The intellectual and political challenge of understanding the Brazilian state is heightened by the lack of a clear, singular label to apply to it, the state contains policies, programs, and politics that appear from the outside to be contradictory. The past three presidential administrations in Brazil are best understood as 'post-neoliberal' in the sense that they ran on electoral platforms rejecting neoliberalism. Many of these governments have stitched together new platforms that maintain key elements of neoliberalism, such as decentralization, free markets, and privatization, as they add new dimensions of social policy that seem to counter or at least soften the Washington Consensus.