Published in Verso.

In 2022, on the eve of Brazil’s last presidential election, Brazil’s leading radical publisher Boitempo brought together sociologist Silvia Viana and philosopher Paulo Arantes for a discussion titled “End-of-the-World Elections”. Viana opened by explaining that the title was meant to capture the “shock” experienced by part of the progressive left after the first round of the 2022 election, as Jair Bolsonaro and the right performed far better than expected.

Four years later, the Brazilian left appears, once again, to be confronting the prospect of “the end of the world.” It is as though we were suddenly passing from representative democracy to apocalyptic democracy. In a presidential contest that, until October 4, many commentators had described as the least interesting since Brazil returned to democratic rule in 1985, unable to galvanize voters on either side, the first-round victory of far-right candidate Flávio Bolsonaro—the son of the former president, convicted and imprisoned for an attempted coup d’état near the end of his term—left many progressive voters in shock: he received 47.03% of the vote to president Luiz Inácio da Silva better known as Lula.

→ Read the full article Brazil in Yet Another End-of-the-World Election, published by Verso.