A Window of Opportunity Opens in Brazil

Marcos Falcone

On October 4, Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2023), won the first round of the presidential election with 47 percent of the vote over current president Lula da Silva, who received 45 percent. Polls initially predicted that Da Silva would win. Yet Bolsonaro is now expected to win the October 25 runoff, as the rest of the candidates are ideologically closer to him than to Da Silva.

Violence and corruption are among Brazilians’ top concerns, and the Da Silva administration has made little or no progress on them. Security featured prominently over the course of the campaign, with police killings on the rise and a stubbornly high homicide rate of 20 per 100,000. The Banco Master scandal, in which a bank collapsed after selling allegedly fraudulent investments, also reached allies of Da Silva and Supreme Court justices and became a major theme. Before being elected in 2022, Da Silva himself had been jailed from 2018 to 2019 over corruption. He was released on a technicality but not exonerated from his crimes.

The judiciary’s ostensible bias toward President Da Silva is also likely to have driven support for Flávio Bolsonaro. In the past, the Supreme Court not only annulled his corruption convictions but also jailed Jair Bolsonaro, then his main opponent. Last week, after Da Silva chose to skip a presidential debate, an election judge he had unilaterally appointed forbade organizer TV Globo from showing his empty lectern, and a Supreme Court judge also ordered it to include a third candidate who originally did not qualify. (The TV channel decided to cancel the debate altogether.) 

The debate rulings were only two more in a string of arbitrary decisions by the judiciary that have undermined Brazilian democracy and free speech in recent years, most notably when it censored X in 2024. As my colleague David Inserra wrote then, the judiciary in Brazil is allowed “to act as victim, prosecutor, judge, juror, and executioner” simultaneously. The Supreme Court in particular has used these powers to censor critics and dismantle major corruption cases. Even Da Silva has complained about “selective leakings” in the Banco Master scandal, where Bolsonaro is also under investigation.

Beyond Brazil, Bolsonaro’s victory in the runoff would represent another blow to the authoritarian Latin American left. If he wins, the only major Latin American country led by a left-winger would be Mexico under Claudia Sheinbaum. Politically, this matters for the region and especially for Venezuela, since Da Silva, a longtime friend of Latin American dictators like Cuba’s Fidel Castro, defended Nicolás Maduro until the very end of his dictatorship.

Economically, a President Bolsonaro could also be a positive influence on the region if he pushes for reform within Mercosur, South America’s trade bloc, which has failed to meaningfully open up to the rest of the world since its founding in 1991. Bolsonaro has signaled that the country should “free itself” from Mercosur. But it is unclear whether he will follow through, as protectionism has long been the norm among the political class in Brazil, the region’s largest economy.

Flávio Bolsonaro is not a libertarian. His political identity is that of his father, after whom is named bolsonarismo, a movement more conservative, religious, and nationalist than market-oriented. In a country that runs enormous deficits and where fiscal concerns are mounting, Bolsonaro pledges to cut both public spending and taxes, but specific proposals on what he would actually do are lacking. In that sense, he is closer to Colombia’s Abelardo de la Espriella than to Argentina’s Javier Milei, in what has become a familiar regional pattern: voters may punish a leftist incumbent, but the beneficiary is not necessarily a candidate fully committed to free markets.

Brazil needs deep reform. For its own sake, its economy needs less government intervention, and its political system needs to stop judicial overreach while still fighting corruption. For the sake of Latin America, the country needs to lead the way in promoting trade and stopping authoritarianism. 

A window of opportunity is opening. Whether Brazil will seize it or not remains uncertain.