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Before the news of the ban on Twitter and VPN by the “dictator” Alexandre de Moraes fell like a bomb on Brazilian politics, the hottest topic was the reconciliation between the Bolsonarists and Pablo Marçal. We may wait for the Twitter issue to unfold before commenting on it, and we cannot let the reconfiguration of the Brazilian right go unnoticed.

As explained in more detail in a previous article, for years Brazil was uselessly polarized between PT and PSDB, two parties that governed as neoliberals, with the first representing the “left” and the second the “right”. In 2018, this scenario underwent a radical change with the Bolsonaro phenomenon. He was a charismatic leader with anti-establishment rhetoric and his campaign was made through social media. Although he had been in politics for decades, Bolsonaro had no influence in parties, and was always chopping and changing. Before the 2018 campaign, he was a politician of electoral relevance only for Rio de Janeiro. Sometimes his anti-communism led him to some weird action that put him in the headlines. He was what we call in Brazil a folkloric congressman (as if we used to elect some odd creatures like goblins and leprechauns). The skill with social media belonged to his son Carlos Bolsonaro.

Cornered by the courts and prevented from running for office, Bolsonaro negotiated his political influence with party owners. The Bolsonarista Ricardo Salles, a former minister in his government, withdrew his candidacy for mayor of São Paulo – the largest metropolis in Latin America – so that Bolsonaro could lend his electoral strength to his non-ideological allies. Thus, Bolsonaro and Boilsonaristas, in theory, should support the re-election of the current mayor, the nondescript Ricardo Nunes, who came to office because the mayor died of cancer and he was the vice-mayor.

Things already started to go wrong when right-wing militants investigated Nunes’ administration and discovered things that were directly contrary to their agenda, such as the imposition of Covid vaccines on their work force and the use of neutral language in material aimed at LGBTs. In Brazil, the woke left has been saying “bom dia a todas, todos e todes” (“good morning to everyone, everyone and everyone”) and is committed to putting this “grammar” in official communications. Unlike English, Portuguese and Spanish frequently mark the gender in substantives and adjectives: a woman is bonita (beautiful), a man is bonito (beautiful) and there is no neutral for non-binaries. So, in the USA, people of Hispanic descent invented that they are “Latinx” instead of “Latino”, in order to avoid using the masculine word. As this is unpronounceable in Portuguese and Spanish, someone invented putting an E in place of the X, to be the neutral, and if you don’t use it regularly, you want LGBT people dead. And this wasn’t even the only case in which neutral language appeared in this campaign: at a rally of Boulos, the main left-wing candidate, to which Lula attended, a “black” singer wearing a huge turban thought it was a good idea to sing the national anthem in neutral language. The scene was funny: she, completely out of tune, singing “des filhes deste solo és mãe gentil” (instead of “dos filhos”, in a verse which means “you [Brazil] are a gentle mother of the sons of this soil”) and Lula startled. It instantly became a meme, it was embarrassing and the Boulos’ staff took the video down.

Well, let’s go back to the right. Scrambling the calculations of Bolsonarists and their allies, Pablo Marçal entered the scene, self-described as a “former coach”, who at the age of 18 was already participating in a gang led by an evangelical pastor, creating malware to rob banks. An evangelical himself, he stars in scenes like this one, in which he unsuccessfully commands a paralytic woman to walk again. On September 2nd, interviewed by the prestigious program Roda Vida, he was asked if he would continue to go to wakes to command the deceased to get up. He confirmed. In the same program, he says that he will end poverty by changing Brazilians’ mindset, as he himself got out of poverty by changing his mindset. Today he has countless millions of dollars.

Although nothing concrete has been discovered, his relationship with people linked to drug trafficking raises suspicions, which are widely used in the campaign of his opponent Tabata Amaral. In fact, since the Cariani case (when a rich doctor-influencer was caught diverting material for the production of cocaine and crack), it is prudent to suspect that rich influencers launder drug money. Cariani, in particular, was a friend and partner of Marçal.

His life as an influencer has caused him a specific problem so far: it was discovered that he has a community on Discord in which he pays those who produce the best video editions (i.e., those with the most audience), and this was considered an electoral crime. That’s why the electoral court suspended Marçal’s profiles on social media. It thus gave him ample opportunity to victimize himself and look like someone who is persecuted by the system. Bolsonaro, on the other hand, would be a member of the system, as he supports Nunes. Furthermore: Bolsonaro would be interested in the suspension of his networks and the real culprit for them. Bolsonarists rushed to Twitter to say that they are against censoring anyone. However, the damage was already done. Here in the interior of Bahia, in a rural municipality 1,900 kilometers far from São Paulo, a resident told me that he opposed to what Bolsonaro was doing against Marçal. For Bolsonaristas, there was no alternative other than a public reconciliation, something that even the son Carlos Bolsonaro, who had been insulted by Marçal, had to do.

So, if he has not yet raised anyone from death, nor made a paralytic walk, Marçal has already done something that all Brazilian politicians would consider a miracle: he dethroned Bolsonaro.