Bolsonarismo Returns: Brazil's First Round Election w/ Felipe Antunes de Oliveira

Show notes

On October 4, Brazilians voted in the first round of a general election, and for the first time since 1998 Lula did not finish first. Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, eldest son of the imprisoned former president, took 47 percent to Lula's 45, forcing a runoff on October 25, while the Bolsonaro family's Liberal Party became the largest force in both houses of Congress. Two days after the vote, Felipe Antunes de Oliveira joins us to walk through the electoral map, explain why the left did so badly, and look ahead to the second round and what a Flávio Bolsonaro presidency would mean for Brazil, the region, and Brazil's place in the world. Part two will follow the runoff.

About the guest. Felipe Antunes de Oliveira is a senior lecturer in International Relations at Queen Mary University of London and a coordinating editor at Latin American Perspectives. Outside the academy, he has served as a diplomat for the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and as General Coordinator of International Financial Affairs at the Brazilian Ministry of Finance. He is the author of Dependency and Crisis in Brazil and Argentina (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024). The views expressed in this episode are his own and do not represent the Brazilian government.

Links

• Felipe Antunes de Oliveira, Dependency and Crisis in Brazil and Argentina: A Critique of Market and State Utopias (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024): https://upittpress.org/books/9780822948100/
• Felipe's faculty page at Queen Mary University of London: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/politics/staff/profiles/antunesdeoliveirafelipe.html

From the Latin American Perspectives archive

• Brazil under Bolsonaro, Vol. 50, No. 1 (January 2023), eds. Tulio Ferreira and James N. Green: https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/lapa/50/1
• Armando Boito, "The Rise of Fascism in Brazil," Vol. 50, No. 1 (January 2023): https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221140419
• Brazil: Assessing the Past Half Decade, Vol. 50, No. 5 (September 2023), ed. Paulo Simões: https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/lapa/50/5
• Brazil and the Changing Music of the Spheres of Influence, Vol. 53, No. 2 (March 2026): https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/lapa/53/2

Latin American Perspectives is a peer-reviewed journal publishing critical scholarship on Latin America, its people, politics, and culture. Subscribe to the journal: https://www.sagepub.com/shop/subscribe-to-a-journal/latin-american-perspectives-200875#subscribe . Annual print subscriptions start at $74, with discounted rates for students and LASA members.

Hosts Alexander Scott and Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli speak with Daniel Gunnar Kressel about his book Hispanic Technocracy: From Fascism to Catholic Authoritarianism in Spain, Argentina, and Chile, 1945–1991 (Cambridge University Press, 2025). Kressel argues that fascism did not simply die in 1945 but mutated, and that across Franco's Spain, Onganía's Argentina, and Pinochet's Chile a distinct post-fascist school of thought became state ideology, fusing Catholic spiritual mission, authoritarian rule, and early neoliberal economics. The conversation begins with Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora lecturing Chileans and Argentines in 1965 on a Spain that had supposedly left ideology behind for pure development, and why "bureaucratic authoritarianism" misses what these regimes were. Kressel traces the Hispanista networks that drew Argentine and Chilean rightists to Franco's Madrid in the 1950s as a third position against both Washington and Moscow; the rise of Opus Dei, whose ministers displaced the Falange, presided over the Spanish "economic miracle," and insisted they were realists without ideology; Onganía's ambition to be a Franco "in the most literal way"; and the ideological roots of Pinochet's terror and the subsidiary state that followed it. They close with the authoritarian nostalgia of Vox, José Antonio Kast, and Javier Milei, the corporatist model that never existed outside the regimes' own propaganda, and why Spain, Argentina, and Chile's democratic transitions came from the street, not from the technocrats.

Daniel Gunnar Kressel is a Koch History Centre Fellow at the University of Oxford (Wadham College) and a historian of modern Latin America and Spain whose work examines transnational right-wing ideologies, networks, and identities during the Cold War. He is the author of Hispanic Technocracy (Cambridge University Press, 2025) and José Antonio Primo de Rivera in Latin America: The Pursuit of a Fascist Usable Past during the Cold War (Routledge, 2025).

Get the book: Hispanic Technocracy: From Fascism to Catholic Authoritarianism in Spain, Argentina, and Chile, 1945–1991 is available now from Cambridge University Press: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/hispanic-technocracy/2C84722CD535BB901058E4748E10065B]

More from Daniel Kressel:

José Antonio Primo de Rivera in Latin America (Routledge, 2025) https://www.routledge.com/Jose-Antonio-Primo-de-Rivera-in-Latin-America-The-Pursuit-of-a-Fascist-Usable-Past-during-the-Cold-War-1939-1989/Kressel/p/book/9781032709796

Faculty page at Oxford: https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-daniel-gunnar-kressel]

Follow on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, TikTok, and Bluesky. Subscribe and rate on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or preferred listening app. Annual print subscriptions start at $74, with discounted rates for students and LASA members.

Andrew Smolski returns to the podcast to continue ouron going conversation on US imperialism and Cuba, recorded September 11, 2026. We discuss labor and neoliberalization in Mexico, the Cuban economy from the Special Period to the present, the new sanctions on Cuba and the US oil agreement with Venezuela, and the return of a nineteenth-century colonial politics in the hemisphere.

Andrew Smolski is an assistant professor of rural sociology in the Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education at the Pennsylvania State University and a coordinating editor of Latin American Perspectives. His research examines imperialism, development, and agrarian change in Cuba and Mexico.

Links

• Part 1: "US Imperialism and Cuban Development w/ Andrew Smolski" (July 2026)
• Joana Salém Vasconcelos, Agrarian History of the Cuban Revolution (Brill 2023 / Haymarket 2024)
• Hannah Garth, Food in Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal (Stanford University Press, 2020)
• Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics (2025)
• Christopher Chase-Dunn et al. "Trade Globalization since 1795: Waves of Integration in the World-System" (2000)
• Current issue of Latin American Perspectives
• US State Department, "Further Sanctions on Cuba's Elites, Financial Channels, and Resource Exploitation Apparatus" (September 3, 2026)

Subscribe to Latin American Perspectives: https://www.sagepub.com/shop/subscribe-to-a-journal/latin-american-perspectives-200875#subscribe