World
• Analysis
Brazil presidential election: the voters choosing between Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro
A workshop manager in Paraná is settling for a candidate he never favoured; a 40-year-old in the interior of Amazonas state backs the president but will give only her initials, fearing reprisals. On Sunday, the first round of the Brazil presidential election pits Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the leftwing incumbent seeking a fourth non-consecutive term, against the far-right senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is serving a 27-year sentence for attempting a coup after his failed 2022 re-election bid.
By Haut Monde Post
• October 4, 2026
• 3 Min Read
A long ballot beyond the presidency
The presidential contest tops the ticket, but Sunday's vote reaches far beyond it. Brazilians will also elect:
- •27 state governors
- •members of the state legislatures
- •all 513 federal congress members
- •54 of the country's 81 senators
The regional stakes
Flávio Bolsonaro, 45, is an ally of Donald Trump who, like his father before him, praises the US president frequently; Jair Bolsonaro was Brazil's president during Trump's first term. The senator has pledged to join the US-led anti-drug cartel coalition, responsible for airstrikes that have killed dozens and for military operations across the region.
The 80-year-old Lula, for his part, has positioned himself as one of the last regional leaders still willing to say no to Trump, and has accused the US president of attempting to interfere in Brazil's election in Bolsonaro's favour. After a wave of rightwing and far-right electoral victories across the region, Brazil is one of the few Latin American countries still governed by the left - and the United States has taken over Venezuela after the capture of Nicolás Maduro.
How Bolsonaro's son became the candidate
Polls at the start of the year suggested Bolsonaro's voters would rather have seen a ticket led by the São Paulo governor, Tarcísio de Freitas, or the former first lady Michelle Bolsonaro; Jair Bolsonaro chose his eldest son anyway. The campaign was nonetheless marked by a recording in which the senator asked a banker accused of corruption for $26.8m (£20m) to fund a film about his father.
For many analysts, Flávio's competitiveness rests on a straightforward transfer of his father's voter base - the elder Bolsonaro lost to Lula by less than two percentage points in 2022 - combined with an anti-Lula vote. Claudinei Ferreira Viana, a 45-year-old workshop manager in Pinhais, in Paraná state, is one such voter: his first choice for president would have been Jair Bolsonaro himself.
"since he is under house arrest and there is no other rightwing candidate strong enough to take on the current president, I'm going with Flávio."
Lula under pressure
Strong social and economic indicators have not dented the president's high rejection rates. Corruption allegations involving his son and a former aide - still under investigation - have also dogged the campaign, and a separate scandal involving supreme court justices, one with no connection to Lula, is nonetheless seen as stoking an "anti-system" vote and, with it, an anti-incumbent one.
In the interior of Amazonas, a 40-year-old worker who asked to be identified only as AMC, fearing reprisals from the local conservative government, says she will vote for Lula on Sunday because of the many programmes he has created to support the most vulnerable groups. In her telling, Jair Bolsonaro weakened protections for Indigenous peoples, and everything the president has done over the past four years to strengthen those protections and protect the Amazon would be seriously threatened if his son came to power.
Both campaigns have spent the final days courting undecided voters in pursuit of 50% plus one vote. If neither candidate gets there on Sunday, the election goes to a runoff on 25 October.
