From the Alps to the WhatsApp Aunt

Lucie Varga and the contours of authoritarianism that Brazil escaped, for now

Abstract

This article proposes a comparative reading between Lucie Varga’s analysis of contemporary history regarding the rise of National Socialism from the perspective of residents in Austria’s Vorarlberg Valley and the radicalization processes of the new far-right in contemporary Brazil, particularly in the period leading up to the 2018 presidential election. Adopting a lens grounded in everyday life observation, the article explores how authoritarian discourses are articulated and grow not through abstract moralism, but through affective ties both inside and outside institutional spheres. The central argument is that although Brazil came dangerously close to institutional rupture, there was no coup, no dictatorship, at least not yet, and the country narrowly escaped authoritarianism. By evoking the figure of the “WhatsApp aunt” as a symbolic space of conservative dissemination, the text advocates for using tools outside the traditional canon of the social sciences to understand the spread of authoritarian narratives beneath the surface of mainstream media.