Three months ago, I put a sentence at the top of this site: Nothing changes on its own. It changes when the structure changes. I wrote it thinking about people, companies, stories, everything we try to transform by touching only the surface. I wasn’t thinking about elections.
But on Sunday night, watching the count flip precinct by precinct, I realized the sentence had just found its clearest proof. It was never a bet that something would change. It was the explanation of why nothing would.
In the first round, it looked as if Brazil had turned. Flávio Bolsonaro finished ahead, with 47.03% of valid votes against Lula’s 45.16%. The president got about 3.3 million fewer votes than in the first round of 2022 and lost in more than 700 cities he had carried four years earlier. The country’s mood had shifted.
Three weeks later, Lula was re-elected to his fourth term.
Whoever is surprised is confusing mood with structure. Voters’ mood swings. The structure that decides what that mood can produce does not. And it was built, over two decades, to deliver exactly what we saw on Sunday.
The state as an electoral machine
A government that controls the budget, the cash-transfer programs, the state banks and thousands of appointed jobs doesn’t run in an election on equal terms. It runs with the machine switched on. Between the two rounds, abstention fell from 21.08% to 18.98%. Mobilization on that scale is not spontaneous. It has logistics, it has a network, it has someone paying for it.
The pact with the political system
The Workers’ Party learned to govern with the Centrão, with governors, with mayors who depend on federal money to balance their books. This arrangement has no ideology. It has interest. And the system’s interest is to keep whoever is already handing things out.
Judicial arbitration
In recent years, the high courts stopped being referees and became players. They decided who could run, and the opposition’s main name is out of the game. They decided what could be said, with the removal of content on social media. They decided the pace of the investigations that hit one side and the other. You don’t need to touch a single ballot box to tilt an election. It’s enough to set the field before the game begins.
The press as a gear
Every structure needs someone to narrate it. Much of Brazil’s mainstream media stopped watching power and started depending on it: official advertising money, ads from state companies, sponsorship from public banks, privileged access to those in charge. Whoever is paid by the state doesn’t bite the hand that feeds it. At most, it barks in the right direction.
The press became one more link in the transfer chain: money leaves the taxpayer, passes through the government and reaches whoever produces the official version of events. In return, one side’s scandal holds the front page for weeks; the other’s fits in a footnote.
All of this in a country where fewer and fewer people generate real wealth. Fewer and fewer produce, start businesses, export, innovate and pay the bill. More and more live off receiving: from the budget, the public contract, the earmark, the appointed job, the benefit, the advertising money. When the majority depends on the state to live, voting against the state becomes an act against one’s own livelihood.
The structure doesn’t need to convince anyone. It only needs to make everyone depend on it. And those who pay, an ever smaller minority, find out they don’t have enough votes to change those who spend.
Democracy as a stage set
What gets called a celebration of democracy is, strictly speaking, a ritual of confirmation. Voters go to the polls, choose, and the result comes out the same as always. There is an election, a count, a victory speech with the word “democracy” in large letters. There just isn’t alternation.
A democracy in which power never truly changes hands doesn’t need fraud. It only needs rules that favor those already inside.
The vote becomes the formality that legitimizes what the structure has already decided. It is the continuity of a power project with a seal of popular approval. Those who hand out keep handing out; those who are protected stay protected. Privileges are not threatened by the election. They are renewed by it, every four years, with our signature.
An opposition with no structural project
On the other side, the candidate changed, not the logic. The opposition still depends on a surname, a leader, a wave. A wave doesn’t bring down a structure. It breaks against it.
Without touching the beams
That is why Sunday’s result is not an accident. It is the normal functioning of a system that, until it is reformed in campaign-finance rules, in the size of the state machine, in the limits of the judiciary, in the way alliances are made and in the relationship between government and press, tends to reproduce itself. You can change the face on the ballot ten times. Without touching the beams, the house stays standing, with the same people living in it.
And four years from now, with everyone (except them) surviving, suffocated, a whole country mopping the floor with the tap running, creating nothing, with no political, technological or moral relevance, who will occupy the structure to keep perpetuating themselves in power? Who will sustain the corruption, draining our wealth and our future, with the seal of bought votes and of the discourse of sovereignty, of love having defeated hate, of democracy having been defended? The same people.
Because nothing changes on its own.