Militant Democracy on Avenida Paulista: What Brazil’s 2026 Election Reveals about Bottom-Up Coordination

The first round of Brazil’s presidential election produced a shocking result for many Brazilians, with far-right candidate Flávio Bolsonaro securing more votes than incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. However, facing the threat of autocratization, Brazilian civil society mobilized on an unprecedented scale, perhaps the largest campaign in the country’s history. In the second round, Lula da Silva defeated Flávio Bolsonaro and secured another term as president. In his op-ed, Juliano Zaiden Benvindo analyzes this mobilization as a form of militant democracy and argues that it holds broader relevance for democratic movements confronting contemporary threats of autocratization.