As supporters of President Lula mobilize to flip the first-round results in the presidential race to secure a fourth term for a Workers’ Party-led government, it’s worth considering what kind of presidency Brazil would experience if Flávio Bolsonaro were elected on October 25.
Obviously, every national political scenario is unique. A potential future Bolsonaro government might look quite different from how Trump has governed since returning to the presidency in 2025. Yet, given the declared affinity the Bolsonaro family has with the Trump clan, its policies, and its practices, it is worth considering how much a new president, governing with a strong far-right base in Congress, may borrow from Trump’s political playbook, should he walk up the ramp on January 1, 2027.
Political observers have noticed a two-year lag between recent political events in the United States and those in Brazil. Trump took power in 2016; Jair was elected two years later. Biden defeated Trump in 2000; Lula won the 2022 elections. Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building in 2021; Bolsonaro’s army of defenders stormed Brasília two years later, in 2023. Trump returned to power in 2025; Brazil could face a new Bolsonaro presidency in 2027. Although different historical processes rarely have such neat causality, the two far-right camps are clearly in ongoing dialogue about how best to gain and consolidate power.
Trump quickly applauded the 1.9% victory the Bolsonaro camp enjoyed on October 4, although in the social media message he confused Brazil with India: “125 Million People voted today in the first round of India’s Presidential Election. The results came out shortly after the vote closed, on the SAME DAY!” He also used the occasion to banter about one of his major fixations: “In Detroit, Philadelphia, California, and numerous other U.S. Cities and States, the results, with much smaller numbers, will often take weeks to Rig- I mean, calculate. Voting in America is CORRUPT!!!”
Whereas Jair Bolsonaro built part of his 2022 electoral campaign on criticizing the reliability of Brazil’s electronic voting system, the right-wing camp was silent about the voting process this time. It seems that there is electoral fraud when you lose, but not so, when you win. Ironically, Trump praised the Brazilian elections for employing voting procedures that the U.S. president has declared fraudulent in the United States.
If Lula’s supporters flip the first-round results and win by a small margin in the second round, both Bolsonaro and Trump will protest the outcome. As Trump did with the Venezuelan opposition’s electoral outcome, the White House might insist the second round of the Brazilian elections was fraudulent and that Bolsonaro was legitimately elected president, creating a national and international crisis over the legitimacy of a new Lula administration.
If Flávio Bolsonaro defeats President Lula, he will likely follow Trump’s lead by reversing almost all the current government’s policies and programs, as much as popular resistance allows. Like Trump’s executive order issued on January 20, 2025, the first day he was in office, pardoning his supporters who invaded the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the 2022 U.S. presidential election results, Flávio has promised a presidential pardon for his father, who was found guilty of organizing an insurrection against the new Lula government, as well as those who invaded the Praça dos Três Poderes to support Bolsonaro’s plan.
Although a presidential pardon would forgive Jair Bolsonaro’s remaining prison sentence, it would not erase the underlying Supreme Court conviction or restore his political rights. Therefore, Bolsonaro’s political allies could seek a legislative amnesty that would fully restore Jair Bolsonaro’s ability to run for office.
Flávio Could Govern out of Revenge, just like Trump
On day one of his presidency, Trump announced a campaign to get revenge on his political opponents through vindictive lawsuits and other administrative actions. Flávio could repeat this strategy.
First Target: Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes
In Brazil, undoubtedly, the first target will be Alexandre de Moraes, who oversaw Jair Bolsonaro’s trial. Because the justice, along with four other Supreme Court members, including two appointed by Flávio’s father, is allegedly involved in illicit actions related to the Banco Master scandal, condemning him may be difficult.
The justice is already a target of the Bolsonaro family. Flávio Bolsonaro’s brother, Eduardo, currently a fugitive from the Brazilian justice system living in the United States, along with Paulo Figueiredo, successfully lobbied the Trump White House to impose 50% tariffs on Brazil, conditioned on lifting the charges against Jair Bolsonaro. They also convinced the U.S. government to impose the Magnitsky Law on the Supreme Court justice, which harshly sanctioned him for allegedly violating human rights, even though Jim McGovern, the U.S. congressman who wrote the legislation, has posted on social media that the law doesn’t apply in this case.
Second Target: Social movements
Another frontal attack from Washington has been targeting civil society organizations that criticize Trump’s policies.
During Jair Bolsonaro’s term in office, the president attacked environmental social movements, calling them terrorist organizations. We should expect that assault to increase significantly
Third Target: The Constitution
Since returning to the White House, Trump’s political strategy has been to pursue policies and actions that seem to flagrantly violate the U.S. Constitution: attempts to deny citizenship to people born in the United States, the imposition of the 2025 50% tariffs without congressional approval, and freezing congressionally authorized funding, among other actions.
Flávio Bolsonaro has declared that he intends to change the constitution, mentioning some possible legislative measures while leaving his overall plans ambiguous. Given the attempted insurrection in 2023, which violated the 1988 Constitution’s presuppositions, one can only imagine how little he will respect the rule of law, especially if he can sustain a far-right voting bloc in Congress.
Fourth Target: The Press
Freedom of the press might also come under attack, as Trump has banned those media outlets whose coverage of his presidency he dislikes. So far, Brazil’s mainstream media doesn’t seem very concerned about this threat to free speech and the free press, and several major news empires have shown they favor Flávio over Lula.
But if the former is elected and decides to go after those who offer unfavorable reporting, who will stop him? With a majority in Congress and a Supreme Court in disarray, there are no system controls to prevent the possible future president from waging a frontal assault on the free press or the country’s most outspoken critics of the far-right.
Fifth Target: Social Movements
When Trump returned to power in the United States, he brought a detailed plan, Project 2025, designed to shrink the federal government and eliminate programs conservatives deemed unacceptable to their agenda. Trump called in Elon Musk to do his dirty work, and the trillionaire was quite successful in slashing government programs and the jobs of people who ensured their success. The Bolsonaro camp has announced it intends to slash government spending, with little detail about its plans. But given the ideological posture that less government is better, one can expect similar dramatic cuts in Brazil.
Undoubtedly, one of the first targets will be Brazilian public universities, and the fires at the Federal University of Pernambuco are only a preview of what may come soon. Trump’s attacks on Columbia, Harvard, and other world-class universities, claiming that administrators had failed to stop anti-Semitism on campuses, were an excuse to force universities to eliminate all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, which had been important mechanisms to ensure that quality higher education was truly accessible to all social sectors and not merely privileged middle-class white people.
There is absolutely no guarantee that a new far-right government in Brasília would leave current affirmative action programs in place, arguing that they are part of a left-wing conspiracy to control the minds of university students, discriminatory, and racist. No programs will be immune from attempts to dismantle them.
Sixth Target: Sovereignty
Brazilian sovereignty will also be at stake. Throughout the world, observers who comment on the United States consider many of Trump’s pronouncements as merely lunatic fantasies from an unstable person. Calling for the annexation of Canada and Greenland, changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, or Lake Ontario to Lake America, seem to be nonsensical nationalist efforts to appeal to his xenophobic base of support.
Yet, Trump’s invasion of Venezuela and the declaration that Brazilian criminal organizations are terrorist organizations that the U.S. government has the divine right to destroy merely reflect a desire to transform Latin America and the Caribbean into a neo-colonial backyard of the United States. A rare minerals deal favorable to the United States that offers few benefits to Brazil is clearly one of the first items on the agenda for a Brazilian president who considers himself 100% aligned with the current U.S. government.
More Targets: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, LGBTQIAPN+ right and the Environment
The list goes on, and on, and on: purging Itamaraty, administrative processes against current government officials, attacks on LGBT+ rights, continued privatization of state-owned enterprises, dismantling the protection of Indigenous lands, and an end to environmental protection. With an electoral victory, no matter how small, Bolsonaro, like Trump, will declare that he has received a mandate from the people to carry out his program, ignoring the will the other half of the country that doesn’t support his plans for the future of Brazil.
The most recent polls in the United States indicate that Democrats will win control of the House of Representatives and now possibly even the Senate, forming a front to restrain Trump’s worst intentions for the next two years. As the U.S. Congress shifts left in repudiation of the current president’s policies, Brazil may face four years worse than the worst moments under Jair Bolsonaro. Although widespread repudiation of a possible new Bolsonaro government may come after a year or so in office, no plausible scenario would see a similar brake on the far-right’s power for the next four years if Lula’s supporters fail to flip the voting results.
The fate of the country could depend on a few hundred thousand votes.
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