Rafael Satiê, 38, published a video last month to tell the story of his life. He says it alone “dismantles the entire narrative of the left in Brazil.”
In the recording, he says he is the son of a former drug trafficker, raised in a Rio community by a single mother, “my princess and my queen.” He has one brother in prison and the other “lost to drug trafficking”.
Then he accepted Jesus and everything changed. The evangelical has also converted to entrepreneurship. He was inspired by his mother, who sold pizzas in Yakult in search of prosperity.
Elected as a PL-RJ councilor in 2024, Satiê entered politics as the man who, in September, was ordered to pay compensation of one million reais for racist statements made in 2021, such as comparing a black man’s curly hair to a “cockroach farm.”
Former President Jair Bolsonaro is a reference for this young man who claims to be a sympathizer of conservatism before becoming fashionable. “My Christian training has always guided me to defend the family, life since its conception, freedom, order and individual responsibility,” he says. Leaf. “These principles are naturally linked to law. Over time, I began to express it more clearly and firmly.”
The councilor was one of the examples given by the leader of the PL in the House, Sóstenes Cavalcante, as a possible candidate for a position in 2026 – state or federal deputy. The hypothesis has a symbolic tension. In the fight for new audiences, the party has begun to treat diversity not as an ideological enemy, but as an electoral asset. The strategy, according to Sóstenes, is to support candidacies that combine representation and conservatism, and thus compete with the left in this debate.
Satiê’s speech sums up the spirit of the thing well. “When someone comes from a favela, like me, and they’re black, the left usually tries to fit them into a ready-made narrative. They tried to do that to me. They wanted me to present myself as a victim. But I built my life on the fear of God, work, entrepreneurship and belief in meritocracy, the exact opposite of what they stand for.”
There’s more where that came from. Before the PF operation in which he was sought on Friday (19) as part of an investigation into the deviation of parliamentary quotas, Sóstenes cited other desired additions to this project. The first name that comes to mind is Jojo Todynho. The former funk singer was even invited to run for the House for the PL in the upcoming elections. For now, he has declined, although affection for the legend remains.
“I think Jojo is a super interesting image, because there are identity cards that predict that a fat black woman from the periphery must necessarily be a left-aligned candidate,” says the PL leader.
“And do you know what we are going to work on now too? Right-wing homosexuals,” adds Sóstenes. He mentions Firmino Cortada as a name with potential. The influencer from Mato Grosso do Sul, openly gay and right-wing, has already stated in a podcast that “there is no gay on the left”.
His argumentative path is as follows: thus defenestrated by the other camp, the capitalist system would be essential for homosexuals to acquire rights, “because gays are a public which consumes the luxury market, it is an important section of capitalism”.
The hammer for new affiliations and candidacies has not yet been struck, but the PL considering diversity as an electoral treasure map does not surprise the anthropologist Jacqueline Moraes Teixeira, researcher linked to Cebrap (Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning) and Iser (Institute of Religious Studies).
She has been studying PL Mulheres since 2023, when former first lady Michelle Bolsonaro assumed the presidency of the movement. It was at this time that “an alliance became very evident between women who began to declare themselves more directly right-wing, based on a specific alliance between evangelicals and Catholics.”
Forays into the gender debate, now from a conservative perspective, include other parties, such as the Republicans of Senator Damares Alves and the PP of Celina Leão, the vice-governor who aims to replace Ibaneis Rocha (MDB), currently a member of the Executive of the Federal District. Both evangelicals.
“I noticed the production of a specific grammar aimed at challenging the concept of diversity,” says Teixeira. She brings a mix of topics to public discussion, from gender-based violence to people with disabilities – an area that Michelle, who is a fluent Libra, also explores.
The anthropologist notes that PL Mulheres stimulated female affiliations in an extraordinary way. Nearly 1,000% in the last two years, a feat “very linked to Michelle’s silhouette and her capillarity capacity”.
These are policies that do not escape the old impasses of conservatism. This is the case for those who declare themselves anti-feminists, because they “believe that feminist women would only fight for selective rights for women who are also feminists and that in fact, right-wing women would fight for everyone,” says Teixeira.
Perception similar to that of advisor Rafael Satiê when he talks about his own trajectory. The ideological debate is the same here: the right must make progress on voters historically associated with the left. Women, black people, LGBTQIA+. Minorities, in general.
“I defended my ideas even when they said black people couldn’t think the way I thought,” Satiê says. For 2026, he says he is ready for the mission entrusted to him by Bolsonaro and Valdemar Costa Neto, president of the PL. “If it is God’s will and theirs.”
Depending on the agenda, the reception of voters loyal to this spectrum does not always follow this openness. The announcement of the influencer Sophia Barclay as a pre-candidate for the Novo deputy illustrates this tension.
She, who identifies as a “right-wing trans person, has been the target of transphobic attacks, such as his failure to recognize her as a woman. Barclay says she has received “both positive and negative reactions, which is completely normal in politics.”
“What gets the most attention is how many people try to delegitimize ideas by attacking their personal identity. That says more about the attacker than it does about me,” she says. He also doesn’t see any incompatibility between being trans and conservative. “This is only paradoxical for those who believe that trans people must think only one way. I am a trans woman, but before that I am a citizen, a worker, a wife and a Brazilian.”
About Nikolas Ferreira (PL-SP), who already went to Congress with a wig on Women’s Day to mock the idea that a trans person exists: “I consider him a young man with an exemplary vision and I believe that the debate must exist in a mature way. In fact, I will soon have the opportunity to speak more with him, because I believe in dialogue as a tool to move forward, even in cases of disagreements.”
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