Youth candidacies for Brazil's Congress and state legislatures in the 2026 elections include fewer Black women and more white men. The finding comes from the first report by Monitor Jovem DX, released in September and reported by Folha de S.Paulo. The survey covers candidates aged up to 29 running for federal and state deputy, and it interrupts, at least in the preliminary picture, a trend toward greater diversity.
Women made up 49.1% of youth candidacies in 2022, after three elections close to parity. They now account for 40.5% of the records. The drop cuts across the ideological spectrum. Among left-wing youth candidacies, women fell from 51% to 46.7%; among right-wing ones, from 48.3% to 37.5%. The youth profile now resembles the overall candidate pool, in which women went from 34% in 2022 to 35.3% in 2026.
The Missão effect
The combination of gender and race also changed sharply from the previous election, according to Folha. The shift coincides with the arrival of a new party. Missão, in its first election, accounts for 178 of the 912 youth candidacies identified by the monitor, or 19.5% of the total registered with the TSE, Brazil's top electoral court. And 70.8% of the party's young candidates are men.
"The debut of Missão is one of the main novelties of the 2026 race and stands out for the strong presence of young people in the party," said Beatriz Besen, coordinator of Monitor Jovem DX and a researcher at Nupmos, the political psychology and social movements research center at PUC São Paulo.
Besen said the imbalance brought by Missão's entry is part of a broader change in the profile of youth candidacies. Among the party's names is influencer Vitor Antoun, 26, a candidate for the Chamber of Deputies from Rio de Janeiro, according to Folha. The monitor is run by the Instituto Democracia em Xeque in partnership with Nupmos, with support from the Heinrich Böll Foundation Brazil. It analyzed TSE data taken from the electoral court's Open Data Portal on September 3.
Contrast with the overall pool
The youth numbers diverge from the overall race. A survey by Inesc, the Institute of Socioeconomic Studies, and the consultancy CommonData, based on TSE data through August 16 and released by state news agency Agência Brasil, found that Black candidates reached 49.8% of the 20,448 valid candidacies. White men remain the largest single group, with 6,688 candidacies (32.7% of the total). Black women total 3,719 records (18.2%), up from 17.3% in 2022.
Carmela Zigoni, a political adviser at Inesc, cautions that a place on party tickets does not guarantee equal conditions in the race. Funding, party structure, advertising time and heteroidentification mechanisms must also factor into any assessment of representation, she said. Constitutional Amendment 133, approved in 2024, changed the criteria for distributing electoral funds earmarked for Black candidacies.
The figures remain preliminary until candidacies are final. Inesc and CommonData will present the complete survey results at the end of September. Monitor Jovem DX plans further reports over the campaign.