When the Opponent Becomes Evil
Polarization, predatory interdependence, and the psychology of democratic erosion in Brazil
By Élison Santos, PhD
On October 4, more than 150 million Brazilians are eligible to vote in one of the most polarized elections in the country's democratic history. The two front-runners are President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the left-wing Workers' Party (PT), seeking a fourth term, and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro of the right-wing Liberal Party (PL), the eldest son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is now in prison.
I write as a clinical psychologist, not as an activist. I will not tell anyone how to vote. Instead, I want to raise a question that no election result can answer: why does Brazil investigate so much and hold so few people accountable?
I also believe the answer matters well beyond Brazil. Readers in the United States, Europe and elsewhere will likely recognize the pattern.
The Brazilian paradox
Few countries have as many accountability institutions working at once. Brazil has an assertive Federal Police, independent prosecutors, audit courts, congressional inquiry committees (known as CPIs), a highly active Supreme Court (the STF), investigative journalism, and social media that exposes everything in real time.
There has been no shortage of scandals. The Mensalão was a vote-buying scheme in Congress during Lula's first term. Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash) uncovered a vast web of bribery around the state oil company, Petrobras. There were allegations of salary skimming in legislative offices, a "secret budget" of opaque congressional earmarks, the plot to overturn the 2022 election, and now the collapse of Banco Master.
And yet many Brazilians feel that nothing really changes.
There are many investigations and little accountability. Many trials and little trust. Plenty of information and little shared truth. Strong institutions and a fragile republic.
That paradox needs an explanation. The most common one, "they're all corrupt," is lazy and explains nothing. The second most common, "it's the other side's fault," is itself part of the problem, as I will try to show.
The problem does not belong to one side
Before proposing any hypothesis, honesty demands an exercise in balance.
PT governments have held power for a little over seventeen years. They produced policies whose principles deserve recognition. Cash-transfer programs such as Bolsa Família lifted millions out of extreme poverty. Scholarships and affirmative action opened universities to students who had never imagined attending one. Brazilian diplomacy gained new weight in Latin America, in the BRICS and in global forums. The same governments were at the center of the Mensalão and the Petrobras schemes, with abundant evidence of collusion between parties, construction conglomerates and public officials.
Lula was imprisoned in 2018. He was released in 2019, after the Supreme Court changed its position on jailing defendants before all appeals were exhausted. In 2021, the Court annulled his convictions. It ruled that the court in Curitiba lacked jurisdiction over his cases, and later found that the judge who convicted him, Sergio Moro, had been biased. Part of the country saw this as the correction of a judicial injustice. Another part saw an arrangement to return him to power. Legally, the convictions no longer exist. But the Court did not declare that the facts uncovered by the investigations were false. It declared that they could not be judged the way they had been.
Jair Bolsonaro's election in 2018 gave voice to legitimate frustrations held by millions of people: exhaustion with corruption, a desire for more economic freedom and a smaller state, and an emphasis on individual responsibility and religious and family values. Early on, he refused to trade cabinet posts for congressional support and confronted entrenched interests. His government was also marked by radicalization, recurring attacks on democratic institutions, a rapid expansion of gun access, and a pandemic response that a Senate inquiry held politically responsible for worsening the crisis. There were offensive remarks about women and other groups, and finally, his conviction by the Supreme Court for taking part in the plot to overturn the 2022 result. There is also a rarely noted irony: the man who promised to break with "the old politics" ended his term relying on the Centrão, Brazil's bloc of transactional centrist parties.
None of this is symmetrical in every detail, and it does not need to be. My point is different. Both camps have real merits and real faults at the same time. Anyone who can only see one half of that sentence has already entered the problem this essay describes.
How the brakes are supposed to work
Brazil's Constitution describes the three branches of government as "independent and harmonious." Independence does not mean isolation. The constitutional design assumes the branches will interfere with one another, within impersonal rules.
The political scientist Guillermo O'Donnell called this horizontal accountability: the real capacity of one state institution to oversee, investigate and, when necessary, sanction officials in another. Congress checks the executive. The courts limit both. Oversight bodies investigate officeholders. The press watches everyone.
But these brakes depend on something no law can guarantee. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt call it institutional forbearance: those who hold power refrain from using every legal weapon available against their opponents, because they know doing so would destroy the democratic game itself.
Everything changes with one subtle difference:
"I need you because the Constitution requires your participation in this decision."
"I need you because you can protect me."
The first sentence describes checks and balances. The second describes something else.
A hypothesis: predatory interdependence
I propose a provisional name for that something else: predatory interdependence.
It is a hypothesis, not a diagnosis. And a serious hypothesis must be falsifiable.
In a healthy democracy there is constitutional interdependence: A checks B, B checks C, C checks A. Now imagine a different configuration. A needs B's protection. B depends politically on C. C has interests that depend on A's decisions. No one controls the whole system, and there is no need to imagine a conspiracy. All it takes is a growing web of cross-dependencies, political, economic, legal or reputational, in which every overseer acquires reasons not to oversee the others all the way.
I want to be clear about what this hypothesis does not claim. It does not claim there is a single, coordinated "system" working against one side, as some on the right argue. Nor does it claim the country has been captured by bankers, as some on the left argue. It describes something less cinematic and perhaps harder to fight: an equilibrium in which many actors, from opposing camps, have something to lose if the brakes work fully.
The concept builds on established ideas but is distinct from them:
Ordinary corruption is a discrete exchange: someone pays, someone delivers a favor.
State capture, a concept popularized by the World Bank, is the illegitimate influence of private interests over the rules and institutions themselves.
Coalitional presidentialism, as Brazilian political scientist Sérgio Abranches described it, is the bargaining a president must do with a fragmented Congress. It is not a pathology in itself.
Predatory interdependence would be the point at which the oversight institutions themselves become part of the networks they are meant to oversee, without anyone commanding the whole.
This is not a dictatorship. International indices such as V-Dem still classify Brazil as an electoral democracy, and there is alternation in power, a free press and clean elections. Nor is it a healthy democracy.
How would we know whether the hypothesis is right? I propose three observable signs:
Investigations that advance or stall depending on who is under investigation, rather than on the evidence.
Cross-indulgence: actors from supposedly hostile camps protecting one another when they face a common threat.
Scandals that cut across the entire political spectrum without producing accountability on any side.
If these signs do not appear, the hypothesis fails. That would be excellent news.
The Banco Master case as a test
The investigation into Banco Master, a mid-sized bank liquidated by Brazil's Central Bank in late 2025 amid allegations of large-scale fraud, may be the most important test of this hypothesis in decades.
The people named in the investigations include a former chief of staff to Jair Bolsonaro, the Lula government's leader in the Senate, a former PT finance minister, and the PL's own presidential candidate. Several Supreme Court justices are also mentioned, in very different ways and to very different degrees. Caution is essential. The investigations are ongoing, those named deny wrongdoing, and being mentioned in a third party's messages is not evidence of a crime. Much of what we read reaches us filtered through the interests of whoever publishes it.
But look at how the two campaigns react. One accuses its opponent of owing his mandate to a Supreme Court justice linked to the case. The other points out that the bank grew under the previous government. Each side sees the scandal only in the other. That behavior is exactly what allows a cross-partisan scandal to survive.
So the question that matters is not who appears in the messages. It is whether the institutions can investigate everyone with equal rigor, including their own members. The Chief Justice has just publicly called for an investigation "without exception." If that happens, it will count as evidence against my hypothesis. The institutional response will tell us more about the health of the republic than the scandal itself.
Each side sees the problem only in the other
The same asymmetry runs through the debate about Brazil's institutions.
The judiciary. The Supreme Court has taken on an unprecedented role. It has opened investigations on its own initiative, ordered arrests and account suspensions, confronted digital platforms, and in 2024 suspended an entire social network, X, nationwide. To some, the Court was the last barrier against an attempted coup, and the conviction of those involved confirms it. To others, it is a branch that has concentrated the roles of victim, investigator and judge, with risks for freedom of expression. Both concerns can be true at the same time. The Banco Master case adds a third layer: who oversees the overseers?
The press. Each camp accuses the major media outlets of serving the other. There is partial truth in both complaints, because media groups have interests like any powerful actor. That does not make journalism disposable. It makes critical reading indispensable.
Congress. Brazil's legislature has greatly expanded its control over the federal budget. It is the branch that appears least in polarized fights, perhaps precisely because it adapts so well to any government.
Why the system holds: the psychology
A network of mutual protection survives only if it is cheap. In a democracy, the price is charged by voters, who punish abuse at the ballot box. This is exactly where the psychology of polarization comes in: it drives that price close to zero.
From "wrong" to "evil"
There is an enormous difference between thinking "this person is wrong" and thinking "this person is evil." We can talk with someone who is wrong. Someone evil, we want to silence.
Jennifer McCoy and Murat Somer call it pernicious polarization when a society stops dividing along many cross-cutting differences and organizes itself around a single one: us versus them. Eli Finkel and colleagues describe political sectarianism as having three components. The first is othering: they are different from us. The second is aversion: we dislike them. The third is moralization: they are morally inferior.
The third is decisive. If the opponent is the embodiment of evil, the sins of my own side become a detail.
Matthew Graham and Milan Svolik demonstrated this experimentally in the United States. Polarized voters tend to accept their own candidate violating democratic principles, as long as he is on their side. They do not stop believing in democracy. They simply think: "this time is different."
Put the pieces together. If half the electorate forgives one side's abuses and the other half forgives the other side's, nobody pays for anything. Polarization is not just a bad mood. It is what keeps predatory interdependence standing.
The morality of permanent emergency
Every election, we hear some version of the same line: "This time we can't take any risks." First we defeat the enemy. Our own side's corruption, ethics and the limits on power can wait. But "later" never comes, because four years on there is another final battle between good and evil.
I call this the morality of permanent emergency. Everyday ethics is suspended and replaced by an ethics of war. Lying about the opponent becomes strategy. Distorting numbers becomes messaging. Staying silent about your own side's wrongdoing becomes historical responsibility.
The question stops being "Is this right?" and becomes "Does this help my side?"
I propose a simple antidote, the mirror test: Would I accept this if my opponent did exactly the same thing? If the answer changes depending on who did it, the standard is no longer moral. It is tribal.
Frankl and the pathologies of the zeitgeist
Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who founded logotherapy, described four pathologies of the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. All of them seem written for Brazil today, and perhaps not only for Brazil.
The provisional attitude is living as if real life will begin once the crisis is over. Politically, it is "now is not the time." But an exception that never ends stops being an exception and becomes the regime itself.
Fatalism is believing there is no alternative. "There are only two choices." "Nothing will ever change." Citizens stop experiencing politics as a space of freedom and start living it as self-defense.
Collectivism makes the person disappear behind a label: leftist, right-winger, communist, fascist. Knowing how someone votes seems to tell us everything about them.
Fanaticism is not having strong convictions. For Frankl, the fanatic is someone for whom the person disappears behind the opinion. There is no longer a human being with a history, fears and reasons. There is only a representative of the enemy.
Frankl would add that freedom without responsibility degenerates into arbitrariness. That is true of citizens, and it is true of institutions.
The cycle
Here the institutional and the psychological hypotheses meet:
Fear of the opponent breeds fanaticism;
fanaticism justifies the exception and forgives one's own side;
forgiveness lowers the cost of abuse;
cheap abuse feeds networks of mutual protection;
those networks erode trust in institutions;
discredited institutions produce even more fear.
If this reading is correct, the paradox we began with makes sense. We investigate so much and hold so few accountable because each side accepts accountability only for the other, and the institutions have learned to operate in that vacuum.
Voting out of fear
The cycle reaches the ballot box. When we believe only two forces can win and that one of them is an existential threat, we vote less for what we want and more for what we fear least.
Brazil's two-round system offers an instructive example. A candidate wins outright in the first round only with more than 50% of the valid votes, which exclude blank and spoiled ballots. Many voters fear that supporting a third candidate might "help" a front-runner win in the first round. The arithmetic works the other way. Every valid vote cast for another candidate makes the 50% threshold harder to reach. Recent polls put the two leaders at roughly 45% and 40% of valid votes. If two-thirds of the remaining 15% spoiled their ballots instead, the leader would reach 50% without gaining a single new vote.
Strategic voting is still legitimate, especially when the question is who makes the runoff. But the belief that voting your conscience "hands over" the election in the first round is a myth, and a revealing one. Part of our freedom lies in choosing before we simply react to fear.
The wrong question: who will save us?
We have spent too much time looking for saviors. One would save the poor. Another would save the country from "the system." The left would save democracy. The right would save freedom.
A republic should not need saviors. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." Because they are not, institutions must limit everyone's power, including the power of those we trust.
The civic question is not "Who is good enough to govern?" It is "Which institutions prevent fallible, ambitious or corrupt people, from any side, from capturing power once they reach it?"
Equality and liberty matter. Protecting the vulnerable and demanding individual responsibility matter. Minority rights and limits on the state matter. None of these values has to destroy the others. One of the tragedies of polarization is convincing us that we must choose between them.
Why this matters beyond Brazil
Brazil is not an exotic case. It is an unusually clear one. Many democracies now combine strong institutions with collapsing trust, abundant information with no shared facts, and voters who are willing to excuse their own side almost anything. The psychology described here was documented first in American data, and the mirror test works in any language.
Brazilians, Americans, Europeans: we may simply be at different points of the same cycle.
Democracy begins when the other remains human
No election breaks the cycle for us. No president, justice, party or savior will do it alone. It begins to break when citizens do what no institution can do for them: hold their own side accountable. When they apply the mirror test, refuse the ethics of war, and keep treating their neighbors, colleagues and relatives as people rather than enemies.
A person is not their vote.
Perhaps the question of this election is not only who we want in power. It is also: what kind of society are we becoming while we try to keep the other side from getting there?
And once the votes are counted, an even harder question will remain: will we still be able to share the same country with those who chose differently?
If the answer is no, our problem will be far greater than the outcome of any election.
Élison Santos, PhD, is a clinical psychologist licensed in Brazil and Washington, D.C. He holds a doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of São Paulo (USP), is a Research Associate at the Suicide Prevention Laboratory of The Catholic University of America, and directs the Instituto de Psicologia Aplicada Sapiens (IPSapiens) in São Paulo.
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