Solon’s Constitution, the Corpus Juris Civilis, the Meiji Restoration, and the New Deal were events that established new foundations for new societies. These flowerings of culture required a high level of harmony among elites. Only with intense unity and a well-established chain of command could ruling classes coordinate their energy toward world-historical reforms.
But such unity is absent today. Around the world, natural elites are dependent on risk-averse politicians detached from reality or even wrapped up in the seemingly necessary corruption. This is especially true in Brazil, which has become a byword for political dysfunction and wasted potential. But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can fix our countries and create new foundations for our societies.
As Chairman of the Mission Party of Brazil, Leader of the Free Brazil Movement, and sitting CEO of the magazine Valete, I want to show you how we are overcoming this problem in Brazil by creating a new political machine from the ground up—hermetically sealed and independent of any outside actors. With our new kind of party, we believe we can win the 2026 Brazilian general elections and bring comprehensive reform to Brazil.
When Elon Musk started his tenure at Tesla in 2006, he published “The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (just between you and me),” which laid out his plan to bring electric vehicles to the mass market by starting with an expensive sports car, then a luxury sedan, then a mass market car. At the time, it seemed wildly audacious. Now it just seems like common sense. Likewise, just between you and me, here’s our secret master plan to win power in Brazil and make it into the country of the future that it was always meant to be.
The Past
Before the Mission Party, there was the Free Brazil Movement—or as we abbreviate it in Portuguese, MBL—created in response to Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s controversial reelection in 2014. Our goal was to build a combative and authentic opposition to Lula’s Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores)—which had governed the country since 2002, sustained by fiscal populism and corruption—and to the “Big Center” (Centrão), a diffuse bloc of non-ideological political machines rooted in underdeveloped, isolated regions such as the Amazon, the rural Northeast, and other remote corners of Brazil.
Rousseff, the successor to present and former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was reelected in one of the most polarized elections in recent history, defeating Aécio Neves, a Big Center scion and governor of Minas Gerais, Brazil’s third-largest state. By then, the Brazilian middle class had coalesced around Neves’ campaign. His defeat, followed by the disclosure of his links to multiple corruption scandals, became the last straw for many who still had hope in politics as usual.
Five days after Rousseff’s reelection, my brother and I officially created the Free Brazil Movement. We had gotten fed up, launched a protest page on Facebook, and gone to sleep. In the morning, a massive outpouring of support from hundreds of thousands of similarly angry Brazilians convinced us we were at the beginning of a great movement. Our purpose was to topple her presidency.
Rousseff’s second term was dominated by Operation Car Wash, the biggest anti-corruption probe in Brazilian history. Federal Police investigations uncovered over $42 billion in losses within Petrobras alone—Brazil’s state-owned oil company—as part of a nationwide scheme that implicated nearly every relevant political actor. During twelve years of Workers’ Party government, both the executive and the Centrão-led legislature had developed sophisticated bribery systems to illegally fund campaigns, help friendly contractors win government tenders, and divert resources from public companies. As Rousseff’s popularity plummeted, the Free Brazil Movement began organizing demonstrations calling for her impeachment.
We assembled over seven million people in the streets across the country. We marched 620 miles on foot from São Paulo to Brasília to set up camp in front of the Houses of Congress. Dilma refused to cave in. We marched over her.
We pressured over two hundred political tycoons until they declared their pro-impeachment stance. In the end, 367 congressmen out of 513 voted to remove Rousseff.
Naively, we thought things would only get better. However, when the Centrão figurehead Michel Temer replaced the former president, the establishment held the keys to our political system. Jair Bolsonaro, then still a minor player in the Big Center, rebranded as the leader of Brazil’s incipient right wing. Back in those days, to be the leader of the Right, you only had to have a few videos histrionically berating gay people and corrupt politicians. He became a vessel for the widespread exhaustion with the corrupt, pro-crime establishment of Brazil, winning in a landslide.
We were never fooled by Bolsonaro; we knew him before the fame. His track record as a politician was abysmal. Before the hype, still in the early 2000s, he had been a spokesperson for the retired military officers syndicate of Rio de Janeiro—who received handsome pensions in return for accepting the end of military rule in 1988. Ironically enough, the same high brass abandoned Bolsonaro when he attempted a coup in 2023. Political instability is no good when your granddaughters are studying in Le Rosey and your pensions are in Brazilian reais, not in Swiss francs.
Throughout his presidency, Bolsonaro aligned himself with the worst, most corrupt figures from the Big Center out of necessity. Later, these same figures started to ask him for big favors. Chief among these favors was the creation of the “secret budget”—a multi-billion-dollar slush fund buried within the federal budget’s rapporteur amendments, known as “RP9.” This mechanism allowed congressional allies to channel funds to pet projects while concealing both the requestors’ identities and bypassing technical oversight requirements. In effect, it became a sophisticated vote-buying operation that shielded the Big Center from scrutiny.
Since the 1988 Constitution, the Brazilian National Congress has been controlled by the Centrão. They thrive in an electoral system where local politicians strike deals with representatives in Brasília, leveraging influence in the capital to secure budget funds and key appointments essential for building and sustaining power bases in states and municipalities. All of these arrangements are negotiated within political parties, which are large official organizations that must be recognized by the Electoral Justice in order to operate. The fundamental particle of Brazilian democracy is the party, not the individual. If you do not have a party, you do not exist. Because the bureaucratic process of creating a political party is onerous, costly, and a logistical nightmare, politicians prefer to join parties that already exist; if they become dissatisfied or their interests diverge, they simply move to a different one.
There are no independents. Party leaders maintain tight entry barriers against any serious threat to the establishment. Bolsonaro was a victim of this. He changed parties ten times, finally settling on the Liberal Party after failing to create his own party, Alliance for Brazil. In November 2021, at the end of the two-year deadline, the Alliance had 158,317 valid signatures, while 492,000 were required at the time for the party’s approval.
By 2022, Bolsonaro’s tenure had left the Right in ruins. Anyone with serious policy ideas wanted nothing to do with it. The Free Brazil Movement stood alone as the sole representative of thoughtful policy on the Brazilian political spectrum, but we faced a critical problem: we had no party of our own. When Kim Kataguiri, one of our founders, led the polls for São Paulo’s mayoral race, his own party blocked his candidacy. The message was obvious. Without a party, you remain hostage to the Big Center.
Bolsonaro, while still the sitting president and one of the most popular leaders in the country’s history, tried to create his own party, but didn’t get far. For anyone, it seemed obvious that we, so small compared to him, would never come close to creating a party.
We decided to try.
The Present
In 2023, we announced the creation of our own party—the Mission Party. New laws at the time had made the rules for official registration exceptionally strict. We needed to collect 547,455 valid signatures from at least nine states, meeting minimum quotas in each. Since many signatures are typically rejected during validation due to errors or duplications, we had to make sure that we got a lot of signatures and that they were all sound.
The results exceeded all expectations. While we only needed to meet quotas in nine states, we successfully reached them in all 27 federal units, breaking every record in the process. We secured 589,476 valid signatures and, had counting continued, the number would have been far higher. Nearly 200,000 additional signatures remained in the validation queue when the process ended.
We were methodical. Victor Couto, our 25-year-old Secretary General, spent weeks developing a “signatures CRM” to manage the entire process. Every signature collector had to register and upload their files by day’s end. The best-performing ones would climb up rankings and earn rewards. By digitalizing and gamifying the process, we made their work much easier and created incentives for volunteers to join. The best of them we hired.
We built our political organization as a closed system. All the elements necessary for a political movement—from ideas to theory, activist mobilization, and party candidacies—originate from and are directed by the executive core. We believe that outsourcing these elements, even though it may be much easier and faster, leads to deradicalization and prevents the movement’s agendas from remaining focused and direct.
Our magazine, Valete, is the brain of this ecosystem. We launched the magazine in January 2023 and it is already Brazil’s second-best-selling culture publication. It gives us a platform to bypass legacy press and popularize underdiscussed topics—from Argentine President Javier Milei’s ongoing war against Peronism to legal theories about how states should confront cartel-driven criminal threats.
Valete has since evolved beyond print. We transformed it into a streaming service, producing around five videos daily for 20,000 paid subscribers. This recurring revenue stream became the foundation for something larger: translating our ideas into actionable governance. We assembled teams of researchers to develop our proposals and policies into a coherent governing philosophy, one ready to be implemented when we win.
The Free Brazil Movement, our activist organization, has only grown since the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff. Currently, it is the largest and best-organized political group in the country. Once again, the logic of centralization prevails: the guidelines decided nationally must be followed by the volunteers, and digital content production must align with the movement’s principles.
Our digital presence has been transformative. Through an extensive online media network, we effectively promote our political theory and convert new supporters to our cause. This digital infrastructure also helps us quickly identify and remove opportunistic actors who operate in bad faith.
The Mission Party now completes our ecosystem, serving as the spearhead of our political action. All prospective candidates must complete our paid training program and pass aptitude tests before running under our banner. This rigorous process ensures mutual loyalty—just as we demand their complete dedication, we pledge our unwavering support in return. Unlike Brazil’s corrupt, ideologically bankrupt major parties that treat politicians as mere pawns in parliamentary numbers games, we stand firmly behind our representatives and their specific causes.
The key to victory in 21st-century representative democracies is this: do not treat your political movement as just one actor within a broader network—like “populist left” or “tech right”—but as a monopoly grounded in intellectual and technological superiority. If your project is truly radical and ambitious, you cannot outsource any part of your organization.
Generate your own funding, develop your own theory, spread it through your own media channels, and mobilize your own activists. Do not dismiss any new idea, and choose your staff not for their public-sector experience but for their loyalty and alignment of vision. Most importantly, develop your own public policies and meticulously plan their implementation through research and data analysis—and if this requires money, spend it. Power is recursive. Keep in mind that creating a party is, in essence, creating a smaller-scale state.
By doing this, you will see that the gravitational pull created by the grandeur of your movement will naturally attract the best minds and the best personalities. Don’t waste them; welcome them in the best way possible and make the “party experience” inside your organization significantly more engaging than that of other political parties.
The Future
Our government plan is contained in The Yellow Book: a collection written by more than one hundred researchers that explains our vision for the future, diagnosing the major problems in Brazil and offering a precise step-by-step manual for solving them.
For Brazil’s critical situation to be addressed, it is necessary to chart a path with difficult and risky, yet essential, steps. Our problems are not unlike a cancer in metastasis: it is not enough to remove a single tumor, rather the organism must restore metabolic health. Since conventional solutions for Brazil’s public issues would not work, our plan will take place in three stages.
First, Brazilian criminal organizations are no longer mere gangs, but large conglomerates that move billions of dollars and act as sovereigns of their own fiefs. Those who live in the favelas live under enemy-occupied territory. Cartels conduct trials under their own penal code, have a standing army, and levy taxes from a population held hostage. De jure, they are delinquent gangs. De facto, they are foreign bodies invading Brazil.
Decades of soft-on-crime policies and decarceration have brought us to the current state of affairs: 50,000 homicides per year, frequent robberies and thefts, and millions of people living under cartel jurisdiction. We are going to flip the script. Cartels will undergo extraordinary criminal processes, wherein they will be judged not as citizens, but as terrorists. ISIS had no right to habeas corpus and neither will they.
As President, I will give the cartels a formal declaration of war.
We will reoccupy not only our lost territory, but also the hearts and minds of our people. Favela pacification will take place alongside a “de-cartelization” campaign pioneered by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. We will erase gang symbolism, ban pro-cartel music, and humiliate narco bosses. What will follow this war will be a thorough architectural and educational overhaul. We will destroy the favelas and develop planned neighborhoods with proper sewage systems, infrastructure, schools, and housing.
Second, the wages and pensions of government officials are the most serious strain on our national budget. Our opponents say we are more radical than Milei, but we are just commonsense people. In 2028, there won’t be enough money to keep the lights on. We are in dire need of fiscal and administrative reforms. We cannot make concessions to bureaucrats whose jobs could be deprecated by a single line of code. We have an infertile, aging population and unprofessional, low-value human capital. With this in mind, any solution must focus on the remaining droplets of talented youth that we still have.
The management of Brazilian states and municipalities will also be meticulously reviewed. Today, states that produce the least are “rewarded” with money from the federal budget—taken, of course, from the richest and most industrialized areas. What this means, effectively, is that we are taking money from research laboratories and industrial parks in São Paulo to pay the salaries of thousands of low-ranking public servants in Fortaleza. This inversion of meritocracy—this kakistocracy—will end under our government.
Spending will be reallocated according to returns on investment. Insolvent or deficient municipalities will be merged with their nearest financially stable neighbors and placed in a development program requiring mayors to meet specific goals to restore municipal productivity. States in economic calamity will be dissolved and put under the rule of Federal special committees. We will abolish the Free Economic Zone of Manaus, which costs us about 6% of all federal tax expenditures and generates near-zero profits, and create special economic zones in technologically-capable and geographically-blessed cities like Recife, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro.
Third, once Brazil rebuilds its administrative and bureaucratic framework, we will embark on the long and onerous path towards industrialization and global competitiveness. For one, our defense industry represents one of the country’s greatest untapped opportunities. Brazil was once the world’s sixth-largest exporter of military equipment. Today, our global market share has dwindled to almost nothing. Our aircraft manufacturer Embraer, the third-largest in the world behind only Boeing and Airbus, will spearhead our rearmament efforts. This successful company has so far succeeded in spite of Brazil, not because of Brazil. As the world’s largest producer of regional jets, renowned for quality and reliability, it will receive our full legal and financial backing.
Petrobras, Brazil’s national oil company, is a key pillar of the economy. The Campos and Santos basins drove production from 1.1 million barrels per day in 2000 to 2.7 million in 2024, but both are expected to peak by 2030, a concern for the future of Brazil’s energy. The Equatorial Margin in the far north offers a promising alternative, with lighter, higher-quality crude oil similar to Venezuela’s.
Environmental regulations, often influenced by foreign-funded NGOs, pose the primary obstacle to expanding exploration. We will invest substantially in Petrobras, maximizing extraction from new fields while building refineries that can both meet domestic demand and generate significant export revenue.
Brazilian agribusiness has evolved into a global force. Through the innovations of the state-owned Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA), the once-barren Cerrado has transformed into a technological marvel, with farms operated by satellite-guided tractors, internet-connected sensors, and genetically engineered crops adapted to tropical conditions. These are high-tech laboratories disguised as fields. Born from the necessity of overcoming poor soils and harsh climate, Brazil pioneered precision agriculture with remarkable results: agribusiness exports reached $164 billion in 2024—nearly half our total exports—with China and Saudi Arabia now dependent on Brazilian soy and poultry.
We will further modernize this sector, ensuring agribusiness has every tool needed to maximize production. By investing in EMBRAPA’s research capabilities and dramatically expanding Brazil’s inland railway network, we will transform our agriculture and livestock sectors into genuine geopolitical assets. True sovereignty demands more than productive capacity; it requires control over the entire supply chain, from seed to port. Once these most obvious sectors of Brazilian advantage are smoothly up and running, we will turn our attention to establishing a Brazilian foothold in the advanced technologies and industries of the future too.
In the early twentieth century, waves of Italians, Germans, and Japanese arrived in a frenzied scramble for patches of land in this country. Among them came Stefan Zweig, one of pre-war Europe’s most widely translated authors, who quietly claimed his own corner in the city of Petrópolis. There, in 1941, he penned his seminal work Brazil: Land of the Future. Now, as lost decade follows lost decade, we approach the centenary of what seems an increasingly misguided prophecy.
Yet, at heart, we continue to believe in the potential Zweig saw so long ago. Though this land ungratefully spurns those who love it most, we persist, stubbornly committed to the Herculean task of fulfilling this dream. Should we come to power, we will ignite a cultural and technological revolution in Brazil. But I know well that plans rarely unfold as intended.
The 2026 election may disappoint our most optimistic members. By nature, I am taciturn and irredeemably pessimistic. Still, when I consider what we have accomplished over the past decade, I cannot escape the feeling that our victory is inevitable. Our supporters are young, aged fifteen to thirty. Our enemies are very old and are teetering on senility. Time is on our side and we are very patient. When Lula and Bolsonaro are gone, we will be the ones to pick up the pieces and build Brazil from scratch.