As right-wing governments backed by Washington rise to power across Latin America, Brazil now looks like it will be the next domino to fall. Far-right Senator Flavio Bolsonaro led the first round of Brazil’s presidential election on Sunday, with President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a veteran left-wing leader and former trade unionist, trailing narrowly behind him. With neither candidate winning an outright majority, an October 25 run-off will determine who will lead the country of more than 214 million people over the next four years.
Bolsonaro’s father Jairis serving a 27-year sentence for having plotted a coup d’état after losing the 2022 presidential election to Lula. His eldest son, whom the former president anointed as his ideological successor a few scant months ago, has promised a pardonif he emerges triumphant in the second round. Brazil heads to run-off as Bolsonaro pulls off shock first place finish in first round To display this content from YouTube, you must enable advertisement tracking and audience measurement.
One of your browser extensions seems to be blocking the video player from loading. To watch this content, you may need to disable it on this site. While less than two percentage points separated the leading candidates, the results were a shock to supporters of Lula’s centre-left Workers' Party (PT); opinion polls had put Lula ahead of his rival in the days leading up to the vote.
And with a handful of other right-wing candidates knocked out in the first round, the second round seems as though it’s Bolsonaro’s to lose. Even if Lula does manage to mobilise enough of the more than one in five voters who abstained in the first round, the presidential palace of Planalto was not the only prize being contested in Sunday’s elections. Across the country, congressional and gubernatorial elections have also seen the country lurch sharply to the right, with Bolsonaro’s far-right Liberal Party (PL) likely to emerge as the leading force in the lower-house Chamber of Deputies, as well as the Senate.
Despite his decades-long legacy of social-democratic policies that have lifted tens of millions of people out of poverty, Lula seems to have struggled to mobilise his base in the face of a far right that has succeeded in welding together a coalition of the country’s business elite and rising lower-middle classes. Read moreFlavio Bolsonaro: In the name of the father, sons, and holy ideology Thomas Zicman de Barros, a fellow at the centre for political research at Sciences Po university in Paris, said the younger Bolsonaro has maintained his father’s appeal to voters frustrated by the status quo. Felipe Krause, a former Brazilian diplomat and the head of Oxford University’s Brazilian Studies Programme, said the global cost-of-living crisis and mounting levels of household debt had eaten into the economic gains made under Lula’s most recent term in office.
Brazil elections: Can Lula's anti-poverty record win over voters? To display this content from YouTube, you must enable advertisement tracking and audience measurement. That might explain why some people are now thinking, ‘I don’t trust the government anymore, I don’t
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