📣 Outsider pitch

A small plane crossed Copacabana Beach last week towing a banner with one question: “Who is Renan Santos?” The advertising strategy reflects the uphill battle: per Datafolha, 73% of Brazilians said they did not recognize the man currently running third for president.

On Thursday, Santos answered the question himself, in English, before a room of foreign diplomats in Brasília. He was the third guest in “Debating Brazil,” a closed-door series hosted by The Brazilian Report and Novo Selo Comunicação that brings presidential hopefuls before the diplomatic corps — after Chief Electoral Justice Kassio Nunes Marques and former Minas Gerais Governor Romeu Zema.

Santos, 42, has never held office. In 2014, he co-founded the Free Brazil Movement (MBL), an internet-native group that took part in a wave of street protests that fed Dilma Rousseff's 2016 impeachment. MBL backed Jair Bolsonaro in 2018, broke with him a year later and urged a null vote in 2022. His party, Mission, was registered just six months ago and holds one seat in the lower house. 

What it owns instead is distribution: 1.5 million Instagram followers and a base of young men. Atlas Intel put him third in May at 6.9%, far behind Lula's 47% and Flávio Bolsonaro's 34.3%, yet among voters under 24 he led the entire field at 36.1%.

Here are the main issues he raised during his Thursday remarks:

Santos framed public security not as policy but as "a war" against the drug cartels he says are killing over 40,000 people a year in Brazil, most of them young black men in the favelas. In the small towns he visits, he told the room, people no longer ask to be kept safe. “They are saying: ‘Kill [gang members].’”

The economic case was the connective tissue of the speech, and it was aimed squarely at the foreign capitals in the room. Santos argued that Brazil holds the inputs the West now needs to reduce its dependence on China — rare earths, the clean and abundant energy to power AI data centers, and the land for the infrastructure. He called this a second chance to close the gap it missed when it failed to reform during the China-driven commodity boom 20 years ago.

Brazil, he said, should be “smart enough” to avoid becoming submissive to either Washington or Beijing, and should refuse to be a mere extraction site. The goal he set out is to negotiate technology transfer and domestic processing — batteries, magnets, engine parts, medical equipment — rather than ship raw ore. 

He reached, repeatedly, for the language of leverage: half a ton of rare earths goes into an F-35, he noted, and he wants Brazil not only to supply the material but eventually to build its own aircraft and a “military-industrial complex.”

Two requests were addressed directly to the diplomats. The first was capital — for data centers, rare-earth processing, infrastructure and a centralized, AI-assisted overhaul of the public-health system (SUS), for which he cited collaborations involving Google, the UK's NHS and China.

The second was more unusual: immigration. Brazil has been “a victim of the brain drain” for decades, Santos said, and a cruel place for the ambitious. He asked the room to send human capital, invoking the early-20th-century waves of Portuguese, Japanese, German, Italian, Lebanese and Syrian migrants who, in his account, built capitalism in Brazil's south. 

He told the diplomats that interest is already there, claiming conversations with the US State Department and with American tech entrepreneurs curious about Brazil's resources.

Pressed on a structural problem — that even in a strong scenario his party will be small in a fragmented Congress where the low cost of opposition has made governing a nightmare for both Lula and Jair Bolsonaro — Santos says he has an answer to reform the political system.

His proposed remedy is a “Managerial Responsibility Law” that would tie congressional budgetary grants and party financing to development KPIs across areas like growth, health, education and sanitation. Mayors with poor scores would lose their political rights for eight years — a mechanism he acknowledged as “kind of Chinese.” His proposal would send federal commissaries to help small towns reach these KPIs.

While acknowledging investment and scientific ties, Santos returned repeatedly to a grievance he summarized as Europe “preaching” to Brazil over how it manages its forests and resources. He attacked what he called an “NGO dictatorship” — foreign-funded organizations that, in his telling, have blocked Brazilian development projects.

Brazil's Foreign Trade Chamber (Camex) on Tuesday voted to keep electrified-car kits flowing through customs duty-free for another six months. The renewed quota — USD 463 million, the same figure that lapsed in January — covers vehicles imported semi-assembled (SKD) or fully knocked down (CKD). 

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