🗳 Election Observatory: Aug. 11

— by Paulo Abrão, executive director of the Washington Brazil Office

The party conventions are over, and the shape of Brazil's presidential election is set. Thirteen tickets now await registration with the Electoral Court. That is a crowded field, but not yet a fragmented race: Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro sit far ahead of everyone else. Since 1994, Brazilian presidential elections have organized themselves around two dominant forces, and nothing so far suggests this one will break the pattern.

The conventions exposed strategies and vulnerabilities. Lula holds the only ticket built by two parties, keeping Geraldo Alckmin as his running mate and a broad coalition behind him. Flávio Bolsonaro runs on a ticket drawn entirely from his own Liberal Party, and must now convert his father's legacy into coalition-building of his own. 

Ronaldo Caiado, Romeu Zema and Renan Santos are each auditioning to be the alternative on the right. Augusto Cury is betting on the fame he built outside politics. The radical left and the smaller parties widen the programmatic range of the contest while starting from almost nothing at the polls.

The campaign is also showing that the national election will be decided in the states. The first gubernatorial debates put public security at the center of the agenda and revealed races that could shape the presidential one. São Paulo is the clearest case: the clash between Tarcísio de Freitas and Fernando Haddad, in the first debate carried on national television, previews not only one of October's decisive state contests but a possible reordering of national leadership ahead of 2030. 

Elsewhere, front-runners skipped the opening debates altogether — a measure of how carefully each campaign is now pricing the risk of exposure. In Minas Gerais, the right is regrouping around Cleitinho Azevedo while the left splits between Alexandre Kalil and Patrus Ananias. In Bahia, the right sees an opening amid corruption allegations against local left-wing leaders. In Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul, the center-left has fielded competitive candidates after years of decisive defeats.

We have argued before that one external variable will shadow all of this. The latest escalation between Brasília and Washington — the revocation of the Brazilian ambassador's visa, in response to the impasse over the appointment of the new US ambassador — confirms that the bilateral relationship has entered electoral mode. After months of sanctions, trade disputes and lectures about the quality of Brazilian democracy and its courts, the worry is no longer confined to how the two governments treat each other. It is about how Washington responds to the vote itself.

The fear, put plainly: that the escalation is laying the groundwork for a refusal to recognize the result should October produce the "wrong" winner.

Washington has said publicly that it respects the Brazilian people and any government they freely choose in a free and fair election. The devil is in the details. By whose standard, these days, is an election free and fair?

Journalism and democracy are inseparable — and right now, both are under threat. A free press is not a luxury; it is the infrastructure of accountable governance, and when it weakens, so does everything else. That is why your support matters. 

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Brazil's parties wrapped up their nominating conventions last week, locking in the field for the Oct. 4 first round. Thirteen tickets emerged from the conventions, pending registration. Only two are genuinely competitive:

Lula, 80, is seeking an unprecedented fourth term. A metalworker who led the ABC region strikes of the late 1970s against the military dictatorship, he helped found the Workers' Party and lost three presidential races before finally winning it in 2002. He governed from 2003 to 2010, was jailed on corruption convictions later annulled, and returned to office in 2023. Lula's is the only mixed ticket in the field; all twelve others are single-party. Vice President Geraldo Alckmin, of the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB), is again his running mate.

Flávio Bolsonaro, 45, a lawyer and senator from Rio de Janeiro, is the eldest son of former President Jair Bolsonaro and Lula's closest challenger in the polls. He served four consecutive terms in Rio's state legislature before winning his Senate seat in 2018. He is running in his father's stead: the elder Bolsonaro is ineligible and imprisoned, serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup. Alfredo Gaspar, a federal lawmaker, is his running mate.

Santos, 42, a São Paulo businessman and writer, co-founded the Free Brazil Movement (MBL), the digitally native group that helped drive the 2016 impeachment of Dilma Rousseff. He dropped out of law school at the University of São Paulo to work in his father's company. An early Bolsonaro backer who broke with him once in office, he now calls himself a non-Bolsonarist conservative. His party was registered only last November. Aroldo Medina, a retired lieutenant colonel, is his running mate.

Caiado, 76, an orthopedic surgeon, has been one of Brazil's most durable agribusiness politicians since founding the Democratic Ruralist Union, a landowners' lobby, in 1985. He first ran for president in 1989, finishing near the bottom, then served five terms in the House and one in the Senate before being elected governor of Goiás in 2018 and re-elected in 2022. PSD chairman Gilberto Kassab, a former mayor of São Paulo, is his running mate.

Zema, 61, ran his family's retail and fuel conglomerate before entering politics, and was elected governor of Minas Gerais in 2018 and again in 2022, winning the latter outright in the first round. A business-school graduate and fiscal hard-liner, he built his record on austerity in a state buried in debt. His running mate is Senator Eduardo Girão of Ceará, among the loudest Bolsonaro supporters calling for an insurrection to overturn the 2022 result.

Leonardo Alves de Araújo, 37, known as Leonardo Avalanche, is a businessman and systems analyst from Anápolis, in Goiás, and the son of an evangelical pastor. He has led the PRTB since 2024 and managed Pablo Marçal's 2024 São Paulo mayoral campaign. São Paulo prosecutors charged him in January with rigging the party's 2024 leadership vote using forged documents and with political violence against a female party officer. He denies any wrongdoing.

Costa, 76, an economist with a doctorate from the University of Campinas, is a university professor, author and secretary general of the PCB, the country's oldest, founded in 1922. He ran for vice president on the party's 2010 ticket and is making his first bid for the top job, on a platform of breaking with what he calls Brazil's entrenched oligarchic order. Cleusa Santos is his running mate.

Dias, 55, teaches in Maranhão's state and municipal school systems and is a rapper and black rights activist. He co-founded the hip-hop collective Quilombo Urbano and fronts the group Gíria Vermelha. A party member since 2010, he ran for vice president in 2018, for mayor of São Luís in 2020 and for governor of Maranhão in 2022. Vanessa Portugal, a public school teacher in Belo Horizonte, is his running mate.

Martins, 38, is a dentist in the public health system and an organizer in Brazil's grassroots movements. She ran for vice president in 2022 on the ticket of Léo Péricles, her party's chairman, and this year heads one of two all-women tickets in the race. Raquel Brício, a port security guard and union leader, is her running mate.

Cury, 67, is a psychiatrist who became one of Brazil's best-selling authors, writing on emotional intelligence and personal development in books translated into dozens of languages. He has never held or sought public office, and enters the race with no political record to defend and no organized base beyond his readership. Júlio Delgado, a lawyer and former federal deputy from Minas Gerais, is his running mate.

Grassi, 56, is a veterinarian from São Paulo who built his political profile around animal welfare. As a board member of the state's small-animal veterinary association, he worked on the creation of Brazil's first public hospital for dogs and cats, in São Paulo. He unsuccessfully ran for the São Paulo city council in 2024 on the PRTB ticket.

Barão, 39, is a lawyer with postgraduate training in public management and administrative law, and heads the party's Mato Grosso chapter. She is not the party's first choice: DC first offered the nomination to former Supreme Court Justice Joaquim Barbosa, who declined. It is the first time since the party's founding in 1995 that its presidential candidate is not José Maria Eymael, who created it.

Pimenta, 69, a journalist and writer, founded the PCO and has run for president four times, in 2002, 2006, 2010 and 2014. The party then spent 12 years offering critical support to Lula rather than fielding its own candidate. Trotskyist and unapologetically marginal, the PCO has never won more than a fraction of a percent of the vote. The Federal Police are probing whether Pimenta has turned the party into a personal piggy bank.

Public security dominated the first debates of the 2026 gubernatorial races on Sunday, broadcast by TV Bandeirantes across 12 states.

In São Paulo, Governor Tarcísio de Freitas and Fernando Haddad, the former finance minister, clashed over crime, schools and sanitation in a civil exchange analysts likened to a runoff — and a rehearsal for 2030.

Eduardo Paes in Rio de Janeiro and Sergio Moro in Paraná skipped their debates. Both lead their races, and both stayed away rather than serve as lightning rods. Rivals called each a runaway.

In Brasília, Governor Celina Leão was pressed on Bank of Brasília's dealings with Banco Master, a fraudulent deal that left a hole that may reach BRL 8.8 billion. In Ceará, Elmano de Freitas, of the Workers' Party, tried to associate challenger Ciro Gomes with Jair Bolsonaro.

The United States revoked the visa of Brazil's ambassador in Washington, Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti, on Tuesday, in retaliation for Brasília's refusal to grant agrément to Daniel Perez, a Florida Republican and Trump's pick as ambassador to Brazil.

The Explaining Brazil podcast, produced by The Brazilian Report and the Brazil Office Alliance, took up the case. Editor-in-chief Gustavo Ribeiro and James Green, board chairman of the Washington Brazil Office, discuss the escalation and where it may lead — including whether isolating Brazil sets up a challenge to the October results.