Watching the state conduct an election is very much like watching an eccentric, financially reckless uncle try to organize Thanksgiving dinner. There will be shouting, several promises that defy the laws of arithmetic, inevitable threats of legal action, and someone will ultimately flee the scene while leaving the rest of us with the bill. In Brazil, the dinner has concluded, the furniture is splintered, and the patriarch of Latin American leftism, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has somehow been handed the car keys for a fourth non-consecutive term. Across the table, the Bolsonaro dynasty is pouting, declaring that conceding defeat is simply out of the question.
To the earnest champions of modern democracy, this election was framed as an epic clash of civilizations, an apocalyptic struggle between progress and reaction. To anyone who values human freedom and the solvency of the private sector, it was merely an exhausting squabble between two distinct flavors of state overreach. On one side stands Lula, the quintessential titan of the administrative state, whose economic playbook relies on the perennial fantasy that you can tax, spend, and regulate an economy into prosperity without anyone noticing the inflation. On the other stands Flávio Bolsonaro, bearing the torch of a nationalist populism that loves the apparatus of the state just as much, provided it can be wielded with martial fanfare and grievance politics.
Lost entirely in the hysteria is the fundamental truth articulated by F.A. Hayek in The Fatal Conceit: that the curious task of political philosophy is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. Neither Lula nor Bolsonaro harbors the slightest doubt about their ability to steer the lives of two hundred million citizens. Both believe the presidency of Brazil is a magic wand that can compel reality to submit to executive decree. The voters, trapped in this perpetual pendulum swing, simply trade a regulatory regime that seeks to micromanage their enterprises for one that seeks to micromanage their speech and allegiances.
If anyone needed a pure, crystalline metaphor for the absurdity of the entire spectacle, they needed only look away from the presidential palace and toward the municipal bus system. In the middle of the runoff madness, the local electoral court decided that its remit included transit logistics. The magistrates issued an emergency order demanding the immediate restoration of one hundred percent of the bus fleet to shuttle voters around, because evidently, central planners in black robes are uniquely qualified to schedule diesel mechanics and traffic routes.
When the local bureaucracy failed to snap to attention quickly enough, the court did what courts always do when reality refuses to conform to their paper decrees: it ordered the arrest of the municipal transport secretary, Pablo Souza. Yet in a development that would make even the most cynical satirist blush, the arrest warrant could not be executed. The secretary was not hiding in a safe house or on the run through the favelas. He was sitting in Paris on what the municipal government solemnly described as an official mission.
You truly have to admire the sheer audacity of the bureaucratic class. While judges furiously stamp warrants and voters agonize over the fate of the nation, the man in charge of the buses is across the Atlantic, almost certainly sipping an espresso on the taxpayer’s dime, insulated from the chaos he ostensibly oversees. It is a masterclass in the primary rule of public administration: the red tape is for the little people, the decrees are for the courts, and the junkets to Europe are for the civil servants.
The deeper tragedy here is why this election felt like a life-or-death struggle to so many Brazilians in the first place. When the state grows large enough to control the pensions, the state-owned oil company, the credit markets, and even the schedule of local buses, control of that state becomes an existential prize. If the Brazilian federal government were strictly confined to defending private property, enforcing contracts, and leaving peaceful citizens alone, it would matter very little whether an aging union boss or an aggrieved senator occupied the Planalto Palace. Citizens could simply wake up, go to work, and ignore them.
Instead, the Leviathan in Brasília has metastasized to the point where every transition of power threatens to upend millions of livelihoods through retaliatory regulation or economic mismanagement. The right refuses to concede because the stakes of losing the regulatory cudgel are immense; the left prepares to celebrate by expanding the very bureaucracy that choked the economy in the first place. The grand pageant of South American politics rolls on, fully funded by ordinary workers, completely unaccountable to reason, and managed by officials who will undoubtedly catch the next flight to France whenever things get complicated.