President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s surprising victory over far-right, Trump-aligned Flávio Bolsonaro shouldn’t just be celebrated by left-leaning Brazilians. It’s a win for democracy, the environment, and the rule of law that will reverberate globally, since it happened in the world’s seventh-largest country by population. It’s also an important defeat for global villains: the Trump administration, the international far-right movement, and Mark Zuckerberg. And it provides something of a roadmap for those trying to fight authoritarians around the world.
Brazil had been a shining example of democracy and the rule of law resisting far-right authoritarianism—and this election preserves that legacy. After Flávio father’s Jair was elected president in 2018 and proceeded to rule like a dictator, a broad pro-democracy coalition led by Lula defeated him in the 2022 election. Bolsonaro wouldn’t concede, and his allies attacked government buildings in an attempt to stop the transfer of power, eerily similar to what Trump and his supporters did in the United States two years prior. That effort failed, and Lula took office. Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court sentenced Jair Bolsonaro to 27 years in prison (he is on house arrest), while its electoral court barred him from running for public office until 2030. Many scholars and pro-democracy experts say Brazil’s treatment of Jair Bolsonaro is what should have happened to Trump.
Flávio Bolsonaro was likely to govern in the autocratic style of his father and use government power to punish Jair’s enemies. It would have been akin to Donald Trump, Jr. being elected president in 2024—-not as bad as the autocrat returning to office but essentially an exoneration of his coup attempt. Sunday’s election averted that terrible outcome.
Flávio Bolsonaro was also expected to repeat his father’s aggressive anti-environmental policies. That would lead to further deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, the world’s largest, as James North explained in a recent TNR piece. Another calamity avoided.
And Lula’s win was in many ways a unique victory for democracy itself. The blue wave likely to hit America next month and deliver huge losses to Republicans is excellent news, but Trump’s unpopularity can be attributed to high gas prices and the anti-incumbment sentiment hurting leaders across the world. It’s not clear that the U.S. elections are a rejection of Trump, the far-right, or authoritarianism. Brazil is different. Lula is the incumbent. And after he finished behind Bolsonaro in the first round of the election, he and his supporters fully leaned into the argument that Brazil was choosing between democracy and authoritarianism. Brazilians chose democracy, putting aside their concerns about electing an 80-year-old to a fourth term.
“We don’t want dictatorship. We don’t want hatred. We don’t want guns. We want a country of love,” Lula said on the eve of the election.
The Bolsonaros and far-right activists in Brazil weren’t the only losers on Sunday. President Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and much of the administration in Washington had worked aggressively to put a Bolsonaro back in power in Brazil. Their regime change efforts were both overt and covert. After Jair Bolsonaro’s conviction, the U.S. imposed additional tariffs on Brazil and revoked the visa of one of the Brazilian Supreme Court justices involved in the ruling. Trump met with Flávio Bolsonaro in June and released a Truth Social post praising the Brazilian and showing the two of them meeting in the Oval Office.
Behind the scenes, two State Department officials, Darren Beattie, senior advisor for Western Hemisphere Affairs, and Ricardo Pita Macedo, Deputy Assistant Secretary for North America, spent the last year imploring U.S. diplomats in Brazil to do everything possible to undermine Lula’s administration and restore a member of the Bolsonaro clan to the presidency, according to a detailed report by Reuters.
The administration’s moves in Brazil are part of a broader imperialistic move by the United States to dominate Latin America, by either forcing reluctant leaders of those countries to carry out U.S. edicts, helping more pro-American figures win power, or in the case of Venezuela, arresting their leader and then replacing him with a proxy beholden to the U.S. Lula is perhaps the most vocal figure in Latin America opposing Trump’s agenda, both in that region and around the world. It would have been a great victory for Trump to defeat one of his most prominent enemies. Brazil’s voters denied the American autocrat such a win.
Lula’s win is a blow to the billionaire class as well. While American billionaires weren’t overtly helping Bolsonaro as they do Trump, there is considerable evidence that Instagram was suppressing pro-Lula content but not accounts and posts favorable to Bolsonaro. Brazil’s election court thought that the allegations of favoritism were serious enough that it issued a ruling demanding that Meta’s media platforms treat the candidates’ content equally. (Meta denies that its platforms discriminated against Lula.)
The other good news about this election is how Lula won. After finishing behind Bolsonaro in the first round of voting, Lula and his campaign essentially adopted an all-of-the above strategy. Lula blasted Bolsonaro’s anti-democratic views while also announcing a slew of populist economic proposals, most notably reducing the workweek there from six days to five. His campaign greatly increased its presence on social media. They aggressively courted people who hadn’t voted in the first round, as well as evangelicals, a bloc that leans right but includes many people who would consider a left-wing candidate.
And Lula’s campaign, unlike liberals in the United States and other nations, didn’t hesitate to bluntly accuse a billionaire-owned social media platform of favoring the right. It forced Meta to commit to neutrality. That’s an important precedent from which other left and liberal leaders around the world should borrow.
Lula’s campaign didn’t adopt the doom and fatalism of so many of those fighting the far-right. They assumed that voters could be convinced to oppose Bolsonaro—and acted on that belief.
To be sure, what happened in Brazil is more avoiding the worst possible outcome than achieving the best one. It’s discouraging that the Bolsonaro family continued to dominate one of Brazil’s major parties after Jair’s anti-democratic rule and coup attempt. It’s even worse that so much of Brazil’s electorate doesn’t prioritize democracy and the rule of law and nearly put a Bolsonaro back into the presidency. And while it didn’t win the presidency, the Bolsonaro-led Liberal Party made huge gains in Brazil’s Congress in this fall’s elections. They will be able to implement much of their agenda and block Lula’s.
And Brazil aside, Trump allies are gaining power throughout Latin America. The far-right is ascendant in Germany and much of Europe. And even if Meta was chastened by this election, billionaires will continue to use their media properties and other holdings to help authoritarians, who tend to reduce regulations and taxes on the super-rich.
All that said, the narrow defeat of Bolsonaro in Brazil likely followed in two weeks by a resounding rejection of Trump’s party in the United States is worth celebrating. The far-right isn’t dead. But neither is the movement against the far-right.
