🗳 Election Observatory: Jul. 14

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

Brazil's 2026 election is entering the stage of party conventions, when presidential tickets are formally nominated and coalitions locked in. The calendar now subjects the country's main political camps to an organizational test in which assembling a viable alliance may matter as much as polling well.

For the opposition, the central question remains Senator Flávio Bolsonaro's candidacy. He has yet to name a running mate, and neither the Republicans, the Progressives (PP) nor União Brasil appears likely to endorse him — raising the prospect of a ticket carried by the Liberal Party (PL) alone. 

That would leave him campaigning from a narrower base than his allies once expected, and make state-level bargains and regional alliances all the more valuable as compensation.

The ground beneath his movement has shifted as well. An investigation into alleged irregularities in congressional budget earmarks has reached Valdemar Costa Neto, the PL's national chairman, returning corruption to the center of the campaign. 

And after a letter from former President Jair Bolsonaro was read aloud at a political rally, the Supreme Court found that he had breached the terms of his house arrest and barred him from contact with his son for 90 days — severing the former president from the succession at the precise moment his camp is trying to arrange it.

The campaign has acquired an international dimension, too. Days after Flávio Bolsonaro appeared at hearings in the US Section 301 trade investigation, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva denounced President Trump's proposal to charge transit fees on vessels crossing the Strait of Hormuz as an act of "piracy." 

Foreign policy, long a peripheral concern in Brazilian campaigns, is becoming a visible dividing line, and it offers the leading candidates rival visions of Brazil's place in the world.

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. 

By donating to the International Observatory on Brazil's 2026 Elections, you are directly funding the journalists and editors who make this work possible. Every contribution goes toward staffing, deeper coverage and the tools we need to do this job the right way — on behalf of readers like you.

Senator Flávio Bolsonaro released a letter this weekend from his father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, urging allies to unite behind his presidential bid.

"The moment is one of rolling up our sleeves and setting aside possible differences," the letter says, calling on the right to commit to Flávio as "the best option to rid Brazil of corruption, violence and impoverishment." The former president describes his son as "my spokesman, in whom I trust to rescue Brazil and lead us to peace and prosperity."

The appeal comes nearly three weeks after former First Lady Michelle Bolsonaro — Jair's wife and Flávio's stepmother — accused the senator of humiliating her and said she would sit out his campaign. It also follows a string of setbacks in the "Big Center," the congressional bloc that brokers power in Brasília. 

Several of its parties have declined to formally join the Bolsonaro coalition, freeing their state chapters to back whomever they choose — in effect, a green light for Northeastern chapters to side with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in a region he dominates.

That the elder Bolsonaro felt compelled to intervene is itself a measure of the campaign's weakness. He is under house arrest and barred from speaking publicly, even through intermediaries. The Supreme Court responded by barring Flávio Bolsonaro from visiting his father for 90 days — that is, until after the first round.

After leaving PL Women, the Liberal Party's women's wing, Michelle Bolsonaro is launching a movement of her own, deepening the public rupture within the Brazilian right-wing's first family. The initiative, called Imparáveis — "The Unstoppables" — will include a website and regular gatherings with supporters. 

Aides say the project had been planned for 2027 but was moved up in light of recent events. Michelle has disagreed with her stepsons' political alliances and wants to endorse her own set of candidates in multiple states.

Organizers describe Imparáveis as unaffiliated: neither its leadership nor its participants will be required to belong to a party. Still, it will be built around Michelle Bolsonaro's politics and staffed by the advisers and allies who surrounded her at PL Women. The arrangement is aimed at preserving her influence and keeping her in public view without a party to answer to.

In rulings signed July 6 and made public over the weekend, Justice Flávio Dino froze up to BRL 119.2 million (USD 23.3m) belonging to Valdemar Costa Neto, chairman of the far-right Liberal Party (PL), and BRL 6 million belonging to Eduardo Cunha, the former House speaker stripped of his seat in 2016 and now seeking a comeback. 

Investigators say both steered budgetary grants — the earmarks lawmakers use to pave roads and build clinics — by attaching congressmen's names to requests they never made. The paperwork, routed through House staffers, supplied what Dino called an air of legality. Neither Costa Neto nor Cunha holds a congressional office, making their control over grants illegal, per Dino. Both men deny wrongdoing.

The grants are the new currency of Brazilian politics. Between 2018 and 2024, they grew from 7% to 24% of discretionary federal spending; the comparable US figure is about 1%. Made mandatory and largely untraceable under Jair Bolsonaro, they shifted Brasília's center of gravity from the presidential palace to congressional leadership offices.

Speaker Hugo Motta called the ruling an act of judicial overreach. For the far right, it hands the Senate campaign its pitch: elect enough senators to impeach the justices.

Listen to the latest Explaining Brazil podcast, with Gustavo Ribeiro, editor-in-chief of The Brazilian Report, and James Green, a historian at Brown University and president of the board of directors of the Washington Brazil Office (WBO).

Rio de Janeiro's Regional Electoral Court voted unanimously on July 9 to seek federal reinforcements for October's general elections. "It is not a matter of a diffuse or isolated risk of unrest, but of a structural phenomenon: armed territorial control exercised in an ostensible and continuous manner by criminal organizations," said Judge Claudio de Mello Tavares, the court's presiding justice. 

Rio has asked for federal help every cycle since 2012. At least another six states have made similar requests — Acre, Amapá, Amazonas, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul and Roraima. In the Amazon, that mostly means logistics. Soldiers have been ferrying voting machines to hard-to-reach communities since 1994. In Rio, it means the state cannot guarantee that voters in militia- and gang-held territories are free to choose. The court is also relocating polling stations and sharing intelligence to block candidacies tied to criminal factions.

Meanwhile, Army Commander General Tomás Paiva has seconded a sub-lieutenant to the TSE for up to 23 months, at the request of Chief Justice Kassio Nunes Marques — a quiet reconciliation, three years after the court expelled the military from election oversight following the Army's echoing of Jair Bolsonaro's putschist rhetoric.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has ordered his campaign to limit the use of artificial intelligence to image and text editing, ruling out AI-generated videos and images. Conflating synthetic imagery with disinformation, Lula said a man of his character had no need for it.

Between January and June, his camp filed roughly 60 lawsuits against opponents — nearly a third of them over AI-generated content. In one suit against the Liberal Party, the Workers' Party takes aim at videos staging events that never happened in order to tie the government to criminal gangs, which Washington recently designated as foreign terrorist organizations. More lawsuits to rein in AI are expected.

On June 16, at the inaugural Debating Brazil event, a diplomats-only series run by The Brazilian Report and the PR agency Novo Selo, Chief Electoral Justice Kassio Nunes Marques told ambassadors that the Superior Electoral Court has barred AI-generated content — true or false — in the 72 hours before polls open, and reversed the burden of proof, which now falls on whoever posts disputed synthetic material. "The problem is not that AI exists," he said, "but that it can be used in an opaque, manipulative and discriminatory way, fraudulently."