Novo and PL Rank Furthest Right, PSTU and UP Furthest Left in Folha’s 2026 Party GPS

Novo remains the party furthest to the right on Folha’s 2026 Party GPS, while PSTU ranks furthest to the left. The updated scale incorporates recent data and measures how Brazilian parties behave in practice.

Folha built the scale from five indicators: voting in the Chamber of Deputies, parliamentary caucuses, party migration, electoral coalitions, and campaign donations. The analysis covers 1,097 votes, 320 caucuses, 11,200 party switches, 15,600 coalitions, and 1.1 million donors across 29 of Brazil’s 30 active parties.

The PCO was left out because it has not elected a deputy, has never shared an electoral ticket, and falls below the minimum thresholds for party switches and campaign donors. The final scale groups the remaining parties into left, center, and right. Its boundaries draw on academic studies of ideology.

Folha does not use the labels extreme right or extreme left in the GPS. The tool measures proximity between parties, not the methods they use. In the newspaper’s methodology, being at the far end of a scale does not itself make a party extremist. That term would require a separate measure of whether a party practices or advocates violence as a political method.

The final GPS position averages the rankings from the five indicators. It uses each party’s place in the order, rather than the numerical values from each individual scale. The congressional voting measure covers votes from January 2023 through July 2026 and includes 565 deputies who participated in at least 10% of them, including substitutes.

That indicator found that the left-wing bloc and the centrão voted with the government in most divisions, accounting for 423 deputies compared with 142 in the opposition. In 91.5% of the 1,097 votes studied, deputies voted as their party leaders recommended. Folha says the scale is based on a statistical model used for four decades to measure the U.S. Congress, and that its scores serve only for comparison.