patient health-care records and using AI to improve triage and reduce queues at public hospitals. A new law would create performance targets for local politicians on education, health care and access to sewerage. Officials who hit targets would have access to more money from the federal budget; persistent underperformers would be threatened with a temporary prohibition from holding office. AI would be used to recommend cuts to public jobs. Mr Santos is polling in the single digits, but his willingness to propose bold ideas is winning him prominent backers on the Brazilian right. “Renan is well-read, informed and can speak about lots of different subjects. Flávio doesn’t know anything. Mr Santos attacks the Bolsonaro family for being intellectually mediocre and corrupt.
Over 90% of Brazil’s federal budget is tied up in mandatory spending, particularly pensions. By 2029 discretionary spending is expected to comprise an unworkable 0.1% of the budget. All this, hopes Mr Kataguiri, would make room for growth-boosting infrastructure investments, which he wants to double to 4% of GDP.
Poll tracker: Who will be Brazil’s next president? Mr Santos is frank about the need for spending cuts. The share is growing relentlessly as the minimum wage is indexed to pensions and several welfare benefits. Missão proposes de-indexing the minimum wage and tying spending on education and health care to inflation rather than revenues, which are growing fast. Cuts to lavish civil-servant salaries would follow, and a pension reform.
