For much of the past decade, Brazil has looked like a mirror of the United States, reflecting American politics with a two-year lag. Donald Trump won in 2016, and Jair Bolsonaro, dubbed the “Trump of the tropics”, followed in 2018. Bolsonaro was a former army captain nostalgic for the military dictatorship. He rose to power as a provocative anti-establishment populist, known for inflammatory remarks, attacks on democratic institutions and for downplaying a pandemic that killed more than 700,000 Brazilians. The 6 January 2021 assault on the US Capitol was then echoed on 8 January 2023, when his supporters stormed Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court and presidential palace in Brasília. One researcher calls the pattern the “two-year American curse”. With Trump back in the White House, many expected Brazil to follow again in 2026, but it seems the “curse” may be lifted.
Brazil’s Election: Lula Turns the Political Tide
On 25 October, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won a fourth term as Brazil’s president. He beat Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the eldest son of Jair Bolsonaro, by 51.7% to 48.3%, which was a margin of more than four million votes.
Brazil uses a two-round election system. If no candidate wins more than half the valid votes, the top two meet in a runoff three weeks later. In the first round on 4 October, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, Jair’s eldest son, came out on top with 47% to Lula’s 45%. The race was closer than many polls had predicted. The right also did well in Congress, where Flávio’s Liberal Party had its best Senate result since Brazil returned to democracy in the late 1980s.
Concern on the left was understandable. The first poll after the vote put Flávio ahead 53% to 47%, and on the eve of the runoff, Datafolha still had him narrowly ahead. Many feared that the movement which had tried to overturn the 2022 election was about to win power at the ballot box, while its founder was in prison for the coup attempt.
The Bolsonaro Dynasty and Trump
After losing narrowly to Lula in 2022, Jair Bolsonaro refused to accept the result, and the riot that followed became Brazil’s own January 6th. Unlike in the US, Brazil’s institutions appeared to follow through against the insurrection. Bolsonaro was convicted of plotting a coup, including plans to kill Lula, and is serving a 27-year sentence.
His son has seemed to follow in his political footsteps, however. Flávio refused to concede and called himself “president-elect”. He says he will challenge the result in court because of a last-minute Supreme Court ruling that extended voting by two hours. After the vote, he fled to the United States to avoid a legal investigation at home. He is under investigation for suspected money laundering, which he denies, and Brazil’s Supreme Court had ordered him to hand over his passports and barred him from leaving the country. He left with his family as the deadline to surrender the passports ran out. The Trump administration then granted them visas. Flávio says he left because he is a victim of persecution. Trump’s administration had already opposed Jair’s prosecution and put tariffs on Brazil, citing a witch-hunt against him. After the result, Trump told reporters: “I didn’t take sides, but it looked like another rigged election.”
Faith, Fear and the Evangelical vote
“Bolsonarismo”, or the right-wing movement built around Bolsonaro, drew much of its strength from Brazil’s fast-growing evangelical churches. Evangelicals now make up about 30% of the electorate, and they remained Flávio’s most loyal bloc. Late polls gave him around 60% of the vote, with Lula at 28%. He toured churches, courted pastors and joined the huge March for Jesus, while allied pastors accused Lula of starting a “religious war”.
Lula held support among Catholics, poorer voters, and the non-religious, and set up his own evangelical committees to narrow Flávio’s lead. Reporting after the vote also suggests many Brazilians were driven by a reluctance to return to the Bolsonaro years. A committed religious base was not enough to deliver a majority.
Lula had popular policies to run on, including ending the six-day working week and banning online gambling platforms. His campaign also invested heavily online. A WhatsApp channel run by the lawmaker André Janones, called “Lula’s Army,” had more than 10 million members. It set followers daily tasks and asked them not to engage with right-wing content.
The Amazon on the ballot
Under Jair Bolsonaro, Amazon deforestation rose sharply as environmental enforcement was weakened. Lula restored the anti-deforestation action plan, reappointed Marina Silva as environment minister and toughened penalties for environmental crime. Deforestation in the year to July 2026 fell to its lowest level since records began in 1988. Carbon Brief estimates that his government has prevented at least 20,000 km² of forest loss since 2022.
Lula’s environmental record is not without criticism. Environmentalists oppose his backing for oil exploration near the mouth of the Amazon, and the new, more conservative Congress could block further protections. But the Amazon is one of the world’s most important carbon sinks, so the result matters well beyond Brazil.
Beyond Brazil
Brazil is not alone in following this path. In April, Hungarian voters ended Viktor Orbán’s 16 years in power in a landslide. They gave Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party a two-thirds majority on record turnout, even though US Vice President JD Vance visited to campaign for Orbán. And on the same day as Brazil’s runoff, Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić conceded defeat to a student-led movement. The contexts differ: Orbán and Vučić conceded, while the Bolsonaros have not. But in all three of these cases, dominant leaders aligned with Trump lost to broad coalitions with a high turnout. For Latin America, Lula’s win disrupts a regional shift to the right that many have feared represents democratic backsliding. More broadly, it shows the far right is not inevitable.
Lula’s re-election also gives the rest of the world an opportunity in the Amazon, and it should not be wasted. International funding has followed Brazil’s politics closely. Norway and Germany froze their contributions to the Amazon Fund in 2019 in protest at Jair Bolsonaro’s policies, and only resumed after Lula returned to office. At COP30 last year, Brazil launched the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, which is a fund that pays countries to sustain forests. It attracted about $5.5 billion in early pledges, and the UK and the Netherlands have since added more. That is still a fraction of the $25 billion in public money it was designed to raise, and it has until the end of this year to reach targets. The Amazon’s role as a carbon sink, stabilising the global climate, makes its protection an international responsibility. Governments that celebrated Lula’s victory should also act to ensure long-term funding that survives changes of government in Brazil.
None of this means the threat has passed. Brazil remains a deeply divided nation. Almost half of voters backed a Bolsonaro, and Congress has shifted to the right. However, after years in which democratic backsliding seemed to be the global trend, 2026 has shown that there is hope for it to be reversed at the ballot box.
Image by Joel Santos from Pexels
