Instead, Jair Bolsonaro, a hard-right former Army man who looked approvingly on the days of military rule, was elected. As President, he slashed Lula’s protections for the environment, cut funding to universities and to urban-housing programs, and badly mismanaged the pandemic. In 2022, Lula summoned his old populist magnetism, built a coalition large enough to defeat Bolsonaro, and won a third term. But Bolsonaro, styled in international media as the Trump of the Tropics, did not accept losing. On January 8, 2023, thousands of his supporters stormed the heart of Brasilia, the federal capital, vandalizing the buildings of the Supreme Court, Congress, and the Presidential Palace.
Brazilian authorities later determined that Bolsonaro was part of a coup plot to oust Lula; he’s currently serving a twenty-seven-year sentence under house arrest. The insurrection drew immediate and obvious parallels to the United States, which, during much of the past decade, has lurched alongside Brazil through a strange hall of mirrors. In some ways, the two largest democracies of the Western Hemisphere are experiencing a shared reality on different time lines: Jair Bolsonaro and Trump both ran as anti-establishment demagogues, peddling a divisive nationalism that tapped into widespread voter apathy and disillusionment, and won a base among devoted evangelical Christians. (They also both came with a soap-opera-worthy cast of scions and hangers-on, a number of whom appear enmeshed in a range of suspect, self-dealing enterprises.) Lula and Joe Biden, well-known veterans of an older, more liberal status quo, seemed the right sorts of politicians to thwart the reëlection of Bolsonaro and Trump, respectively, but they failed to defeat Trumpism or Bolsonarismo as movements. Like Biden, in this cycle Lula found that a disconcerting number of his compatriots were unmoved by his calls to save democracy from those who would seek to undermine it—or didn’t buy into his rhetoric in the first place.
Though no one can accuse Lula, as they did Biden, of lacking the mental and physical acuity for the job—his social media includes various videos of him working out—his politics, rooted in unions and labor movements from the nineteen-seventies and eighties, don’t register as much in a Brazil now reshaped by the more atomized gig economies of the twenty-first century. Lula can tout some strong macroeconomic indicators—unemployment is at its lowest rate since 2012—but most Brazilians feel the crunch of a cost-of-living crisis, persistent concerns about law and order, and a growing pessimism about the direction of their country. Those dynamics hobbled the Democrats in 2024; meanwhile, anger over inflation in the U.S. has only intensified in the past two years under Trump.
There are more than echoes ricocheting between the United States and Brazil. Trump has slapped tariffs on the Brazilian economy and punitive sanctions on Alexandre de Moraes, the chief justice most heavily involved in the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro. (The sanctions were dropped, though the White House has recently weighed reimposing them.) Lula seized on these acts as meddling in the campaign, and as an assault on Brazilian sovereignty encouraged by the Bolsonaro family. But such is the scale of Brazil’s polarization that many Brazilians are insensible to Lula’s entreaties and want the left defeated. If elected, the younger Bolsonaro, who comports himself as a more moderate version of his father, has been clear on his plans not only to secure his father’s freedom but to punish the top figures in the judiciary who pushed for his prosecution. His brother, Eduardo, who has spent Lula’s term in self-imposed exile in the United States, wants to purge the country’s foreign ministry. A year ago, Brazil’s decision to investigate and punish Bolsonaro, Sr., was hailed by many observers as a courageous example of how to deal with assaults on the peaceful transfer of power. But a return of the Bolsonaros, Oliver Stuenkel, a German Brazilian political scientist and writer, told me, “would force us to reassess that conviction among democracy scholars around the world that Brazil led the way in showing how to protect democracy against authoritarianism.”
On Sunday, the two candidates took part in an acrimonious, largely unedifying televised debate, where they paced around each other onstage and hurled insults. Bolsonaro cast Lula as a thief, suggesting that it was best to keep his physical distance, “because my wallet could be stolen.” Lula called Bolsonaro a “thug,” an apparent allusion to alleged ties to a host of paramilitary organizations in Rio de Janeiro. (Bolsonaro has previously denied any such connections and dismissed the allegations as “smears.”) In the vein of El Salvador’s President, Nayib Bukele, Bolsonaro has promised a ruthless crackdown on crime, with expanded maximum-security prisons to detain more suspected cartel members and chemical castration for convicted rapists. Some in Bolsonaro’s camp want him to follow the lead of the Argentinian President, Javier Milei, a radical libertarian who has hacked away at public spending and shut down whole government ministries. But most Brazilians don’t have much of an appetite for such shock therapy. “If I were a Flavio supporter or an adviser, I would be worried about overinterpreting my mandate and going too far,” Andre Pagliarini, a historian of Brazil at Louisiana State University, told me. “The election may be a repudiation of Lula, but it’s not a sign of deep support for the kind of reactionary overreach that Flavio is promising.”
