Is Latin America’s pink tide ebbing in Brazil?

The knife-edge presidential election campaign underway in Brazil pits a far-right candidate, the eldest son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, against a populist democratic socialist seeking an unprecedented fourth term as president of Latin America’s largest nation. This will be, unquestionably, a consequential election, not least for Trump’s America. Brazil occupies almost half of the South American landmass, is home to nearly half of the continent’s population and, as the ‘pink tide’ recedes, stands as the region’s last major stronghold of left-wing governance.

The 4 October contest is a first-round general election. The successful candidate must garner more than 50 per cent of the vote to take office in Brasilia’s Palácio do Planalto. Recent polls indicate that 80-year-old incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, of the Workers’ Party, is the leading candidate on 43 per cent, followed closely by 45-year-old Trump protégé Flávio Bolsonaro, on 41 per cent. But a majority vote is unlikely, given the surge in popularity for a centrist third candidate, psychiatrist Augusto Cury, who is now on six per cent. Cury, 67, is a newcomer to politics but a household name in Brazil. Possibly the nation’s most widely read author of the 21st century, he has written over 70 self-help books that have sold more than 40 million copies in Brazil and have been published in 70 countries. While Kalshi, the online prediction market, gives Cury only a one per cent chance of winning the presidency, this spoiler in the race means that Brazil’s pivotal election will probably go to a run-off vote on 25 October. 

The Brazilian election is being viewed as a referendum on Donald Trump’s ability to reel in a ‘left-wing island in South America’, as one of Brazil’s leading newspapers, Folha de S. Paulo, has characterised the Portuguese-speaking, multiracial nation, the world’s fourth-largest democracy. Trump aggressively backed Colombia’s right-wing Abelardo de la Espriella (nicknamed ‘the Tiger’) when he successfully ran for president in June; he enthusiastically endorsed and financially backed Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei; and he aligns with both Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa and Chile’s José Antonio Kast. Both Peru and Bolivia have also moved to the right politically, while Venezuela’s recently installed President Delcy Rodríguez effectively answers to Trump.  

That is a tectonic shift from where South America was positioned as little as four years ago when left- and centre-left candidates dominated the political landscape. If Flávio Bolsonaro takes office in Brasilia on 5 January, a near-clean sweep will have taken place, leaving Brazil’s tiny southern neighbour of Uruguay as the only remaining nation with a left-leaning government. The US president, never one to pass up a chance to congratulate himself, will not hesitate to take credit for this monumental shift.  

Trump has put his full weight and that of the US government behind the outcome of the upcoming election. In a flagrant political manoeuvre, designed to alter the outcome as well as to rebuke current President Lula, the Trump administration has levied a series of unprecedented punitive tariffs on Brazil. These began in July of last year when the US president announced by executive order that Brazil would face a 50 per cent tariff on many goods exported to the United States. Trump’s stated reason was to punish Brazil over its prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro for leading a conspiracy to overturn the nation’s 2022 presidential election in an attempted coup. Trump charged that Bolsonaro’s conviction by Brazil’s Supreme Court was baseless and that the former president had been the victim of ‘political prosecution’. In doing so, he attempted to interfere with the process of another country’s highest tribunal.

After Lula and Trump met privately in Kuala Lumpur during an ASEAN summit and later at the White House last spring, Trump removed some of the tariffs, but as the race between Bolsonaro and Lula has become tighter recently, the US president has reimposed some of those punitive measures.

That an American president would twist Brazil’s arm because he does not approve of its current president is not a phenomenon without precedent. Americans have a long history of intervening in their southern neighbours’ business – be it the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, the 1954 ousting of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz, the 1965 tampering in the Dominican Republic, the 1964 Brazilian coup, the 1973 Chilean coup, or last January’s stealth extraction of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela to New York to face trial for narco-terrorism. Yet these historical attempts at interference were covert. Trump, on the other hand, boasts about his imposition of crippling tariffs to subvert a nation, and considers his involvement in Brazil’s internal affairs part and parcel of the ‘Donroe Doctrine’.   

The Trump-Bolsonaro axis is not to everyone’s liking in Brazil. It has triggered resentment and mistrust among millions who believe that the Bolsonaro family (former President Jair Bolsonaro has four sons, all of them elected politicians) is creating a far-right dynasty beholden to the United States. Lula has portrayed the Bolsonaro family as lackeys of Trump, who are using Brazil to further expand US global hegemony. The US President’s tariff imposition has created an unintended boon for the white-bearded populist, whose image seems globally burnished by his white-straw Panama hat. Lula was diagnosed with basal-cell carcinoma earlier this year and, after doctors recommended he wear a head covering, the hat has turned into a campaign icon. Turning Trump’s pressure into a political advantage, Lula surged in national polls as he barnstormed the country, proclaiming that the US president was meddling in Brazil’s sovereignty.

Last week, at the opening session of the UN’s General Assembly, Lula once again derided Trump without mentioning his name, staunchly proclaiming, ‘Brazil does not belong in anyone’s backyard’. By showing up at the UN, Lula secured an international stage, appeared presidential and was able, in effect, to campaign.

Meanwhile, the 71-year-old Jair Bolsonaro continues to serve a 27-year prison term, currently under house arrest for ‘medical reasons’. He is prohibited from engaging in any form of political campaigning. Last July, at the convention of Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party, when Flávio was nominated as the party’s candidate, an AI-generated video showed Jair passing a torch to his son and intoning, ‘blood of my blood, my son, Flávio’. Such an endorsement would have violated the terms of Jair Bolsonaro’s sentence by the Brazilian Supreme Court, but the former president maintained that he had not authorised the simulation.

This is not the only time that AI has muddied the waters in this election race. More recently, Flávio Bolsonaro appeared in a widely circulated video clip, holding a prized Brazilian cut of beef, picanha, promising to raise the minimum wage, ostensibly so that voters can afford to purchase it. Another clip shows him being endorsed by a popular samba singer, Zeca Pagodinho. Both are AI fakes. 

Lula’s main campaign thrust continues to be that this election is about participatory democracy, sovereignty, protection of the environment and an array of progressive social programmes pioneered by his administration. Flávio Bolsonaro, who bears an uncanny resemblance to his father, has turned the campaign into a referendum on incumbent Lula and whether the ageing reformer has failed in his three terms as president. 

An overriding campaign issue thus far has been crime, and the failure of Lula’s initiatives to staunch a rising tide of street offences. In certain areas in Rio de Janeiro, the nation’s showcase of breathtaking geography and littoral beauty, gangs led by the notorious Red Command are particularly prevalent. Candidate Bolsonaro has noted that when he was a child in Rio, playful kites dotted the sky. Today, they have been replaced by drones operated by drug traffickers, hovering over favelas, or hillside slums.

Crime has dogged Brazilian cities for decades, though the nation’s overall homicide rate has, in fact, declined significantly. São Paulo, the nation’s megalopolis of 12 million people, is relatively safe, with a lower homicide rate than Los Angeles or Chicago. Rio is still plagued by crime, but statistics show that violent crimes have dropped by almost three quarters since 2000. 

An additional wrinkle in the upcoming election is a series of allegations of corruption involving one of the 11 Supreme Court justices, Alexandre de Moraes. Despite widespread calls for Lula to demand Moraes’ resignation, the president has stuck by his ally.

The Moraes corruption scandal has complicated the mano-a-mano race, though it is still assumed that Bolsonaro and Lula will advance to the run-off on 25 October. In a second-round vote, Brazil’s major polls now show Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro in a statistical dead heat. In Latin America’s largest economy, the result is too close to call. But, if Lula loses, Trump will no doubt be quick to spin the outcome as the pink tide’s definitive end.