I was in Colombia at the time, and a friend remarked, “First Brexit and now this. This means that Trump will win in November.” About a month later, Trump reached the White House, with a campaign that relied heavily on nativism, racism, and misogyny, as well as blatantly false accusations against his opponent. In 2018, in Brazil, the right-wing former Army captain Jair Bolsonaro—Flávio’s father—was elected President. His campaign also played on fears of “gender ideology,” inundating voters with WhatsApp messages claiming that his opponent promoted pedophilia.
In office, Bolsonaro and Trump were ideological soulmates, espousing anti-environment, pro-development views and fanning hatred of Black people, women, and trans people. Both were extraordinarily cavalier in dealing with COVID-19; the U.S. had the world’s largest number of reported deaths, with 1.2 million, while Brazil had the second largest, with more than seven hundred thousand.
The Trump and Bolsonaro stories overlap in eerie ways. Bolsonaro’s first campaign, in 2018, gained new momentum when he was stabbed by an assailant at a rally—a foreshadowing of Trump’s near-assassination in 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania. Trump’s response to that shooting—“Fight! Fight!”—impressed Elon Musk, who became his largest individual donor and, eventually, his DOGE czar. (Musk also began openly supporting right-wing movements around the world, using his social-media platform, X, to denigrate Lula and to support Milei and Germany’s extremist AfD Party.)
After the 2020 election, Trump blamed his loss on a Democratic conspiracy to tamper with voting machines, and encouraged supporters to assault the Capitol to halt the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Two years later, Bolsonaro lost a reëlection bid to Lula. He, too, had repeatedly claimed that the vote could be rigged. He flew to Florida and conspired with allies in the security forces back home to plot a coup. A week after Lula took office, thousands of Bolsonaro supporters attacked Brazil’s Supreme Court and National Congress buildings, trying to reinstall him as President.
Bolsonaro eventually returned to Brazil, where he was convicted of conspiracy and sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison. Later, he was remanded to house arrest on humanitarian grounds. Since he was unable to run for office this year, his son Flávio, a lawyer and legislator in his forties, became a candidate in his place. Flávio said that his goal was to see his father freed and to punish the jurists who had upheld his conviction. He also suggested that he would weaken environmental protections, combat “wokeness,” and encourage development and foreign investment. To ingratiate himself to Trump, he promised to join the Shield of the Americas, a program in which U.S. troops can be deployed to Latin American countries, ostensibly to fight narcotrafficking.
Brazilian elections generally have two rounds of voting. In this year’s first round, in early October, Bolsonaro came out ahead. But, in an unprecedented three-week social-media campaign, a tech-savvy politician named André Janones enlisted millions of Brazilians to serve in “Lula’s Army.” By synchronizing their messaging, he gained an algorithmic advantage over the right-wing trolls who had dominated Brazil’s social media for years. (One prominent troll operator is Fernando Cerimedo, an Argentinian ally of the Bolsonaros, who was indicted in Brazil for alleged involvement in the coup attempt, although prosecutors ultimately declined to charge him. Since then, Cerimedo has helped Milei get elected, in Argentina, and has aided other right-wing politicians around the Americas. In August, while he was working out of Bolivia’s Presidential palace, he was arrested on suspicion of hiring gunmen to assassinate his girlfriend, who is pregnant. She survived; he remains in jail, and denies all charges against him.)
Janones’s digital “war” succeeded despite some obstacles. The country’s electoral court twice blocked his WhatsApp channel, at Bolsonaro’s request. But the same court also imposed an injunction on Meta, after Lula’s campaign provided evidence that the company had doctored algorithms to favor Bolsonaro in search results. Although Meta denied this, it acknowledged “technical issues” and promised to fix the problems. The allegations of interference troubled many Brazilians. Walter Salles, the director of “I’m Still Here,” an acclaimed film about Brazil’s years of military dictatorship, told me recently, “This has probably been happening for some time in past elections throughout South America.”
