BRAZIL 2026 - WHO VOTES BEFORE YOU DO?

When fear arrives before reality

It is still dark.

A woman opens her phone before getting out of bed. She needs to prepare breakfast, organize the children, and work out how to make the money last until the end of the month.

The first video says that her faith is under threat.

The second claims that children are in danger.

In the third, the political opponent is no longer presented as someone who thinks differently. They appear as an enemy of God, the family, and the very possibility of salvation.

She feels afraid.

Not because she is ignorant.

Not because she is incapable of understanding politics.

She feels afraid because she loves her children, believes in life after death, and does not want to lose what gives meaning, comfort, and hope to her existence.

That is precisely why her attention is so valuable.

Anyone who understands our deepest bonds does not need to explain a public policy. They can simply claim that everything we love will disappear if the other side wins.

On October 4, 2026, Brazilians will vote in the first round of the general elections. A possible second round will take place on October 25. The vote will be recorded on that day, but its preparation began much earlier, shaped by debt, churches, families, work, algorithms, absences, and fears accumulated over many years.

The central question is not only:

Who will you vote for?

Before that, we need to ask:

Who selected what would reach your attention before you made your choice?

The suspicion that continued to circulate

In 2014, Dilma Rousseff was reelected with 51.64% of valid votes, while Aécio Neves received 48.36%.

After the election, the PSDB requested an audit of the voting, counting, and result-totaling systems. The report found no evidence that software or votes had been altered or that ballot secrecy had been violated.

The facts were available.

But suspicion remained alive.

Doubt began to acquire a new political function. It did not need to prove that fraud had occurred. It was enough to repeat that something might be hidden.

It was enough to keep a crack open in collective trust.

In the years that followed, Jair Bolsonaro, then outside the central command of the major political parties, found in digital networks a structure capable of bypassing newspapers, broadcasters, and traditional party organizations.

The message could arrive through the family group.

Through the church.

Through a colleague at work.

Through someone who had helped when there was no food at home.

Research on Brazilian elections found widespread circulation of false content, manipulated images, and misleading narratives in public WhatsApp groups. Later studies showed that previously fact-checked claims continued circulating and that different platforms carried different versions of the same allegations.

When a message arrives through a trusted relationship, questioning it can feel like betraying one’s own group.

Flooding the space until truth cannot breathe

In 2018, Steve Bannon summarized a political communication strategy:

“The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

The purpose is not necessarily to make everyone believe the same lie.

It is to generate so many versions, accusations, scandals, and contradictions that no one can verify everything.

While journalists investigate one claim, ten others appear.

While one falsehood is corrected, attention has already been taken to another crisis.

The person does not end up convinced.

They end up exhausted.

The strategy exploits a human limitation: our attention has limits, and institutions also have limited time to verify events. When the information space is flooded, reality must compete with versions produced at industrial speed.

Then a dangerous phrase emerges:

“Everyone lies.”

From that point on, each group begins trusting only what confirms its own identity.

That is why we need to defend people who have been manipulated.

The deceived person is not the enemy.

They are someone whose faith, hope, anger, loneliness, or need has been transformed into political raw material.

Blaming only the person who shared the message hides the architecture that selected the content, rewarded the reaction, and profited from its circulation.

When God receives a party number

Brazil is constitutionally a secular State. This does not mean a State opposed to religion. It means that public power cannot establish churches, create dependence on them, or turn one particular faith into a condition for political belonging.

Secularism protects Christians.

It protects Afro-Brazilian religions.

It protects Indigenous spiritualities.

It protects people who have no religion.

But polarization tries to transform an election into a choice between God and Satan.

The 2022 Census recorded that 26.9% of Brazilians aged ten or older identified as Evangelical. These are millions of people belonging to different churches, social classes, regions, and interpretations of the Bible. There is no single Evangelical Body-Territory and no completely uniform Evangelical vote.

For many people, the church provides something the State has failed to provide.

Food.

Music.

Listening.

Support during illness.

Protection from violence.

The hope that death is not the end.

None of this should be ridiculed.

The problem begins when leaders turn that hope into an electoral threat. Research on Brazilian elections has documented situations in which opponents were associated with Satanism, hell, atheist communism, and evil spiritual forces.

Faith asks how to live with meaning.

Manipulation asks how to transform that search into a vote.

When a candidate claims to represent God, disagreeing with that candidate can seem more dangerous than disagreeing with an economic proposal.

The Constitution disappears.

The contaminated river disappears.

Debt disappears.

What remains is the fear of belonging to the wrong side of eternity.

A moral war that did not emerge from the territory

Since the beginning of colonization, European institutions have attempted to reorganize the peoples living in Brazil through religious conversion and control over labor, land, and customs.

Christianization was not only a spiritual encounter. At many points, it formed part of projects of territorial domination and the destruction of Indigenous ways of organizing life. Indigenous peoples resisted, negotiated, and recreated these relationships, but the colonial attempt to turn difference into inferiority left deep marks.

Today, moral issues continue to occupy much of political debate.

Family.

Sex.

Sin.

Weapons.

Religious enemies.

These matters may be important to many people. The problem arises when they cover the entire field of vision and prevent questions about material life:

Who controls the water?

Who owns the data?

Who receives the credit?

Who profits from mining?

Who remains with the waste?

Which Biome sustains this city?

Who works every day but still has no time to participate?

Without recognition of the Body-Territory, the population can spend years debating imported moral battles while profoundly local economic decisions are made far from public attention.

Left and right standing on the same ground

Left and right represent real political differences.

Policies associated with the left generally emphasize social protection, income, and labor rights. Right-wing projects tend to defend property, markets, security, and conservative values more strongly.

But neither of these European categories can fully represent Brazil’s Body-Territories.

The right may treat forest destruction and extractive expansion as an inevitable cost of progress.

The left may expand social programs without changing monetary structures that keep families indebted and dependent on private credit.

At the same time, successive Harvest Plans mobilize hundreds of billions of reais in credit for commercial agriculture. The announced amounts were R$516.2 billion for 2025–2026 and R$525.1 billion for 2026–2027. These sums are programmed credit and should not be confused entirely with subsidies, but they reveal the public capacity to mobilize resources when an activity is considered strategic.

We can ask:

If the State can create large financial architectures to produce and export, why does it seem impossible to create new money directly for citizens and territories?

Neuro Challenge Latam: imagine before voting

The Neuro Challenge Latam can begin without devices, laboratories, or political classification.

It can begin with a pause.

Before assessing a candidate, imagine a responsible State in which every person receives a Citizen Drex.

Not as an electoral favor.

Not as payment for obedience.

But as permanent, individual, and unconditional income capable of providing a foundation for food, housing, care, mobility, and participation.

Now imagine that Biome Income is also a reality.

The community receives resources because its forest produces water.

Because the mangrove reduces disasters.

Because the soil remains fertile.

Because biodiversity remains alive.

Because preservation has also begun to place money into circulation.

These two proposals are BrainLatam hypotheses. Brazil’s official Drex remains under development, with operations and end users simulated in the pilot; it does not currently function as universal citizen income.

After imagining your basic needs as less threatened, ask:

Under which political project could my well-being and the well-being of my community genuinely improve?

The purpose is not to search for a candidate who promises everything.

It is to observe who presents proposals capable of bringing this reality closer.

Who protects the water?

Who reduces dependence on debt?

Who returns resources to the community?

Who strengthens the secular State without persecuting faith?

Who creates conditions in which work does not destroy the Biome?

Who allows the population to participate after the election?

Who transforms fear into an enemy—and who transforms needs into policies?

The choice will remain with each voter.

The exercise merely changes the place from which that choice begins.

Instead of voting while imagining which group must be defeated, we can vote while imagining what kind of life we want to build.

The vote we can still recover

On election day, the voting machine will not ask which video frightened us.

It will not ask which pastor, influencer, businessperson, or algorithm reached us first.

It will record a choice.

But we can still recover what happens before that moment.

We can protect faith without handing it over to a party.

We can defend people who were deceived without defending the lie.

We can disagree without turning our neighbor into Satan.

We can look beyond left and right and ask what will happen to water, debt, work, and the Biome.

The first vote does not happen at the voting machine.

The first vote is attention.

Perhaps democracy begins when each Body-Territory can say:

My faith will not be used against my neighbor. My fear will not decide alone. My need will not be exploited. My territory will also participate in the future.

Essential references

Superior Electoral Court of Brazil. Calendar and General Rules for the 2026 Elections. 2026.

Superior Electoral Court of Brazil. TSE Plenary: PSDB Finds No Fraud in the 2014 Elections. 2015.

Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. 2022 Demographic Census: Religions—Preliminary Sample Results. 2025.

Constitution of the Federative Republic of Brazil. Article 19.

Lewis, M. Interview with Steve Bannon on the “flood the zone” strategy. 2018.

Reis, J. C. S. et al. A Dataset of Fact-Checked Images Shared on WhatsApp During the Brazilian and Indian Elections. 2020.

Hale, S. A. et al. Analyzing Misinformation Claims During the 2022 Brazilian General Election on WhatsApp, Twitter, and Kwai. 2024.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Social Media and Adolescent Health. 2024.

Montero, P.; Silva, A. Between Faith and Political Expression: Interactions Between Pastors and Evangelical Believers During the 2022 Elections in Rio de Janeiro. 2024.

Central Bank of Brazil. Drex Pilot. 2026.

Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock. Commercial Agriculture Harvest Plans 2025–2026 and 2026–2027.