Brazil’s presidential race formally began on Sunday. Flávio Bolsonaro appeared in Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana neighborhood for a launch rally while wearing a bulletproof vest under a green-and-yellow shirt printed with the words, “My party is Brazil.” His wife walked beside him, along with his running mate Alfredo Gaspar, a first-term legislator from Bolsonaro’s party accused of mishandling public funds and sexually assaulting a minor.
Gaspar’s selection followed months of fruitless negotiations in which Bolsonaro sought to assemble a broader coalition behind his candidacy—and possibly select a more esteemed running mate from another party. The failure of those talks reflected the doubts that many politicians on Brazil’s right have about Bolsonaro’s chances.
Brazil’s presidential race formally began on Sunday. Flávio Bolsonaro appeared in Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana neighborhood for a launch rally while wearing a bulletproof vest under a green-and-yellow shirt printed with the words, “My party is Brazil.” His wife walked beside him, along with his running mate Alfredo Gaspar, a first-term legislator from Bolsonaro’s party accused of mishandling public funds and sexually assaulting a minor.
Gaspar’s selection followed months of fruitless negotiations in which Bolsonaro sought to assemble a broader coalition behind his candidacy—and possibly select a more esteemed running mate from another party. The failure of those talks reflected the doubts that many politicians on Brazil’s right have about Bolsonaro’s chances.
Michelle Bolsonaro, Bolsonaro’s stepmother and arguably the family’s most popular political figure after his father Jair, remained in Brasília to care for the former president, who is under house arrest for attempting a coup after losing the 2022 election. Barred by the Supreme Court from participating in the campaign, the elder Bolsonaro instead addressed the crowd by dialing in through loudspeakers as his son formally launched his candidacy. The turnout—estimated to be between 7,800 to 9,900 people—was underwhelming.
Some 250 miles down the coast, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva walked into a municipal stadium in São Bernardo do Campo to begin his fourth presidential election campaign. In 1979 and 1980, metalworkers filled the same terraces to hear Lula, then a gritty young labor leader, denounce the economic policies of the military dictatorship. Lula personally chose this site to launch his reelection campaign. His wide-ranging speech touched on his hardscrabble upbringing, his mother, the radiation treatment he underwent last year, his union, and party-building efforts over the past 40 years. If Lula is reelected, he will be 81 when he starts his fourth presidential term.
The incumbent president has maintained a steady advantage in the polls, but it is too soon to count Bolsonaro out. Recent polling by Quaest has Lula at 38 percent in the first round of elections against 31 for Bolsonaro, and 43 to 40 percent in a head-to-head runoff, a tie within the margin of error. Public security, an issue that has long favored the right, now tops voters’ concerns, according to Quaest. And the Bolsonaro name still carries weight in deeply polarized Brazil.
What is striking, however, is how little confidence Bolsonaro’s side seems to have in his candidacy. Prominent nominal allies like Nikolas Ferreira, a young right-wing congressman with an enormous social media following, and the former first lady were conspicuously absent from his rally. Bolsonaro’s running mate is barely known, except for the allegations swirling around him.
Bolsonaro has maintained a deep public devotion to his father while insisting that he is more moderate. He has quipped, for example, that he is the Bolsonaro family member who got vaccinated, an allusion to Jair’s calamitous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. But Bolsonaro has no coalition to point to as a sign of his political tact and supposed ideological inclusivity. In fact, challengers on the right who trail Bolsonaro in the polls have grown sharper in their criticism of him, sensing opportunity in his political isolation.
Lula’s allies, on the other hand, have consolidated around him. His Workers’ Party has allied with every major left-of-center party to present a unified front against Bolsonaro’s far-right camp. Geraldo Alckmin, once a dogged center-right opponent who competed against Lula in the 2006 presidential runoff, is his running mate once again.
Last week, Gilberto Kassab, a former São Paulo mayor who served in the cabinet of former President Dilma Rousseff, told a room of agribusiness and mining executives that, because the country’s powerful centrão bloc of pragmatic, center-right parties has effectively aligned with Lula, Bolsonaro has no chance of winning in October.
Kassab is widely considered to be among the most accurate weathervanes in Brazilian politics. He is the influential head of the centrist Social Democratic Party and is currently running as vice president on the ticket of Ronaldo Caiado, the governor of Goiás state. Kassab’s prediction is hardly ironclad, but it reflects a broad sense among insiders that a whole lot would have to go wrong for Lula to lose.
One explanation for this reading rests on how Bolsonaro’s candidacy came about in the first place. From prison, Jair unilaterally selected his son as his political heir, communicating his decision to his party in a handwritten letter. The move bypassed other figures in Jair’s political orbit who had their own ambitions to succeed him or at least hoped to exercise greater influence over the choice of presidential candidate.
The decision also carried risks with one of the pillars of Jair’s coalition: evangelical Protestant voters. Silas Malafaia, a media-savvy pastor whose network turned out enormous numbers for the Bolsonaro family in 2022, made no secret of his desire to see a presidential ticket composed of São Paulo Gov. Tarcísio Gomes de Freitas, who served in Jair’s presidential cabinet, and Michelle, a committed evangelical. Both polled better against Lula than Bolsonaro did. But the former president overruled them both with the stroke of a pen.
In a telling move, Malafaia sent an audio message of support to Bolsonaro’s Copacabana rally but did not appear in person. A political camp that treats the presidential nomination as an inheritance should not be surprised when the people it disinherits lack enthusiasm.
Bolsonaro’s weak launch could impact the Brazilian right’s future electoral prospects. A Flávio defeat that no other key stakeholders on the right signed onto leaves the 2030 succession race wide open—and lets Freitas and a myriad of others argue that the bolsonarista electorate is not beholden to the former president and his clan.
To be sure, the other conservative candidates in the race could endorse Bolsonaro in a potential runoff against Lula. But there is an appeal in waiting until the first round of voting concludes to do so. A second-round endorsement comes after voters have already decided whether the Bolsonaro name can still carry the Brazilian right. It costs nothing if Bolsonaro ultimately loses—and gives the endorser a claim on the spoils if he wins. By contrast, backing Bolsonaro before the first-round vote means spending political capital to help a rival secure the nomination and tying one’s own future to his fate.
But what Bolsonaro needs is help now, and nobody is stepping up to offer it.
None of this makes Lula’s victory inevitable. The first-round election isn’t until Oct. 4, and Brazil’s campaigning period has only just begun. But the weakness of Bolsonaro’s launch is a reminder that he needs to prove he’s more than just his father’s proxy. If Bolsonaro loses, the right will squabble over the reason. Was it Lula’s unique strength or an unhealthy dependence on the Bolsonaro name?
Freitas and others have every incentive to preserve the rabid reactionary movement built by the former president while loosening his family’s grip on it. Their interest, in short, is not necessarily a Bolsonaro victory. It is in proving that bolsonarismo can survive without the Bolsonaros. For now, they are hedging. And in politics, hedging is often the first sign that a succession battle has begun.