Analysts trace Flávio Bolsonaro's Brazil surge in the 2026 presidential race to evangelical megachurch muscle, Bukele-style answers to urban violence and President Lula's failure to address voters' daily grind.

Crime, Bukele and the hardline pitch

Urban violence, in Mello Franco's assessment, has turbocharged the "far-right windstorm" sweeping Brazil. The pro-gun Bolsonaros, he argues, answer high crime with remedies that are misguided but easy to understand:

• •increased police violence
• •mass incarceration
• •lowering the age of criminal responsibility

Such pitches, Mello Franco argued, land with a specific audience:

El Salvador's Nayib Bukele, the authoritarian president who has jolted murder rates down by jailing thousands of people - often with no due process - is Latin America's leading light on security populism. During the 2026 campaign, Mello Franco said, Bolsonarista politicians presented the proto-dictator and his supposedly magic solutions as an inspiration.

Hardline ideas gained an outside lift as well. Donald Trump designated Rio's Red Command and São Paulo's PCC - Brazil's two biggest crime groups - as foreign terrorist organizations, and the move has boosted such proposals. The campaign vows that followed from Bolsonaro and his allies were to "neutralize narco-terrorists" and to chemically castrate rapists, pledges that appear to have won over many voters worn down by violence.

Many observers filed Sunday's rightwing victory under a familiar heading: the worldwide rise of a far right fluent in social media. "We're seeing this in the US, we're seeing it in parts of Latin America," said political scientist Miguel Lagos, who added that Europe shows the same revolution in a different way. In Brazil, he argued, the fuel is a deep rage against the classical political elites - journalists, traditional politicians and intellectuals among them.

The evangelical machine

The family's ground game, as Mello Franco describes it, runs through pulpits and phone screens: pastors who purchase television airtime, head congregations numbering in the millions and command social media audiences to match have taken on the role of canvassers for the Bolsonaro family. This religious machine, he said, "was put at the service of Bolsonarismo."

The apparatus was decades in the making. Brazil's evangelical church has expanded dramatically since the 1980s, and evangelical Christians now account for nearly a third of the population. Many of those voters - often steered by their church leaders - have backed the radical populist movement Jair Bolsonaro built and his evangelical eldest son now spearheads.

As president from 2018 to 2022, Jair Bolsonaro used ultra-conservative policies to forge a durable alliance with the leaders of powerful megachurches - the televangelist Silas Malafaia among them.

Where Lula's campaign lost the room

Political analyst Thomas Traumann, once spokesperson for the leftwing former president Dilma Rousseff, offers the bluntest diagnosis: Lula's third administration, he believes, overlooked a big slice of society unhappy over economic issues or supreme court controversies. In his account, the government brushed off all criticism as fascism - which he grants exists in Brazil - or as elitism, which also exists. Others, he noted, expected more and fit neither label: "They are simply people who didn't like the government and decided to punish it."

What those voters saw on the trail fed the estrangement. At a recent rally in suburban Rio, some of the president's own supporters could be seen switching off as he held forth at length on critical minerals and artificial intelligence. The campaign, meanwhile, leaned hard on sovereignty - vows to stand up to Donald Trump's "colonial" designs and to safeguard Brazil's rare earth reserves.

Voters' actual worries were closer to home, Mello Franco argued: bank debts, the cost of food, insecurity. Analysts say the failure to focus on such day-to-day matters - crime among them - may have hurt his prospects.

The age question and the Biden parallel

A recent Economist story branded Lula "a doddering leftie" and placed him alongside the "geriatric leader" Joe Biden, who quit the 2024 re-election race after a debate against Trump went disastrously wrong. The two analysts who have followed this race give the comparison only partial credit.

Traumann called questions over the president's physical or mental state ridiculous, pointing to the gym-going octogenarian's speeches: "When you see him speak, you can tell it's not about this." Mello Franco agreed the comparison overreaches: in his view, Lula has never displayed physical frailty or cognitive decline the way Biden did, and he does not believe age was an issue.

Where the parallel does hold, in Traumann's view, is temperament: Lula's stubbornness, his habit of not listening to those around him, and his apparent faith that decent economic indicators would deliver re-election. "This disconnection from reality reminds me of Biden," he said, putting it down to the stubbornness of age. From the campaign's outset, he added, Lula seemed to believe "the election was in the bag" - and it was not.

For his critics, the president's age remains his Achilles heel - and they fault him for never grooming an obvious successor. He turns 81 two days after the second round on 25 October.

The next test is the second round on 25 October. Mello Franco believes Flávio Bolsonaro is now the favourite to become president, but does not think the contest is over: Brazil, he cautions, "is always showing us that plot twists aren't just possible – they're practically part of the landscape."