Flávio Bolsonaro, senator and eldest son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, was the candidate with the most votes in the first round of Brazil's presidential elections, with 47% of valid votes compared to 45% for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The senator arrives as a favorite in the second round on October 25.
Arithmetic favors it. The majority of voters of the other candidates, who totaled close to 8%, will hardly migrate to Lula, who at 80 years old is seeking a fourth term. Another option for the former union leader would be to mobilize part of the 33 million Brazilians - 21% of the electorate - who abstained. The problem for Lula is that, unlike a newcomer, it will be difficult for him to change the image that voters have of him: he first ran for president in 1989 and has played a dominant role in Brazilian politics for decades.
For many Brazilians, especially the youngest, Lula represents the establishment at a time when rejection of the governments in power is strong throughout Latin America. Not even the revelation of a major corruption scandal involving Flávio Bolsonaro would necessarily change the picture: in May audios came to light in which the senator asked Daniel Vorcaro, a disgraced and imprisoned banker, for money. The scandal lowered his voting intention, but Bolsonaro recovered the ground he lost before the first round. This is because the central dynamic of Brazilian polarization today is fear and rejection of the other side. In conversations with Bolsonaro voters in recent weeks, most cited rejection of Lula as one of the main reasons for their vote. One told me that he would vote for a horse if he ran against Lula.
The strong performance of the Bolsonaro family at the polls – in addition to Flávio, Jair's wife, Michelle, and his son Carlos were elected senators, and another son, Jair Renan, and his brother Renato, federal deputies – is a verdict on Brazil's historic decision to punish and imprison Jair Bolsonaro and several of his generals for the 2022 coup attempt, when he refused to acknowledge defeat. Brazil has since been praised as an example of how to confront these types of threats to democracy, and was often compared favorably to the United States. Flávio has promised an amnesty for his father and the others convicted of the coup plot, and, if he does, the Brazilian case will show the opposite: that those responsible for an attempted coup can go unpunished if their political group wins the next election.
In Washington, a victory for Bolsonaro would be seen as a strategic victory for the Trump administration, which seeks to expand its influence in Latin America by helping to elect ideologically related leaders. “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never again be questioned,” the State Department proclaimed in August. The White House has largely managed to tilt the electoral field towards its preferred candidates. In Argentina, he conditioned a multimillion-dollar financial rescue on the victory of Javier Milei's party in the October 2025 legislative elections. In Honduras, Trump campaigned in Truth Social for the conservative Nasry Asfura days before an election that he won by a minimal margin.
That strategy may generate short-term advantages, but it will hardly produce a structural and lasting alignment with the United States, such as a reduction in the region's ties with China. Milei, for example, presents himself as Trump's main ally in Latin America and continues to expand the relationship with Beijing. It is a matter of economic pragmatism: trade between China and Latin America will exceed $500 billion in 2024, and Brazil exports more to China than to the United States and the European Union combined.
Recent history points in the same direction. During the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, between 2019 and 2022, Brazil fulfilled the rituals of alignment with Washington while its exports to China continued to grow. If he wins, Flávio Bolsonaro will present himself as an ally of Trump and will expand security cooperation, although he himself has already announced that his relationship with China will be “pragmatic.” Promises of structural alignment ignore economic reality: agribusiness, the centerpiece of his electoral coalition, would block any attempt to move away from Beijing.
