🗳 Election Observatory: Jun. 30

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

This week, Brazil's unofficial campaign season continued to reveal three parallel dynamics: the contest for leadership within the opposition, the growing international ambitions of the presidential candidates, and the persistent gulf between voters and the legislative races.

On the right, the succession crisis within the Bolsonaro movement has grown harder to ignore. With former President Jair Bolsonaro barred from office and banned from social media, the top-down cohesion that defined the movement in recent years is beginning to fray. The public clash between Michelle Bolsonaro and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro shows that the fight over Bolsonaro's political legacy remains unresolved. 

The Banco Master scandal damaged Flávio Bolsonaro's candidacy, but the widening of the investigation to figures close to President Lula's government has partly eased the senator's isolation and restored a measure of uncertainty to the race.

At the same time, the presidential contest is becoming more visible abroad. Meetings between the candidates and foreign ambassadors suggest that foreign policy, mining, trade, the environment, artificial intelligence, and Brazil's geopolitical alignment will weigh more heavily on the campaign. The candidates are working to present not only domestic agendas but also competing visions of Brazil's place in the world.

More broadly, recent polling on how little voters know about their own legislators points to a deep contradiction in Brazilian democracy. Congress has amassed growing power over the federal budget, public policy, appointments, and the government's ability to function, yet it remains largely invisible to the electorate.

Most Brazilians cannot name their current representatives or recall whom they backed in past legislative elections. That disconnect tends to favor entrenched party organizations, regional political machines, and candidates with the deepest financial and territorial resources.

As the official campaign calendar nears, making sense of Brazil's 2026 elections will mean considering the presidential race, state contests, and the renewal of Congress at once. More than choosing the country's next president, the vote will set the political configuration that sustains — or constrains — the government's ability to operate in the years ahead.

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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The Brazilian Report, in partnership with the Brasília-based public relations agency Novo Selo Comunicação, has launched "Debating Brazil," a series of events bringing presidential candidates before foreign ambassadors to lay out their proposals for the country — particularly on foreign policy, mining, trade and the environment.

Speakers so far have included Chief Electoral Justice Kassio Nunes Marques, who discussed the Superior Electoral Court's efforts to rein in the use of AI this election cycle, and the presidential hopefuls Romeu Zema, the former governor of Minas Gerais, and Renan Santos, leader of the Free Brazil Movement (MBL). Senator Flávio Bolsonaro will speak on July 21. President Lula and Ronaldo Caiado, the former governor of Goiás, have yet to confirm.

Zema defended steep cuts to public spending, arguing they would help bring Brazil's benchmark interest rate down from 14.25% to around 7% — a shift he said would aid small entrepreneurs, lift productive sectors and help Brazilians escape debt. On foreign policy, he said Lula had pushed the country away from the West, and pledged to reverse course.

Santos, whose outsider campaign is making waves with young male voters, said he had a plan to turn Brazil into a top-five global power. That would mean aligning with neither the United States nor China, he said, while extracting all it can from partnerships with both. He criticized a "preachy European Union" and declined to weigh in on the war in Ukraine, which he called Europe's problem.

For years, the Bolsonaro family had something no other political movement could claim: strict top-down organization and cohesion. With the movement's founder, former President Jair Bolsonaro, sidelined — he is serving a 27-year sentence for staging a coup and is barred from social media — that advantage appears to have vanished.

The fight to be his heir is growing increasingly public. Last week, Michelle Bolsonaro, the former first lady, posted a video accusing her stepson, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, of humiliating her and of defying his father's wishes over which candidates the movement should back in local races.

Michelle is no peripheral figure. She commands a following of her own among evangelicals and can soften the movement's image with female voters — a constituency that is the far right's Achilles' heel.

Some were quick to declare Flávio's presidential bid in a state of collapse, especially since Michelle's blow landed weeks after his name surfaced in the Banco Master case — audio recordings showed he had asked Daniel Vorcaro, the CEO of the fraud-laden bank, for money.

But any deterministic verdict seems destined to be proven wrong. The Master scandal has now reached Lula's Senate whip, as we reported last week — and that gave Flávio some breathing room in a new poll by Nexus, narrowing Lula's lead in a simulated runoff from 6 points to 3, a statistical tie. Polls this far from Election Day predict little, but they shape political behavior. For now, at least, they let Flávio dispel the claim that he is finished.

Most Brazilians cannot name a single sitting federal legislator. According to pollster Datafolha, 68% could not name a member of the lower chamber, and 75% drew a blank on the Senate. Memories of past votes are just as hazy. A majority said they could not recall whom they backed four years ago — 67% for the House, and 66% for both the Senate and state legislatures.

The figures lay bare a familiar feature of Brazilian political culture: presidential elections command attention, but legislative races barely register. The disconnect may stem from a lack of clarity over who is actually steering the country, even as Congress grows steadily more powerful. The sheer number of legislative seats at the federal, state and municipal levels only deepens the public's confusion.

The contrast with the top of the ballot is stark. Just 7% of respondents could not remember their 2022 presidential vote, Datafolha found. Yet more than a third said they had forgotten their choice for governor that same year.

President Lula is flexing every muscle incumbency affords. After launching a debt-relief program for delinquent borrowers in May, the government on Monday rolled out a second one — this time for borrowers who are current on their payments, allowing them to renegotiate on better terms. The bet is that easing this cohort's burden will spread a feel-good effect across the economy. Roughly 80% of Brazilian families were carrying debt as of April.

For months, President Lula tried to coax former Senate President Rodrigo Pacheco into running for governor of Minas Gerais on the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB) ticket. It didn't work — unraveling the Workers' Party (PT) plans for the second-most-populous state in the federation. For sheer lack of options, the party might field its own candidate: Marília Campos, former mayor of Contagem, in the Belo Horizonte metropolitan area.

Campos wants to run for the Senate and has resisted running for governor — a far tougher challenge. Since the disastrous Fernando Pimentel administration (2015-19), the PT has lost ground in the state that mirrors the national electorate more closely than any other — a longtime bellwether of presidential elections. In 2022, Lula edged Jair Bolsonaro there 50.2 to 49.8.