There is something intensely poignant about the wounded pride of an entrenched statist. When the initial returns from Brazil trickled in, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva reportedly suffered a sudden bout of bureaucratic heartbreak, unable to fathom how the electorate could possibly hesitate to re-crown him after what he viewed as a masterclass in benevolent governance. It is the eternal tragedy of the central planner: spending four years rearranging everyone else’s deck chairs, only to discover that the passengers would occasionally like to steer their own boats. The fatal conceit, as Friedrich Hayek famously warned us, is the delusion that any single committee or charismatic grandfather figure can possess the knowledge required to orchestrate the economic life of millions. Yet when the spreadsheet doesn’t elicit spontaneous weeping and gratitude from the masses, the planner never blames the plan. He blames the ingrates.
What followed, of course, was an emergency scramble by the machinery of the modern political machine. Faced with the sudden terror that nine million swing voters might decamp toward Flávio Bolsonaro, the Brazilian left deployed the full cavalry: student organizers skipped their lectures on macroeconomics to protest in the streets, and a frantic torrent of WhatsApp broadcasts flooded the country’s digital channels. It worked, as these spectacles often do. The veteran interventionist dragged himself over the finish line, leaving international observers swooning over the grassroots vibrancy of it all. It takes a truly gifted political class to use decentralized, peer-to-peer communications technology solely to resurrect an antiquated regime of centralized economic controls.
Let us dispense with the fairy tale being spun by the usual foreign correspondents. The spectacle in Brasília was not a triumphant victory for human liberty over the dark forces of reaction; it was merely the standard, exhausting democratic ritual of trading one flavor of overbearing government for another. The state is that perennially embarrassing uncle who arrives uninvited to your dinner party, drinks your best vintage, insists on lecturing you about fiscal management despite his third personal bankruptcy, and then demands you pay for his cab home. In Brazil, voters were simply asked whether they preferred their patronizing uncle to wear a fatigue-jacket or an artisanal worker’s scarf. Neither contestant offered to leave the homeowner alone to mind his own property.
Lula’s third term, much like his earlier iterations, was built on the unshakeable premise that capital is something created by executive decree and that prosperity flows directly from the ink of a federal gazette. Under the guise of developmentalism, Brazilian industry has spent years coddled by protective tariffs, state-directed credit subsidies, and an administrative apparatus so dense it practically generates its own gravity. The average Brazilian entrepreneur doesn't compete against market forces; he competes against a jungle of municipal permits, federal tax codes that change before the ink dries, and a regulatory state that views every private commercial transaction as an act of defiance waiting to be fined.
The tragic irony of the youth movement carrying this banner across the finish line is entirely lost on the participants. Students took to the boulevards to demand more government stewardship, effectively petitioning the armed mugger to hold onto their wallets for safekeeping. They mobilized through end-to-end encrypted messaging apps—an absolute triumph of private, unregulated, cryptographic engineering—in order to elect a government whose first instinct upon waking is to regulate the digital economy, protect state monopolies, and manage the nation’s currency via bureaucratic fiat. If irony produced electricity, Brazil’s energy crisis would be solved by sunrise.
Now that the dust has settled and the victory parties are winding down, reality must inevitably reassert itself. You can rally the masses with clever digital campaigns, but an algorithm cannot repeal supply and demand. You can march through São Paulo with red banners, but you cannot subsidize your way into an efficient market, no matter how many times you cite social solidarity. The hangover is on its way, and it will be paid for in the traditional currency of the interventionist state: stubborn inflation, sluggish capital investment, and an army of fresh inspectors fanning out to ensure that nobody builds anything useful without filling out three copies of Form 42-B.
The international commentary will treat this as an epochal turning point, because politics is the secular religion of our time, and the press corps loves anointed saviors. But for the ordinary citizen trying to run a small shop or keep a few honest reals out of the hands of the tax collector, little has fundamentally changed. The faces in the presidential palace have merely swapped chairs. The real victor, as is always the case in these grand electoral dramas, was Leviathan itself, which watched the entire chaotic affair from the wings, completely confident that whoever won the crown, the chains would remain firmly in place.