Pablo Marçal creates new blueprint for far-right demagogues. É Verdade? #PabloMarcal

Pablo Marçal is a Tony Robbins-like figure who presents himself as a self-made business success.

He tried to run for president in 2018, but didn’t make it to the ballot. In 2022, he ran for a House seat representing the state of São Paulo. He obtained almost a quarter-million votes — which would have made him the 11th best voted candidate if electoral courts hadn’t excluded him from the race due to issues with his party.

Mr. Marçal started the race as a wildcard. He defends many of the values espoused by Jair Bolsonaro and his supporters. More importantly, he deploys a social media strategy that seems to be a version of the Bolsonaro campaign on steroids. 

This has propelled him to a three-way tie with the two men who were favored to win the race for mayor of São Paulo: Ricardo Nunes, the incumbent mayor and official Bolsonaro candidate, and Guilherme Boulos, a left-wing congressman endorsed by President Lula.

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This episode used music from Uppbeat and Envato. License codes: Fairytales by Daniel Zambo, Aspire by Pryces (B6TUQLVYOWVKY02S), and Private Investigation by AMZA (V9ZG3LD).

In this episode:

• Beatriz Rey is a political scientist and a columnist for The Brazilian Report.

Background reading:

• Whether or not former life coach Pablo Marçal gets elected São Paulo mayor, he is already setting a blueprint for radical candidates in the future, Ms. Rey writes.
• As Bolsonaro’s influence wanes, a new political figure vies for attention in Brazil’s conservative camp, challenging the status quo in São Paulo’s mayoral race, writes Isabela Cruz.
• Life coach Pablo Marçal has scrambled the São Paulo mayoral race, rising in the polls to a tie for first place. But his social media-based strategies could make him ineligible.

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Transcript

Supporters of Jair Bolsonaro gathered in São Paulo on September the 7th to celebrate Brazil’s Independence Day. And in many ways, it was business as usual. They idolized Elon Musk, complained about the Supreme Court, bashed leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and establishment media, and supported Israel to the detriment of Palestine. But there was one big elephant in the room, Pablo Marçal, a candidate for mayor of São Paulo who has become a hot name within Bolsonarism, despite not being formally endorsed by Mr.

Bolsonaro. And this week, we will discuss how Pablo Marçal is changing the Brazilian conservative movement and Brazilian politics as a whole. My name is Gustavo Ribeiro, I’m the editor-in-chief of The Brazilian Report, and this is Explaining Brazil.

our journalists via our Buy Me A Coffee page. And you can also subscribe to our Buy Me A Coffee fan page,

pledging a monthly contribution to our newsroom in exchange for exclusive content that you won’t find anywhere else. Our Buy Me A Coffee subscribers are Christina Viau, Andrei Novoseltsev, Wild Rice, Jassiara de Oliveira,

Carson Allen, Gabriel Loka, Pan Ludvik, Leslie Seal, Mark Hillary, Louise Renz, Erwan Minais, Aaron Berger, Kars Vrieswyk, And our Buy Me A Coffee members come from all over the world so please if we’re butchering the pronunciation of your name please send us an email. This week I’m joined by political scientist Beatriz He, who is also a columnist for the Brazilian Report.

Beatriz, glad to have you back on the show.

It’s a pleasure to be back. Thank you for inviting me.

Beatriz, before we get into the interview, I’d like to present Pablo Marçal for those who don’t know him just yet. And just to make it short, he’s a Tony Robbins-like figure who presents himself as a self-made business success. He has tried to run for president in 2018, but didn’t make it into the ballot. In 2022, he ran for a House seat to represent the state of São Paulo

and obtained almost a quarter million votes, which would have made him the 11th best-voted candidate if electoral courts had not excluded him from the race due to issues with his party. Marçal is also linked to many people with several criminal accusations, and he has started the race as a wild card.

He defends many of the values that are espoused by Jair Bolsonaro and his supporters. And more importantly, he deploys a social media strategy that seems to be a version of the Bolsonaro campaign in 2018 on steroids. That has propelled Pablo Marçal into a three-way tie with the two men who everyone thought were the favorites to win the race for mayor

of São Paulo, Ricardo Nunes, the incumbent mayor and official Bolsonaro candidate, and Guilherme Boulos, a left-wing congressman endorsed by President Lula. Now, you wrote about Pablo Marçal for the Brazilian report, and I’d like to start our conversation by asking you to talk a little bit more about Marçal’s beliefs and how he connects with voters.

Sure.

So in the piece that I wrote, I talk about how Marçal is already crafting his own legacy in Brazilian politics. And the first element of that legacy is the introduction of what we call the prosperity theology, which is a form of religious populism that is rooted in evangelical movement. And he’s bringing that into the political arena. He wrote a book that is called, in Portuguese I’m translating here, The Bible You Haven’t Read.

The title, I think, points to where he’s going with this. Marcel believes that the church is irrelevant for you to connect with God, so you don’t need to go to church, you don’t need to attend church, you don’t need to do service. This is very similar, by the way, to how we think about populism in the political arena. The institutions don’t mediate social relations the same way here.

The church doesn’t mediate the relationship you have with God. And he focuses a lot on material success. He thinks that’s a divine blessing in the life of those who follow the gospel. In the piece I quote this article by a scholar named Kate Fowler. She describes this belief as money in the bank, healthy body, a thriving family, and boundless happiness. When I read this, my first thought was, well, who doesn’t want that? Money in the bank, healthy body, good for every family, and boundless happiness.

And the key thing here is that he believes that this material success, for you to achieve it, you just have to believe it. If you believe it, you’re going to get it, regardless of where you were born, the conditions under which you were born, if you’re poor, if you’re not, if you didn’t have access to formal education, regardless. It’s a matter of just believing it. So Marcel was interviewed by a program in Brazil that’s called Joda Viva, which is basically,

it puts the person who’s being interviewed in the center, and then you have a round table with journalists asking a lot of questions. And one of the journalists asked him how he would combat poverty, which is a serious issue in Sao Paulo. And his answer was that anybody can meet poverty as long as that person becomes somebody. So poverty to him is really a

state of mind. And I think I don’t think I know for a fact that if you look at the outskirts, the periphery of Sao Paulo, where people struggle to get out of poverty or they’re getting out of poverty and they want this material success that Marcello is telling, this is going to be very appealing to them.

It’s interesting because, I mean, Uber sociology here, but when you talk to people that are struggling financially, like Uber drivers or delivery couriers, a lot of them say that they are not very sensitive to anti-poverty discourse because they say like, I’m working seven days a week doing two, three, four jobs, and you’re talking about aiding people who are not pulling the same kind of effort as I am. So it is something that really rings a bell for that part of the population, right?

Right. And I think in some way it is wrapped around some sort of prejudice, right? And this is something that the movement that Bolsonaro represents does. And I think Marcel is doing the same, that there are people that just benefit from the system without doing anything. And those are the ones who receive social policy, such as Bolsa Familia, on the national level. Even though we have a lot of evidence that that’s not how that works, right? The Bolsa Familia actually takes people out of poverty, and once they are out, they’re able to thrive by themselves.

It gives them the tools that they need to get out of the situation in which they are. But I think it’s wrapped around this, there is some prejudice there, but there is also the narrative that is very true for a lot of people, that they work very hard. And democracy is failing them on all levels in Brazil, right? It’s not delivering the things that people want. It’s not delivering quality education, quality health.

It’s not delivering public transportation. People struggle in a city like Sao Paulo, people struggle a lot every day. People go to work and they take like three to four hours to get to work, they work the whole day, they come back, everything’s expensive.

So here comes a guy who says, you just have to believe it, and it’s gonna happen.

Yeah, no, and I mean, talking about this quote unquote proposal for changing the mindset of people in São Paulo, that is the kind of thing that has been met with a lot of scorn. And Marcel has been treated in a very condescending manner by politicians, by journalists, many of whom have dismissed him as a joke candidate. But he’s proving to be pretty competitive. And he has polled above the 20% mark in each of the past few polls.

He’s statistically tied with Guilherme Boulos, the strongest name left of center, and with Ricardo Nunes, who is the incumbent. And we know that in Brazil, incumbency bias is a real thing.

How has that come to be? I think a part of it is we have it’s Marcel’s own merit and we can talk about that in a second. I think he brings a style of communication that is very different, but I also think it’s a product of the mistakes made by his adversaries. Right. So you have a candidate like Guilherme Boulos who lives in the south of Sao Paulo and coincidentally he lives in the neighborhood where I was born, Campolimpo. And in Campolimpo, according to internal polls, he’s tied with Marçal. The guy lives in the neighborhood and he’s not able to get the votes in his own neighborhood.

You have movements such as the Funk movement in Sao Paulo, the Samba movement, they have tied with Ricardo Muniz or Marçal, not with Hilary Vox. From what I hear from the Black movement, Hilary Vox is also not opening up enough space to hear them as in line with the Samba and the Funk movement, right? So you have a movement of the social groups

that naturally would go to the left, going to the right or to the extreme right. And you wonder why this is happening. And I think part of the problem is that the Unamigolos campaign doesn’t have any clue about what it’s doing. And I think that’s true on political strategy. That’s true on social media. And then it’s natural that you can open up space. There’s no vacuum in politics. If something is not

being occupied, if the space is not being occupied. Somebody’s going to occupy it, right? And I think that’s what Marcel is doing, and to some extent Nunes as well, but he’s also gaining traction because you have Nunes is, somebody called him a bolacha de jaguarsal the other day, I don’t know how to

translate, like he’s, he’s… Incipient. Yeah. So for people who have never been to Brazil, it’s like a cracker biscuit that is almost tasteless. And I mean, you have to put jelly or butter or something to give it any kind of flavor. So yeah, he would be an insipid candidate. And he’s someone that people barely knew until this year, right? Because he was elected as a deputy mayor, and he only took office after the mayor died of cancer. But I mean, not only was he unknown, but the few people that knew him,

knew him for the wrong reasons, because he was accused of domestic violence in the past.

And also, he hasn’t done a great job as mayor since he took office. A lot of people, I was in Sao Paulo recently, and none of the taxi drivers that I spoke to liked him. So I think that’s a sign that people are not necessarily happy with him. And then you also have Tava Tamarão, who is a federal deputy, but she’s not known in São Paulo.

People don’t know her. So she’s not competitive. And then you have D’Atena, who I think is about to drop out the race, if not.

Yeah, here’s a, Zé Luiz D’Atena is like this TV presenter that is the biggest political tease in Brazil, right? Every four years, every two years, he says, okay, I’m running for office, whether it’s the Senate or the mayor’s office. But every time he drops out before things get official. Now, his candidacy has been registered, so he can be at the ballot, but of course he can drop out at any time he wants and go back to his TV job, which is very lucrative for him, has been for years.

Very convenient for him. So yeah, I think this scenario gives a lot of space for Marcel to occupy. to at the very least untie the race, right? Like he’s not in a position. I think anybody could claim to know who will win this election is crazy.

It’s impossible at this point.

We have a three-way tie, and the guy who has the machine, who is the mayor right now, is not able to pull ahead. And then you have…

We do not even know who is going to be in the runoff, right? Because at this point, I mean, we could have a Bolus runoff with either one of the conservative candidates or an all conservative runoff.

It could be Marçal against Nunes, it could be Marçal against Bolus or Nunes against Bolus.

We don’t know. At this point, we can discuss which is the likeliest scenario, but at this point, all scenarios are within the realm of possibilities.

Yeah, so there’s just a lot of space for him to occupy. And what is striking to me is just how much ground left is losing on the ground. Like, really, when I’m talking about the funk and the Zumba movements, when I understood that from the news, I was just appalled. I was like, what is happening? How are they just giving that up? But apparently they are.

I want to go back to this discussion about the left in a bit, but before that, I want to talk about the Marcel phenomenon and the fact that some research… and he appears to prove what some some researchers have said about the Bolsonarista movement, that espousing values such as tough on crime policies, anti-abortion views, and this absolutist view on freedom of speech might be more important to the Bolsonaro eglectorate than actually being endorsed by Jair Bolsonaro. Do you agree with that assessment? Do you think that this Marcel phenomenon proves that or the jury is still out?

Well, there are some researchers from the University of Sao Paulo on the ground and even on September 7th, and what they find is that 70% of those who were there who claimed to be Bolsonaroistas, who claimed to support Bolsonaro, they actually prefer Marcel than Bolsonaro’s candidate, Ricardo Nunes. And I think to me, that is related to the fact that Marcel takes Bolsonarismo and pushes it to the extreme. So there was a video that I watched on social media last week,

that he’s talking to a journalist and I think it’s a six minute video. And part of the video is just him holding Bolsonaro accountable saying you’re weak, you’re not holding your values strong enough, that’s why people are leaving you and I think he’s very smart, Marçal is very smart, he knows what he’s doing, so he is projecting himself to be the candidate for Bolsonarismo that is not Bolsonaro and people are buying it.

More royalists than the king, right?

Exactly. So I think, yeah, I think that, I think it’s more, the values are probably more important to that electorate than the endorsement of Bolsonaro. And I think, I don’t think that’s a surprise. When we think about the 2018 election, I think there we had several phenomenon going on inside of that Bolsonaro was able to capitalize on, right? The anti-PT movement, the frustration with corruption movement. So he was just the name that was able to capitalize the values that were there. And now there’s somebody who’s doing a

better job than he is. Now that that you just said, combined with the fact that this September 7th demonstration was four times smaller than a February rally commanded by Jair Bolsonaro. Does those two things mean that Bolsonaro is losing grip on Bolsonarism or I am perhaps reading too much into it?

I think honestly at this point there are still people gathering in his name, so I think it’s still alive. When we go back to that point, do you remember that point in time where it would be just like six people with like a protest sign saying please come back military dictatorship, then I would, I will start to conceive that post-soldierism is dying. But I don’t think that’s, that’s not the case yet. I think it’s still there. There’s still people together.

Yeah, no, I remember in 2017, I guess, covering a demonstration that was just 1100 people asking for the return of the military. And yes, I mean, when you frame like this, we had at least 45,000 on Saturday. So yeah, it’s still strong. Another major point about Marçal and how he’s rattling Brazilian politics, and you mentioned this in your op-ed, is

his disruptive, aggressive, and like you said, skillful debating style. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because he has, in his own words, wreaked havoc in debates with other

candidates. And he has a short temper and he also doesn’t have much in terms of vocabulary or argumentation skills. And we cannot say the same about myself. In the piece and the op-ed I wrote, I referred to a concept concept that it’s called here static. This concept was defined by global scientist William Riker, and it refers to the art of reshaping political debates in a way that allows actors, politicians to manipulate the

team, the terms of those debates and be successful. And that’s exactly what my style is doing. Right. I mentioned the interview with the several journalists that we had last week. If you watch it, and to those who speak Portuguese, I encourage them to do so, because it is a lesson on how to reframe debates. He is asked questions.

But it’s painful to watch it, right?

It is painful to watch those things and enforce it, but yes, it’s not going to be a lifetime or a light use of your time. But he asks questions and again and again, he responds to every one of those without addressing any of them. he basically hears the question and then he reframes the question and the answer in the way that he wants.

And he’s able to do that in an intelligent way. And what you see over and over is that like journalists, they are not sure what to do about that, right? Because they still they’re still in this condescending or arrogant mode or confrontational mode that for Marcel is very easy to deal with. He thrives on that. He gets the arrogance, he gets the condescending behavior and he refrains it again and he keeps doing it until

like, if I was a journalist there, I honestly wouldn’t know what to do. He’s very skillful and he has the vocabulary, he has the argumentation skills and he can do that for a long time and that’s the difference from Bolsonaro. At some point, Bolsonaro just says, I don’t want to like, he just means, and Marcel doesn’t. So I think we’re dealing with a different type of politician here. Because when politicians use this here static that Breitbart is talking about, they end

up creating new axis of debate. This, of course, can be good. And he’s had good examples in his book. But I think in Marcel’s case, it’s bad because when he’s reframing those debates, he always reframed them in terms of ideas that are vague or weak or that cannot deal with the complexity of the city like São Paulo.

It’s like the idea of constructing a building that is one kilometre, I think, has a proposal like that, right? I mean, how would that help Sopal? And that’s one of the main proposals that he’s advocating for, right?

Yeah.

No, but I mean, you mentioned that journalists are being condescending, they are losing their temper with him, and essentially they are playing on his turf. But how can one lead Marcel out of his comfort zone? Because that’s all that interviewing politicians is about, is to removing them from a zone of comfort and actually holding them accountable. But it seems to me that this is maybe pretty impossible to do with Marcel, because if you are aggressive, he will double, he will one-up you and make you look stupid. But if you just ask him regular questions, he has been pretty clear in

saying that he doesn’t want to answer journalists’ questions, he just wants to use the airtime messaging the way he says fits him.

I think that’s the million dollar question right now.

How to deal with them, right? In my opinion, the question is, it precedes that, the real question precedes that one is, should he allow to be a candidate given that he has been convicted and that he has like all the, that his curriculum is not the one that… if we take the Fichalimpa Law, I don’t know how you’re translating that…

The Green Slate Law.

Green Slate Law. He wouldn’t pass that test, right? Because even when he’s confronted…

Actually, I think he would, because his conviction was tossed due to the statute of limitations. Right. he would. It’s more of a matter of why someone who is allied with many people who have alleged links with organized crime, someone who was convicted of scamming people, even if that conviction was why he has grown to become this popular. I mean, we’re talking about the biggest city in the land.

We have also 9 million voters in Sao Paulo, at least like 2 million voters, according to the polls. And of course the polls have gotten everything wrong in the past few years, but according to the polls, like 2 million people would be ready to vote for him. It’s pretty remarkable.

It is, and I think that this is a very difficult question, and it isn’t. This discussion here is the one that we have about how to deal with fascists in democratic systems, right? It’s very similar. I’m not calling him a fascist, but I’m just saying that the logic is similar. What should he do? Should you allow him to run and kill democracy from within if he’s elected or he’s already doing it in the process of running? So I think political science can be very instructive here. We think that for democracy to thrive, there has to be some level of non-democratic institutions working to preserve it, right?

I’ve seen a lot of people argue that he should be allowed to run, that if he’s not supposed to be mayor, that the people will vote him out. And I don’t think it’s as simple as that. I think the founding fathers in the US were very concerned about the vote. Sometimes people don’t vote well. And we need to have that. Sometimes they might vote for a populist demagogue, right? That can happen. And there has to be some sort

of defense from the democratic system. And that defense is not always going to be democratic. Sometimes it’s going to be an anti-democratic or non-majoritarian, let me put it that way, institution that would safeguard and protect us from people like myself. That is in the context of this election that doesn’t exist, unfortunately. But in my opinion, it should be a lot of people, can’t it? I think the debate in which Batena went to collapse his booth and went to face him physically, that is a line that we shouldn’t be crossing. And he has already been crossed.

Now, I wrote for the Brazilian report that for Mr. Bolsonaro,

probably the worst outcome in the São Paulo election is actually not the victory of the left, in which a right-wing politician that is not endorsed by him wins, because that would become a blueprint for right-wing candidates to rally Bolsonaro’s support without necessarily bending the knee to the former president. Do you think this is a fair assessment or have I gotten it all wrong? No, I think this is very accurate. I share the same concern.

I think he already did that.

He already set the blueprint. And I think that’s what my op-ed is about. He’s leaving a life seat that is not going to be restricted to São Paulo, regardless of whether he wins or not, regardless of whether he goes to the runoff or not.

I think what is clear to me at this point is that Bolsonaro is not very smart. Had he been smarter, I think he would have been reelected. And I think Marcel is showing us that a combination of capitalizing on the values that seem to be floating in Brazilian society, and the dissatisfaction, the conservative values, the anti-PT, frustration with corruption, if you combine that with an intelligent mindset like myself has and this confrontational

style, which apparently people are, it’s appealing to people. It’s something that I don’t, I can’t relate to, but like from as a political scientist, I understand that that’s what people want and that’s what he’s giving. And this can be mimicked in any other type of race, any point. All it takes is for someone to have a little bit more brain than Bolsonaro did.

I just feel like in this interview I’ve been calling Bolsonaro stupid over and over again. But I think that’s what Marcel is showing us, right? And it’s not a coincidence that there is this sort of theater, and I put the quotation marks that Bolsonaro is angry with Marçal and yada, yada, yada, because he’s creating coordination problems for the extreme right.

I do believe that if the second round is between Marçal and Boulos, they will unite and not endorse Marçal. But at this point, they’re having coordination problems. And I think that’s happening because he’s creating a blueprint that is actually more effective than the one that Bolsonaro created.

Now, before I let you go, I’d like to go back to what you talked about, the left not seizing the opportunity that is created by this lack of coordination within the right and the far right. And I mean, I cover politics, both you and I, we are political wonks. But I guess it is hard to look at the Bolus campaign right now and see any kind of brand that is not I am Lula’s candidate. And I mean, that formula of relying solely on Lula’s brand as this larger than life figure, it

might be running thin, right? I mean, of course, Lula is on his third non-consecutive term. He has a lot of clout, but not as much as he once did. Let’s remember he had above 80% approval ratings at the end of his second term. Now Brazilian society is much more divided. Also Lula is on the twilight of his political career. At one point he will retire. Do you see any sort of strategy that is long term,

that is not just riding on Lula’s coattails? And for you, what are the risks of that?

I think the BOLUS campaign is making the same mistake that the LULA campaign did in 2022, which is to present the candidacy in terms of, we are against the extreme right. They are not for anything. There is a lack of project that really worries me. And it worries me for the reason you said, that LULA is not eternal. At some point, he’s going to leave us. And I think the future of the Workers’ Party, to me, is completely unclear in that scenario. I don’t think that there is a natural successor after Lula. I don’t think Bolas is that person. I think

that is becoming clear by the day. I think that given this lack of project. And I think also, like for those of us who follow politics in Brasilia, I think that’s why things feel so slow in Brasilia right now, that things are not happening or they are hard to happen. It’s because there is not a project like there was in the previous administration. They were against the extreme right, but I don’t think they have a plan for the country. And I see that in the Bolus campaign as well. And I think it’s not a coincidence that he’s losing ground in the periphery

where a leftist party should be stronger than a center or an extreme right party, right? I also think that they made the mistake of, Bolus has this professorial posture, and I think that doesn’t bode well in parts of Sao Paulo. And I think that was the same mistake that, to some extent, happened with Fernando Vaz de Canada in 2018. So you see the same mistakes happening over and over again.

And I don’t know how the left is going to get itself from this situation. I honestly don’t, especially if they don’t have a plan, a project for the country that does not, that cannot be summarized in we are against Bolsonaro, we are against the extreme, right? That is not enough. I mean elections.

Beatriz Rei, thank you very much. It was a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Beatriz Rei is a political scientist and a columnist for the Brazilian report. And if you like Explaining Brazil, please give us a five-star rating wherever you get your podcasts. It takes only a second and it will help us reach a broader audience or better yet sign up for the Brazilian report, the journalistic engine behind this podcast.

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