The political map emerging from the polls delivered an unmistakable message: the first-round election of governors aligned with the radical right in strategic states, the consolidation of the Liberal Party (PL) (external link) and the so-called “Bullet Caucus” in the National Congress (external link), and the expressive vote tally for Flávio Bolsonaro in the race for the Planalto Palace were not mere conjunctural accidents. They represent the explicit ratification of a popular mandate centered on a specific model of public order (external link).
Brazilian society (external link) made a deliberate choice for a public security agenda grounded in force, punitive expansion, and individual armament. However, this choice embodies a dramatic paradox.
Decades of criminological research and empirical evaluations demonstrate that the central proposals of this camp rarely deliver sustained reductions in crime rates—when they do not exacerbate the problem altogether.
Why, then, does the majority of the electorate continue to endorse this playbook? The answer requires confronting an uncomfortable fact: voting for punitivism does not stem from technical ignorance, but from a profound and accumulated disbelief in the answers offered by the progressive camp.
The punitive menu: from parliamentary rhetoric to government practice
The security project endorsed by the electorate articulates an integrated response across multiple branches of government. In Congress, the Parliamentary Front for Public Security translated its political muscle into concrete legislative victories. Chief among them are the passage of Law No. 14,843/2024 (external link), which repealed temporary prison furloughs for family visits and mandated criminological evaluations for sentence progression, and the fast-tracking of amendments that grant amnesty to unregistered firearms and ease the requirement to prove effective need (external link) for carrying firearms.
Emblematic bills are moving forward with the explicit backing of leaders such as Senator Flávio Bolsonaro (external link), rapporteur for measures aimed at expanding official firearm permits, and caucuses championing high-rhetorical-impact measures, such as chemical castration (external link) for convicted sex offenders, lowering the age of criminal responsibility (external link), and the criminalization of rural land occupations (external link) and social movements under terrorism definitions.
In the state executive branch, governors such as Tarcísio de Freitas in São Paulo and Cláudio Castro in Rio de Janeiro converted these guidelines into ostensive action. This materialized in the retreat from or resistance to the unrestricted deployment of body cameras on police uniforms (external link), the execution of operations with high lethality rates, such as Operation Escudo (external link) and Operation Verão on the São Paulo coast, and open challenges to the civilizing benchmarks established by the Federal Supreme Court in ADPF 635, the “ADPF das Favelas.”
The narrative sustaining this practice is simple: police authority must operate backed by broad “legal safeguards” (the exclusion of unlawfulness), criminals must be neutralized or incapacitated through rigorous imprisonment, while ordinary citizens must have the guaranteed right to fight back armed.
The chasm between public faith and criminological evidence
While this playbook carries overwhelming electoral appeal, in terms of factual effectiveness it clashes head-on with criminological data.
First, the thesis that loosening access to firearms prevents crime and reduces lethality finds no backing in research. On the contrary: the unregulated proliferation of licenses for categories such as hunters, sport shooters, and collectors (CACs) and regulatory rollbacks largely served to supply the arsenals of organized crime itself (external link). Legally acquired rifles and handguns were frequently diverted to criminal factions that control territories and terrorize populations.
Second, the strategy of mass incarceration and the asphyxiation of prisoners’ rights acts as an accelerator of organized crime. When the STF declared the Brazilian penitentiary system to be in an “Unconstitutional State of Affairs” under ADPF 347 (external link), it pointed to an undeniable reality: overcrowded, unsanitary, and degrading dungeons do not reform deviant trajectories; they function as union-like incubators for factions (external link).
By abolishing temporary furloughs for community reintegration and encumbering sentence progression with bureaucratic expert evaluations that the state lacks the material capacity to conduct, the new legislation keeps convicts under the daily domination of criminal syndicates. It is the faction, and not the state, that provides security, food, and protection inside the cells. By isolating prisoners even further from legitimate social spheres, their perpetual dependence on the factional network (external link) is cemented.
Finally, highly lethal repression in the peripheries and the suppression of external oversight mechanisms, such as uninterrupted operational body cameras, erode public trust in police institutions. Violent operations may produce immediate headlines projecting strength, but they rarely dismantle the financial and logistical core of criminal networks, while multiplying the toll in civilian and police lives.
The root of the choice: the exhaustion of progressive discourse
In the face of such compelling evidence, labeling the electorate’s preference as irrational is an analytical mistake. Voting for far-right candidates on public security reveals an understandable reaction to the failure of a competing model: profound disillusionment with the playbook presented by the progressive camp over recent decades.
Historically, the progressive camp approached crime through the lens of its structural causes: economic inequality, the absence of public social facilities, lack of educational opportunities, and the penal selectivity of the justice system. While sociologically sound, these explanations operate on a timeline that borders on irrelevance for those living with daily fear.
Telling a worker who had their cell phone stolen on the way home from work, or a small business owner extorted by criminal groups in a peripheral neighborhood, that the solution will come through socio-educational reforms and reducing inequality across generations sounds like negligence or cynicism.
Moreover, a widespread public perception has taken hold that the progressive camp operates with an inversion of ethical priorities. The discursive emphasis on procedural safeguards for inmates, restraint in the use of force, and human rights for the accused fueled the Bolsonarista narrative that the left protects the criminal and ignores the victim.
For years, conservative rhetoric skillfully exploited this asymmetry, contrasting the defenseless and unarmed “good citizen” with the criminal shielded by legal technicalities. The left has struggled—and continues to struggle enormously—to articulate a response that combines the non-negotiable defense of human rights with an uncompromising policy of victim protection and combat against concrete disorder in the streets.
Finally, there is the progressive inability to deal with authority. In much of the Brazilian left's formulation, the police apparatus is seen almost exclusively as an instrument of state oppression against marginalized populations. By abdicating from conceiving the police as a provider of an essential service, the progressive camp gave up on contesting public security forces. The vacuum was entirely occupied by the right (external link), which offered police officers moral recognition, corporatist representation in Parliament, and the promise of legal immunity.
Immediate order versus abstraction: lessons from the ballot box
The election results reflect a society weary of abstractions in the face of the collapse of its basic sense of peace. Far-right punitivism may not resolve violence according to the parameters of criminological science, but it offers something the progressive camp was unable to deliver: moral clarity, an embrace of the sense of urgency, and a practical sense of agency.
When the state manifestly fails to guarantee the monopoly on legitimate violence and public order, allowing citizens to acquire firearms is understood as the restoration of an elementary right to self-defense. When lenient laws appear to reward impunity, eliminating penal execution benefits sounds like the restoration of retributive justice. It is an intuitive, visceral response to social anomie.
The radical right's electoral victory in public security should not be read merely as the consolidation of an authoritarian agenda, but as an ultimatum from the ballot box to the inertia of the traditional debate. As long as the progressive camp is unable to formulate a security doctrine that integrates investments in investigation, the regaining of territorial control, respect for rights, and, above all, operational authority and immediate protection for the lives of ordinary citizens, the public will continue to opt for proposals that at least promise to confront danger. At the crossroads of public security, the pragmatism of fear will always defeat the elegance of theory.
This article, “O triunfo do punitivismo nas urnas: por que o Brasil escolhe a segurança da extrema-direita mesmo contra as evidências?”, by Roberto Uchôa de Oliveira Santos, was originally published in The Conversation and is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-ND 4.0). Original publication: The Conversation — “O triunfo do punitivismo nas urnas: por que o Brasil escolhe a segurança da extrema-direita mesmo contra as evidências?” (external link)