Lula launches fourth-term bid as Bolsonaro's son challenges in pivotal Brazil election

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva stood before thousands at Vila Euclides stadium on Sunday, the same football ground where his improbable rise to power began nearly fifty years earlier. Now eighty years old, the Brazilian president was launching his bid for a fourth term—a historic stretch that would extend his grip on the country's highest office if he prevails in October's election. His message was unambiguous: he would spend whatever time remained to him ensuring the far-right never reclaimed the presidency.

Lula's campaign opening was a deliberate return to origins. In 1979, as a thirty-three-year-old union organizer, he had led strikes that helped dismantle Brazil's military dictatorship, transforming himself into a national figure. That victory took years—he lost three times before winning the presidency in 2002 as the country's first working-class leader. His first two terms, stretching through 2010, brought expanded welfare programs, hunger reduction, and wider access to higher education, though corruption scandals shadowed the achievements. The years that followed were turbulent. His successor, Dilma Rousseff, became the first female president but steered the country into recession and was controversially removed from office in 2016.

Then came Jair Bolsonaro. In 2018, Lula was imprisoned on corruption charges—a conviction later overturned by the supreme court after 580 days behind bars. The imprisonment cleared the field for Bolsonaro's election and four years of what Lula now characterized as environmental devastation and international isolation. The pandemic arrived during those years, and Bolsonaro's anti-science approach contributed to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Gun laws were loosened, flooding the country with more than a million new weapons that criminal organizations seized to expand their power. By 2022, when Lula defeated Bolsonaro by the narrowest of margins, he declared the nightmare over. A week after his January 2023 inauguration, far-right radicals stormed Brasília in a failed coup attempt. Bolsonaro was imprisoned in 2025 for twenty-seven years for plotting that power grab.

Now his son was running. Flávio Bolsonaro, a forty-five-year-old senator, launched his campaign the same Sunday on Rio's Copacabana beach, the site of his father's massive rallies. Wearing a bulletproof vest beneath a yellow Brazil shirt, he told a noticeably smaller crowd that he would fight "this system." Polls showed Lula with a narrow advantage—43 percent to Bolsonaro's 40 percent in the anticipated runoff scheduled for October 25th, assuming no candidate reached 50 percent in the first round on October 4th.

At the stadium, Lula spoke directly to the violence of the Bolsonaro years. He promised a fourth term dedicated to education and healthcare, and to developing Brazil's rare-earth deposits, the world's second largest reserve after China's. On security, he offered a stark diagnosis: it was simple to kill criminals in the favelas, but the real architects of organized crime lived in penthouses, and that was where enforcement needed to focus. He told his far-right opponents to "show some shame."

The election had become something larger than a domestic contest. André Pagliarini, author of a book about Lula, called it "the single most important electoral contest this year in the world." A Bolsonaro victory would energize what he termed the pro-Trump "reactionary block" that had won elections across Latin America—in Argentina, Chile, Colombia. The Trump administration had already turned its attention southward with intensity. It designated Brazil's two largest crime organizations as terrorist groups, a move that sparked fears of US military intervention on Brazilian soil. Trump's defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, visited a jungle training camp in Panama and declared Washington would use military force to "ruthlessly" pursue Latin American drug traffickers, comparing the effort to the war on terror against ISIS and al-Qaeda.

Outside Lula's rally, activists distributed stickers reading "Fuck Trump." A thirty-three-year-old supporter named Seixas Alves expressed alarm that the terrorist designation could become a pretext for American military action, drawing a parallel to the false weapons claims that preceded the invasion of Iraq. In Rio, Flávio Bolsonaro praised Trump's targeting of the crime groups and positioned himself as the only politician capable of negotiating with Washington. Back at the stadium, Simone Tebet, a centrist aligned with Lula, urged voters to prevent Brazil from falling into the hands of those who wanted to "kill Brazilian democracy" and build "a country of hate." The October election would determine not just Brazil's direction but, in the view of many observers, a crucial pivot point for the hemisphere itself.