How a strong messaging strategy helped defeat Brazil’s Bolsonaro

This article How a strong messaging strategy helped defeat Brazil’s Bolsonaro was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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This is part of a series of interviews with experienced organizers and movement thinkers on ways to defend and expand democracy amidst the rising authoritarian tide globally.

The Trump phenomenon in the United States has sharp parallels with the powerful right-wing populist movement in Brazil. Under the leadership of Jair Bolsonaro, who won the presidency in 2019, that movement trampled previous democratic norms, denied climate change, downplayed the risks of COVID-19 and fostered violence against vulnerable communities.  

Often called “The Trump of the Tropics,” Bolsonaro lost his re-election effort in January 2023, and quickly followed in Trump’s footsteps by refusing to concede defeat. His supporters then tried to occupy and attack government buildings in the capital, while also calling on the military to intercede.  

Thanks to a civil society made strong by pro-democracy organizers and activists, their tactics did not succeed — and popular left-wing leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva returned to the presidency. 

Pedro Telles was one of those organizers who helped rally Brazilians against authoritarianism. During the last election campaign, he co-founded Quid, an organization that battled the far-right on the communications and civic engagement front. Telles then went on to work directly for Lula’s campaign as a strategist. After winning, he joined the transition team that helped set up the new administration.

Since January, Telles has been working on a new venture he helped to create called D-Hub, which offers support in the form of trainings and network-building to groups around the world resisting authoritarianism. In this interview, he explains the importance of learning, implementing and sharing communications strategies that increase participation in the struggle to stop the far right.

First of all, I want to congratulate you for being so victorious in stopping Bolsonaro from returning to power.

Thank you, but that honor goes to the whole of Brazilian civil society. It was the very definition of collective struggle.

It’s only collective struggle that really delivers democracy, right? But since people play so many roles in a mass movement, I’m interested in learning about yours. So, what role did you play in stopping Bolsonaro and how did you do it?

I think the most fundamental decision I made with a few people was the decision to build Quid, which was a new organization we set up in 2020. At the time, I was working as chief of staff for a mandate in the Sao Paulo state assembly. It was an activist mandate, a collective mandate. I had co-founded a movement dedicated to electing activists, and we brought nine activists together to run for a single seat in the state assembly in Sao Paulo. It was a collective candidacy, and this group got loads of votes. So, I was there as chief of staff for this group. Then COVID hit and the whole of the world’s congresses and governments pretty much stopped working the way they used to and became just online meetings. At the same time, Bolsonaro was refusing to buy the vaccines for COVID. He was one of the deniers. His supporters were literally shooting fireworks at the Supreme Court. He was kind of testing ground for a potential coup, and he was just sustaining his popularity despite all this. 

I’ve been a campaigner forever. So, I started talking to other friends of mine who were campaigners — working either on civil society or elections — and we came to the realization that this guy and his group are clearly ahead of us in campaigning strategies and tactics. It looks like they’ve got a hang of the capacity to do comms and engage in civic engagement. They are so well-positioned and ahead of us in terms of comms capacity and of shaping narratives that — unless we have a very solid operation in terms of comms to fight it back — most likely they’ll continue to win. 

We weren’t the only ones coming to this conclusion, but most NGOs in social movements already had too much on their hands. If you were working with climate change, this guy was burning the Amazon. If you were working on public security, he was easing gun access and spreading firearms around the country. If you were working on gender violence, rates were just going higher. Everybody was dealing with emergencies on their agendas — so nobody had the bandwidth to focus on the comms challenge. What we said was, “Let’s just leave our jobs and set up a new organization fully focused on this.” So we created Quid with the objective of catching up with the most advanced strategies, tactics and technologies in comms.

We knew it was going to be a complex operation because we had already studied those guys and we knew it wasn’t just viral content. There was a lot of very good research behind what they were doing — very good paid media, very good organizing. It’s engineered to feel like it’s fully organic, but there’s a lot of money behind it and a lot of strategy. We spent several months learning — literally reading Steve Bannon’s books and Dominic Cummings’s blog to see what those guys did. The one thing they’re very good at is explaining and teaching others from their field what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. They’re better than us at that. So we just spent some time studying those guys and also studying folks who had faced them in the U.K. and in the U.S. Then we spent several more months  testing ideas, testing methodologies, testing technologies — before feeling confident that we were ready to make a meaningful contribution. So that was kind of a two-and-a-half-year cycle, until the election when Bolsonaro was fortunately defeated. 

How did you reach wide swaths of the Brazilian public with your comms campaigns? Did you have to build up followings first? 

In terms of building an audience, a part of what we did was more organic, or in coordination with other networks and players from the field. Here we were also emulating what the other side does because, today, the way you shape public opinion is not by having a single big outlet — it’s by having a coordinated ecosystem of channels. 

There are pretty much three levels of influence when it comes to comms shaping the public’s mindset and the way they see the world. At the closer level it’s the communities you belong to — so a WhatsApp group for your family, a Facebook group for your school or the church you go to. It can be online and offline. It’s communities you belong to — that’s what’s most influential and what really shapes your opinion the most. 

At the second level, there are channels or pages that you follow or read. They’re not communities you belong to, but you choose to read them. So it’s an Instagram page about politics, humor or whatever that you follow. It’s a newsletter through which you get your news every day in the morning. It’s a podcast you’re used to listening to every week. 

Then, at the third level, it’s channels and people you don’t actively follow, but people close to you follow. They often cross your timelines or your conversations, because some of them will share it. So it’s people who are influential to you indirectly, but are crossing your life because people you know are sharing that with you somehow. 

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The way it works — the way Bolsonaro built his ecosystem (and also Trump) — is that when a person opens their WhatsApp family group their uncle is going to be sharing something that came from the Bolsonaro group he belongs to, and they’re going to send that in the family group. Then, when you turn on the television, you’re going to be watching news, and someone is going to be saying the same thing on Fox News — or you’re going to turn on the radio and someone’s going to be saying the same thing on that radio show. And then, when you are in the street, there’s going to be someone talking about it as well. So, when you have this effect, where you’re getting multiple points of validation for the same subject, you figure it must be true — and you get influenced. 

That’s how those guys operate nowadays, and it builds on what people from other places like Russia and China have been perfecting for many years as well. 

And how do you compete with the other side, which might be using more nefarious ways of spreading their message online?

What we tried to do at Quid — and what we believe more people should try to do too — was build our own ecosystem. It’s worth saying that this is not really a problem that any single organization can solve alone. It really is an ecosystem thing. If you look at the way Trump operates, it’s different players that are loosely coordinated, but when there’s big things, they get together and just push stuff. The same thing for Bolsonaro. 

But at Quid we had some campaigns that were very focused on building WhatsApp followings and Telegram followings. The main ask was: “Come and join this WhatsApp group.” It wasn’t: “Sign this petition.” It wasn’t: “Pressure this congressperson.” It was: “Are you also against this, or against Bolsonaro’s policies, or whatever? Join this WhatsApp group. We’re going to be organizing here.” So we started building some WhatsApp following through this, and eventually I had the opportunity to contribute to Lula’s campaign in the same way. 

At the same time, we were also building a social media following at Quid. The most effective way to do it, we learned, was not to build it from scratch. It was buying it — not buying ads or followers, but buying entire profiles or channels. We didn’t want to talk to people who were already convinced that far-right ideas or Bolsonaro’s policies were a problem. They’re already against it. We want to talk to the movable middle — people who were undecided. We did loads of research to find out who these audiences were, and also got information from research that was already out there. There were a few subgroups in society that were more likely to lean more towards progressive ideals and democratic values, even if they were not yet doing so. And we studied what these people consume — and it was mostly entertainment: celebrity gossip, entertainment, humor and trivia. 

Then we started approaching pages with big followings on these topics in Brazil and asking if they would sell advertising on their page. Many people would say yes. Then we did a follow up question, which was, “Would you sell the whole page?” And many did. We learned that this is a new market, still informal in many ways, and it’s a growing market – already explored by the advertising industry and by the far-right as well. And so, in a relatively short time, we built an ecosystem with dozens of pages on different platforms, adding up to millions of followers. 

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We didn’t pivot these pages to talk about politics suddenly, because that doesn’t work. What we did is an approach called “putting broccoli on the rice.” These pages would continue to talk about gossip, celebrity news, whatever, but every five or 10 posts there’d be a post like this: “This celebrity is angry at the price of electricity” or “That celebrity broke up with a boyfriend because the boyfriend likes Bolsonaro.” This sort of stuff, and always real news and content that did not cross legal or ethical boundaries. Ensuring this is crucial for us not to make the problem worse. So you start putting political content inside the traditional content of the page, but only sometimes. You just start putting broccoli on the rice, and whenever you get closer to critical moments — like a crisis or the proximity of a voting date — you can increase the amount of broccoli without that becoming a problem to your audience, because the whole society is talking about that. There’s more space for you to push harder on this sort of stuff. 

So, at Quid, we were building campaigns that were both organically in the WhatsApp group, or through buying channels, or sometimes through hiring influencers for big pushes around critical things. We just built this ecosystem effect in which people were getting messages on their phone, on their Instagram account and through influencers talking about it — all at the same time. That was a key part of the strategy of what we did, and what we shared with others as we learned.

Are there any other takeaways from the last election that you think activists in other countries like the U.S. can learn from?

Going beyond Quid’s experience, there were a few more things that were critical to what happened in Brazil. One is opposition unity. I think you’ve got this in the U.S. to a large extent already [in terms of the wide range of opposition to Trump]. But in Brazil we have dozens of parties and Lula got, as his candidate for vice president, a guy who was historically one of his main political opponents. They got together only because Bolsonaro was a threat. Nothing else would lead these two guys to get together. This opened political space for civil society to do the same. Loads of groups in civil society that wouldn’t usually coordinate or work together changed their approach, as if saying, “Okay, if those guys are doing that together, we can work together as well.” 

I talked to someone close to Lula about this, and I asked him, “What was going on behind the scenes? How did they manage to pull off this very unusual political alliance?” He said that it was actually a kind of a two-level negotiation. The second level was Lula negotiating with this guy for them to get together, but the first level was Lula negotiating internally with the Workers’ Party and other key allies — to convince them that this was needed. There was a lot of energy put in by heavyweight players on the left in Brazil to internally discuss with their peers, saying, “Hey guys, we know this is complicated. This is tough. It’s unusual, but we need this.” Only when it was pretty much solid among Lula’s inner circle and closer political groups did he take the step of reaching out to the other guy. So this sort of two-layer organizing for opposition was one critically important piece. 

Another thing that was interesting was the emulation of the fandoms model. Celebrity fandoms are one of the most engaging social dynamics out there. People really are diehard fans for folks they believe in, and they will do anything for them. The way fandoms are built is quite different from the way we usually do politics. They are very focused on the human side of the celebrities. Let’s say it’s a singer, for example. It’s not just about their music or the new album, it’s about who their friends were when they were little, who their partners are and the sort of the human dimension of everything. It’s quite a lot about gossip and behind the scenes. I’m not just showing you this person on stage, I’m showing you this person before they got on stage. I’m showing them rehearsing — all that sort of sort and loads of fun, thematic content that’s cool to engage with. 

In several countries, you’re seeing politics lean more towards fandom models to expand the reach of a politician and their comms. If you look at the Move Forward party in Thailand, the center of their strategy was to build fandom-style movements around their main candidates, and it really worked. So a core part of what we did in Lula’s campaign was build Lula’s fandom. We needed to reach a broader group of people who were already leaning toward liking Lula, but who weren’t following political content, who wouldn’t engage with it. So we just built this kind of fandom for Lula, and it really worked — like it really became an important part of the campaign. 

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The other side of this is building hatedoms, which is pretty much a fandom, but against someone. So a hatedom against Bolsonaro was built by a Brazilian group of activists following the same logic. It was about Bolsonaro not just as a politician, but his personal side. It had loads of memetic content and “have you heard about this?” as well.

Another important element that we saw in Brazil was the effort to demonetize extremism, particularly on social media. Monetization is one of the dimensions in which the far right is ahead of us. They have learned how to make money out of their organizing, especially online organizing. They do in three ways: One is through selling ads on their big fake news portals and social media channels, which get loads of traffic. That’s the easiest one. The second one is making money off of the platforms, like YouTube, which starts paying you when your audience gets above a certain threshold. The third one is making money off of your base by getting subscriptions or by getting people to buy merchandise. They really are making a lot of money from these three things — much more than democracy defenders and progressives across the world. 

So, one important piece of the work was getting organizations to pressure Big Tech and advertisers to stop funding these guys. They would say, “Hey, your money is going to political extremists. Your money is going to people who are breaking the law. Your money is going to people who are pushing hate speech, and you’ve got to stop.” Many advertisers don’t really know where their ads are going, due to how online advertising works. But once they know, they can whitelist or blacklist specific websites and pages. They can say, “I want to make sure I’m here”, or “I do not want to be here.” So a core part of these campaign efforts was just telling companies: “Blacklist these pages here from your ads because they’re pushing hate speech” or going to Big Tech and saying “Your platform is being used by extremists that violate the law or your terms of service, and there is a responsibility to take them offline.” That was important. It really took a toll on those guys here in Brazil. Millions and millions of dollars were demonetized from these guys through this sort of effort.

Finally, we’re still seeing online and offline organizing as separate things — and that’s just wrong. The most effective ways to do organizing today is to blend online and offline from the very beginning of our strategies. The most interesting example of this is from India. Recently, Rahul Gandhi, who is the opposition leader, walked across India twice. He went from North to South, and then he went from West to East, on a pilgrimage with his followers. From the start, this very traditional offline organizing strategy was fully connected with an online strategy to organize folks on platforms like WhatsApp. And I think this sort of integration is critical to success these days. It didn’t defeat Modi, but it really helped weaken him.

Tell us about your work with D-Hub?

So my job right now, since the beginning of this year, is with D-Hub, which is a new initiative dedicated to network building, capacity building and strategy support for democracy defenders internationally. We’re coming from the understanding that authoritarians have infrastructure like international gatherings, teams of experts traveling across the world to help their allies, shared intelligence and strategies — and we need to get better at organizing internationally as well.

We realized we don’t have enough of this sort of stuff for our side. We’re missing the sort of global infrastructure of like, “Hey, I got this problem in my country. Who can help me?” “Those guys can help you. Go talk to them. They’re going to connect you with the right folks. They’re going to give you some training, whatever.” So that’s what D-Hub is meant to do. 

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Have you run into any challenges when it comes to sharing and translating lessons from one country to another?

Sometimes contexts are just different, and the way you address this is by making sure you have enough examples from enough parts of the world. 

In my experience when talking digital organizing with people from African countries, it has been quite common to hear: “That looks pretty cool, but in my country, the authoritarian leader will just cut off internet access. So I just cannot build a strategy that requires internet access as a central element. Please bring me something else.” That’s a structural need that is not as common as in other regions, while other regions have their particular needs as well. So, you need examples from other countries where this is common to be able to help those guys.

The second thing is to focus less on the details of a particular case and more on the key insights. Oftentimes when people get an idea of what to do in their country it isn’t from the depth of a case study. It’s just about the spark of insight, the new way of looking at something. So I wouldn’t initially suggest 15-page case studies. It’s more about distilling the core of the strategy, or the key innovation, and how it can be inspiring to others. If someone does end up wanting to do exactly what another group did, fine — here’s the detailed case study, or the phone number of the person from that group. Just talk to them for two hours, and they’re going to help you out.

The third element here is one I learned from folks who convinced me that I was wrong. Someone was trying to give a fundraising training, and my response was: “I understand this, but in Brazil, we don’t really have a small donors culture, and people don’t really donate that much money. I don’t think it’s going to fly here, just because this was done like that in the U.K.” And then the trainer’s response was: “I hear this all the time, but when people actually sit down and try it, they get surprising results. So it may not be the same as it was in the U.K., but try it out — because I’ve heard the same thing said by loads of people who thought something wouldn’t work. Then they tried it anyway and found meaningful success.”

To bring it back around to Brazil, how does the fight against the far right and authoritarianism in Brazil look now going forward?

There’s definitely a chance that they’re coming back to power. One important mindset / linguistic limitation we have now — not just in Brazil, but in other places — is that we often refer to the phenomenon we’re dealing with as Bolsonarism, Trumpism or whatever the leader’s name is. It makes sense since they were in power, but the limitation is you end up focusing your mindset and strategies on that one individual. They are, of course, a critical player — and if you take them out of the game, it is a huge advancement for our cause — but they are, to a large extent, a product of a context, rather than its creator. 

We’re facing this in Brazil. It’s unlikely that he’s going to come back because he’s legally barred from running. The only chance he has seems to be if he manages to get a pardon, which is highly unlikely because we don’t think the Supreme Court would pardon him — or that he will be able to pull this off some other way. However, the movement that got him elected is still out there. 

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The main person in this movement besides Bolsonaro is the state governor of Sao Paulo, Tarcísio Gomes de Freitas. This guy is a Bolsonaro ally 100 percent. He’s a very skilled politician. He’s a senior guy, and he’s blending what he learned from Bolsonaro with a bit of what they’re learning from folks like Vitor Orbán in Hungary. So he’s much more polite than Bolsonaro was. He doesn’t lash out. He looks more reasonable, like an Orbán or an Erdoğan [in Turkey]. He’s also drawing a bit from the playbook from Nayib Bukele, who is the El Salvador dictator and should actually be looked at as a successful case study for the other side. Bukele’s main approach has been to be very tough on crime. He drastically reduced criminality just by pretty much arresting everyone and killing indiscriminately, but he’s getting loads of public support because criminality really went down at a very high cost for human rights.

Tarcísio is also doing a bit of this. He’s been piloting police operations that are very brutal and are killing and arresting loads of people without the due legal process. He’s getting popularity out of this. So this guy is kind of drawing from different playbooks, and he’s a Bolsonaro protege. He’s most likely the one who’s going to be facing Lula in the upcoming elections — and there’s a real chance he wins.

The main challenge we have in Brazil is a natural consequence of defeating Bolsonaro — I’m pretty sure you face this in the U.S. as well — and it’s people just going back to business as usual. You go, “Okay, that problem was sorted. I’ll go back to my regular agenda at my NGO or movement.” And then three years pass and you say, “Oh, they actually didn’t go away. They actually are still here, and they may actually win it again.” 

So the question is how do we keep the guard up — and how do we understand that this is not just an electoral problem, this is a structural, political struggle that we’re going through here. If you just focus on winning elections, you’re losing the bigger picture. We have to focus on this again and make sure that we’re not leaving them enough room to grow.

This article How a strong messaging strategy helped defeat Brazil’s Bolsonaro was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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