This week, a would-be far-right presidential dynasty in South America’s largest country died before our very eyes. On Monday, the day after losing Brazil’s presidential election to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro went to visit his father. Former President Jair Bolsonaro is under house arrest, serving a 27-year sentence for plotting to overturn his defeat in the 2022 election. Immediately upon leaving, Flávio, who has been implicated in a money-laundering scheme, was reportedly approached by Federal Police agents who demanded he hand over his passport; the man who a week ago was widely expected to become Brazil’s next president was being told not to leave the country. In a video filmed shortly thereafter, Flávio criticized the authorities for their gung-ho attitude. “I never considered leaving the country,” he said, insisting, “I’m going to deliver my passports and defend myself from this aberration, which is a clear attempt to intimidate me. But nobody is going to silence me.”
Less than a day later, the younger Bolsonaro was gone. On Wednesday morning, he landed in Miami, after President Trump’s State Department stated that it would issue visas to the senator and his family. His arrival in the United States early Wednesday morning represents a new chapter in the Bolsonaro family’s expanding efforts to coordinate the Brazilian opposition from under Trump’s skirt. Flávio’s brother, former Brazilian Congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro, self-exiled to Texas a year ago so that he could lobby MAGA-world full-time on father’s behalf, for which Brazil’s Supreme Court sentenced him in absentia to more than four years in prison. Though they may have to remind the senescent U.S. president who they are from time to time, Flávio and Eduardo have successfully evaded Brazilian justice. The Donroe Doctrine, Trump’s strategy for Western hemispheric dominance, apparently includes selectively overriding other nations’ sovereign authority to prosecute criminal offenses when the accused are his political supplicants. But not even the authoritarian leader of the world’s most powerful country can save the ignominious Bolsonaros from political irrelevance.
Flávio may be safe for now from any accountability for his misdeeds in his home country. But he has effectively surrendered any claim to Brazilian political leadership for himself or another member of his clan. Indeed, as I wrote in August, one of the questions facing the Brazilian far right early in this campaign was whether one of the disgraced former president’s sons was really the best candidate to run against an incumbent with middling poll numbers in Lula. Why not put up, say, a popular governor who had served in the elder Bolsonaro’s Cabinet but did not carry the blighted last name of the far-right leader? Jair Bolsonaro’s insistence on running Flávio, against the advice of many in his ideological camp, strained his coalition—even more so since Flávio lost. For Flávio now to flee, apparently without warning even close allies, is to concede that the family is not up to the task of sustaining the opposition. Flávio’s own campaign manager admitted he had no idea where the senator was: “We are surprised because yesterday we spoke about the necessity of Flávio, with the 60 million votes he received, assuming this role of opposition leader.” That is the role Flávio had proclaimed for himself even as he was apparently planning his getaway.
For Flávio to leave so abruptly is also to surrender his father to his fate. Trump already applied considerable pressure on Brazil on Jair’s behalf, to no effect. The former president’s wife just won a Senate seat, as did another one of his sons; another won a seat in the lower house of Congress. But the only plausible hope for Jair Bolsonaro to leave jail anytime soon was probably for Flávio to win the presidency, empowering Flávio to check the power of the Supreme Court that sentenced his father. Springing his dad was going to be one of President Flávio’s first acts, he maintained throughout the campaign. Whatever protection he may now hope to secure for himself in the U.S., there is no reason to imagine he will be able to do much for Jair. Any leverage he may have had rested on his ability to mobilize a sizable, disgruntled part of the Brazilian electorate. He can’t do that remotely.
Ironically, in fact, Flávio’s flight may do more to discredit his father than anything Lula’s government could have done on its own. Jair’s political strength has always rested on the conviction among his supporters that he is an aggrieved fighter, a man willing to take on Brazil’s institutions and pay the price for doing so. His brash adult sons have now offered a different model of leadership: denouncing political persecution and vowing to fight on, even while plotting an escape to live lavishly abroad on funds likely secured through the biggest financial scandal in Brazilian history. It is difficult to imagine a more damaging repudiation of the family’s political brand for many rank-and-file bolsonaristas than the actions of Eduardo and Flávio.
For years, the Bolsonaros have presented themselves as indispensable to Brazil’s conservative movement. There is some truth to this: Jair Bolsonaro was the only candidate since 1998 to win the presidency by vocally eschewing the left. The family’s appeal rested in part on the claim that only they possessed the courage to confront the country’s powerful institutions. Flávio’s flight has exposed the weakness in that claim. A movement that depends on the flighty failsons of an incarcerated one-term president and the goodwill of a soon-to-be lame duck in Washington is not much of a movement at all. It is a political inheritance in search of a custodian.
And that is something that Trump, for all his talk of hemispheric dominance, cannot provide. He can issue visas, apply diplomatic pressure, and offer the Bolsonaros a platform from which to denounce Brazil’s government, but he cannot make a credible leader out of a whimpering coward.
