According to the polls, the Brazilian presidential race will be tight: with days to go before the first round of voting on 4 October, the two main candidates are in a dead heat. Four years ago, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated the incumbent Jair Bolsonaro by only 1.8 percentage points, in the closest result in Brazil’s modern history. Last September, however, when the country’s highest court sentenced Bolsonaro to twenty-seven years in prison for plotting a military coup to remain in power, many took heart from what Le Monde hailed as an ‘exemplary verdict for democracy’, demonstrating to the rest of the world how to handle the challenge to democratic institutions posed by the far right. As Lula faces off against Bolsonaro’s forty-five-year-old son and heir apparent, Flávio, on another razor-thin margin, such conclusions now look premature. Whatever the result, it will ripple well beyond the borders of Brazil, one of the remaining holdouts – as Marco Rubio recently told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee – in a hemisphere ‘filled with American-friendly leaders’.

Lula, who turns eighty-one this month, has led the Workers’ Party (PT) to victory in five out of the last six presidential elections, a record of electoral dominance explained by committed support from the bottom half of the income distribution, disproportionately concentrated in the Northeast, where poverty rates are far above the national average. Since his re-election to a second term in 2006, the PT has systematically performed better with the poorest voters, while often losing ground among the wealthiest quarter of the electorate. As André Singer has argued, this realignment was premised on a series of policies that improved the living standards of the country’s immense industrial reserve army of labour, the core of the PT’s base – around 40 per cent of the working-age population. Conditional cash transfers, rural electrification and regular pension increases allowed the ‘underproletariat’ to expand consumption beyond necessities and stimulated local economies in small and medium municipalities. The upshot was a ‘politicization of inequality’ that led Thomas Piketty to single out Brazil as one of the few exceptions to the class de-alignment observed across Western democracies, where lower-income voters have increasingly abandoned left-of-centre parties.  

Support for the Workers’ Party proved more elusive among the better-integrated, formally employed sections of the urban working class. In the boom years of the 2000s commodities super-cycle, this segment could hold out hope in upward mobility – especially younger Brazilians, many of whom were the first of their families to get a university degree. However, the pattern of accumulation did not permit those expectations to be realized. Higher-paying manufacturing and service jobs dwindled, and labour market formalization was driven almost entirely by poorly-paid work in construction and basic services. When crisis struck in 2014, the precariousness of this group’s income gains became evident. A decade of progress was erased within just a few years. Disappointment would lead many – especially men – to look for an alternative in the far right.

Lula’s chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff, was elected to the presidency in 2010 and narrowly returned to office in 2014. But recession and scandal soon engulfed her second term. Damaged by a politicized investigation into corruption and money laundering, she was impeached on the pretext of budgetary irregularities in 2016 and replaced by vice-president Michel Temer, who assumed the presidency without a popular mandate and oversaw a sharp rightward shift in policy. Lula himself spent a year and a half in prison on graft charges that were later annulled. The breakdown of the party system, together with economic downturn and anti-PT backlash, opened the door to Jair Bolsonaro’s victory in 2018, installing the radical right in the Planalto.   

Bolsonarismo capitalized on popular frustration by a variety of means, eventually assembling an electoral base to match Lula’s. Culture-war militancy cemented the retired army captain’s appeal to a large network of conservative religious leaders, his brutal law-and-order talk catered to the security forces and anti-systemic rhetoric captured the atomized and disaffected. Recent studies of the Brazilian far right highlight Bolsonaro’s success in consolidating a loyal ‘conservative bloc’ around a cluster of issues – policing, abortion, same-sex marriage, deregulation – welded together by a digital infrastructure of WhatsApp and Telegram groups, YouTube channels, ‘influencers’ and televangelists. But this literature generally fails to note a key geographical characteristic of the bloc, without which it would be unlikely to rival Lulismo at the ballot box. Since 2018, Bolsonarismo has been hegemonic in the vast areas of Brazil dominated by soya and cattle, an agribusiness belt that runs from Rio Grande do Sul through Paraná into the Centre-West, giving it a territorial basis comparable to the PT’s strongholds in the Northeast.

To understand how the far right has taken root here, it helps to consider the changing features of Brazilian capitalism over the past two decades. Since the turn of the century, China’s reordering of global capitalism has pushed South America to become one of the world’s main sources for agricultural and mineral commodities. In response to surging Asian demand for meat, soya cultivation expanded rapidly, supplying the beans that would be transformed into animal feed. Brazil alone increased soya acreage by 20 million hectares between 2005 and 2020, an area one and a half the size of England. The Brazilian savanna was transformed into an enormous soya plantation, to the detriment of its biodiversity, and the advancing cropland frontier encroached on the Amazon rainforest, already threatened by the ever-deeper incursion of cattle ranching.

Ecological pressure had a social counterpart. The supply chains for both soya and meat are oligopsonistic, dominated by giant grain traders and meatpackers that control most of the exports – in the case of Brazil, five firms account for more than half of all soya exports and three are responsible for two-thirds of the beef sales abroad. But these firms rarely engage in farming and ranching themselves; a multitude of small and medium landowners supply them with soyabeans and fattened animals. The resulting power imbalance means that these farmers and ranchers are deeply subordinated to the corporations, which dictate their production practices and squeeze their incomes. Pressured from above, this middle layer – which includes other small capitalists involved in servicing the agri-industrial supply chain – is also vigilant against stirrings from below (labourers, peasants, indigenous and riverine communities), identifying both with the PT, which supported the consolidation of large agricultural holdings and environmental policies that impinged disproportionately on small and medium landowners.

The region that extends from the countryside of Brazil’s southern states and São Paulo through the Midwest to the southern and eastern flanks of the Amazon offered fertile ground for Bolsonarismo. The ethnographer Caio Pompeia has shown how radicalized farmers and ranchers entered state-level producer associations, coordinating their efforts across the country until they were powerful enough to shape the large agrarian caucus in Congress, pushing it firmly to the right. With the rise of agri-Bolsonarismo the Brazilian countryside was ‘no longer content to simply defend its immediate economic interests’, as Rodrigo Nunes observed in Sidecar: ‘it instead sought to impose its agenda on the country as a whole’.

In 2022, this effort came up short. Bolsonaro’s attacks on the electoral system, the courts and the press, compounded by his response to the Covid-19 pandemic, drove sections of finance and big business to throw their weight behind Lula. On 8 January 2023, a week after the PT leader’s inauguration, Bolsonaro supporters rioted for several hours in the Brazilian capital, vandalizing public buildings and ransacking offices before military police took matters in hand. Bolsonaro himself had decamped for suburban Orlando, where he would be spotted eating Kentucky Fried Chicken and posing for selfies as the judicial inquiry into his alleged coup plot gathered steam.

Lula returned to power to face a very different country from the one he last governed. Brazil had been ravaged by deep crisis from 2014 to 2016, followed by a long period of stagnation. Annual GDP growth between 2015 and 2022 averaged 0.3 per cent. Bolsonaro’s deliberate dismantling of state capacity and market-liberal reforms (fiscal austerity, weakened labour protections, pension restructuring) further complicated the moderate redistributive strategy Lula had adopted in the 2000s. Notwithstanding these obstacles, he revived the approach that characterized his first two administrations, increasing social transfers and the minimum wage without any open challenge to neoliberal orthodoxy.

In some respects, the government could claim success. Despite global economic turmoil and Trump’s tariff offensive, average GDP growth in the first three years was more than double what it had been under Bolsonaro and unemployment fell to historic lows. The government adopted a strict fiscal rule that merely attenuated the constraints imposed by its predecessor; however, this only went into effect in 2024, after a substantial fiscal expansion in Lula’s first year back in office. Subnational governments and state-owned enterprises sustained the spending push a bit longer, partially circumventing the commitment to austerity. All the same, GDP growth declined from 3.4 to 2.3 per cent between 2024 and 2025, and it will likely be even slower this year.

Economic improvements, such as they are, have failed to translate into higher approval ratings for the incumbent, unlike in the 2000s. Aside from its laudable progressive income tax reform, the government’s capacity to improve the lot of the majority of the population through policy has turned out to be limited. Consider, for instance, the burden of household debt. Expanding access to credit had been one of the pillars of Lulismo since 2003, a policy that allowed many poorer families to purchase basic appliances like washing machines for the first time. But this is only sustainable as part of a development strategy that delivers sufficient pay increases to allow workers to repay their debts. In Brazil, with its precarious labour market and volatile macroeconomic conditions, financial inclusion quickly became financial expropriation. The situation has now reached a breaking point, with high interest rates pushing household debt service to more than 30 per cent of disposable income. In this context, lower unemployment and rising incomes means little, as additional funds go straight to lenders.

Aggregate indicators also hide the territorial division of the economy created by the soya and cattle boom. While average GDP growth more than doubled from Bolsonaro to Lula, agribusiness GDP growth moved in the opposite direction, from 7.7 per cent under Bolsonaro to 3.2 per cent in the first three years of the current government. This owed much more to volatile global markets than government policies – Bolsonaro’s tenure happened to coincide with the post-pandemic price boom – but it was experienced by those living in these regions as an economic deceleration, regardless of national statistics. At the same time, Lula doubled down on the toxic combination of state support for Big Ag with land-sparing environmental policies – precisely what sowed the seeds of agri-Bolsonarismo in the first place.

Given the entrenched social basis of Bolsonarismo and how little the current government has done to unsettle it, there is no mystery why the economic success Lula can point to has not guaranteed him easy re-election. His challenger, the eldest son of Bolsonaro and senator for Rio de Janeiro, has managed to reassemble much of his father’s electorate on a similar platform, conventional pro-business views combined with a hard line on security and doses of evangelical fanaticism. Less charismatic than his father, whom he pledges to pardon if elected, Flávio styles himself as a more disciplined, ‘vaccinated Bolsonaro’. His other campaign promises include chemical castration for convicted rapists, stiffer sentencing for minors and El Salvador-style mega-prisons. The younger Bolsonaro is directly implicated in a fraud and influence-trafficking scandal that has dominated headlines throughout the year, although this seems to have done him little harm in the polls; allegations have touched senior figures across the political spectrum, including the PT, though not Lula himself. Among those caught up in the investigation into payouts by a collapsed bank to public officials in return for favourable treatment is Alexandre de Moraes, the powerful Supreme Court Justice who sentenced Bolsonaro Sr and whose use of censorship orders has made him the target of criticism for judicial overreach and politicization. ‘To vote for Lula is to vote for Alexandre de Moraes’, Flávio Bolsonaro declared at a rally last month.

With both candidates polling well below 50 per cent, a runoff appears almost certain. If Lula comes out on top on 25 October, he will likely have to govern with an even more right-wing legislature, further constricting his room for manoeuvre. It remains to be seen whether he will be remembered for opening a new chapter of inclusiveness in the history of Brazil or laying the ground for the far right to thrive. There are signs that Flávio Bolsonaro, if elected, might head further than his father did in the direction of authoritarianism. Neither the PT and its allies on the left – never commanding more than a third of the lower house – nor the judiciary, weakened by scandal and under pressure from a hard-right Senate caucus, could be expected to exercise much institutional constraint on the new president.

Brazil stands at a crossroads, and the path it chooses will shape not only its own future but also that of the region as a whole. The United States is watching. Trump fired a warning shot in July 2025, when he wrote to Lula to denounce the criminal proceedings against Bolsonaro as a ‘witch hunt’, sanctioned Moraes and imposed a 50 per cent tariff on Brazilian goods. These were subsequently rolled back, but the trade weapon is still on the table. This spring, on the urging of Flávio Bolsonaro, Trump classified two Brazilian drug gangs as terrorist groups, a designation – confirmed at the UN General Assembly by the newly created ‘Shield of the Americas’, regrouping Washington’s more pliant hemispheric allies – that could open the way for US military action on Brazilian soil. In contrast with the ongoing fiasco in the Middle East, Trump has so far succeeded in imposing his wishes on Latin America, not least through meddling in elections. The key goal, made explicit in the latest National Security Strategy, is to contain China’s rise, restricting its access to Latin American markets and, especially, natural resources.

Geopolitics, as much as ideological affinity, determines how the White House views the election unfolding in the largest economy south of the Rio Grande. Beyond its abundant foodstuffs, Brazil possesses the world’s second largest reserves of ‘rare-earth’ elements and its crude exports – 60 per cent of which go to the PRC – are gaining strategic importance as states seek to reduce their exposure to Gulf producers. China is the central market for Brazilian goods, taking in a larger share of exports than the US and Europe together. Washington has of late sought preferential access to the country’s mineral wealth and limits on Chinese participation, prompting Lula to announce that these would be treated as a matter of ‘national sovereignty’. At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Grapevine, Texas, this March, his opponent showed a more understanding attitude: ‘Brazil is going to be the battleground where the future of the hemisphere will be fought, because Brazil is America’s solution to break the dependence on China for critical mineral, especially rare earths.’ Flávio Bolsonaro can be accused of many things; hiding his intentions is not one of them.

Read on: André Singer, ‘Lulismo 3.0: A Mid-Term Diagnosis’, NLR 150.