I first campaigned for Lula in 2002, when I was 17. He was the first politician with a real chance of winning who seemed genuinely moved by the struggles of ordinary Brazilians, and he made me think about social questions for the first time. In 2022, days before the runoff against Jair Bolsonaro, I wrote that Bolsonarism had to end. I said that between the worst of what people can be and an imperfect man who had made too many concessions in order to govern, I’d choose the imperfect man without hesitation.
Bolsonarism didn’t end. It swapped the father for the son, put on the suit of a moderate, and is now one step away from the presidency again. In the first round on 4 October, Flávio Bolsonaro took 47% of the valid vote and Lula 45%. The polls for Sunday’s runoff show a statistical tie.
That made me ask a question I hadn’t fully considered four years ago. What does this election mean for people who will never vote in it? I’ve come to think the answer is: a lot. Brazil’s choice on Sunday will shape whether a mid-sized democracy can say no to a superpower, who controls the minerals the energy transition depends on, whether the Amazon keeps standing, and whether a coup attempt is something you can simply wait out.
The appeal of the “moderate” Bolsonaro
It’s worth being honest about why Flávio is competitive. Plenty of Brazilians are tired of Lula. He’s 80 and running for a fourth term, and for the first time in this term more people disapprove of his government than approve of it. People are frightened of organised crime. Flávio speaks more softly than his father, and he has positioned himself as the reasonable face of the right.
But the platform is the same. He wants to label gangs as narco-terrorist organisations and build mega-prisons modelled on Bukele’s El Salvador. He wants to cut at least ten ministries in a programme borrowed from Milei. And he has promised to free his father, grant amnesty to the people convicted over 8 January, and impeach Supreme Court justices. A softer tone doesn’t change what’s on the list.
A foreign power in a domestic trial
In July 2025, Donald Trump raised tariffs on Brazilian goods to 50%, and the White House said plainly why: the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro. Washington then used the Magnitsky Act, a law designed for human rights abusers and kleptocrats, to sanction Alexandre de Moraes, the Supreme Court justice overseeing the coup case. Visas of Brazilian officials were revoked. When Bolsonaro was convicted, Marco Rubio called it a “witch hunt” and promised the US would “respond accordingly”.
Brazilians argue about plenty, but in my view this should not be one of them. A foreign government punished an entire country’s economy to pressure its courts over the trial of one man. It didn’t work, and The Economist described it as the biggest US attack on Brazil since the Cold War.
Going after Pix
The pressure didn’t stop there. In July this year, after the US Supreme Court struck down the core of Trump’s tariff system, the US Trade Representative imposed a new 25% tariff on most Brazilian imports, with another 12.5% proposed on top.
One of the targets of the investigation behind it is Pix, the free instant payment system run by Brazil’s central bank. Almost every Brazilian uses it, from street vendors to supermarkets. Washington’s complaint is that it favours a “national champion” over American payment companies. In other words, a public service that works too well for Brazilians is being treated as a trade offence.
Inviting the intervention
In May, Flávio flew to Washington to ask the Trump administration to designate Brazil’s two largest criminal organisations, the PCC and Comando Vermelho, as terrorist groups. By the end of the month it had happened, over the Brazilian government’s objection. Flávio said Rubio supported the move after meeting him.
I can’t know exactly what Flávio intended. What I can see is the effect. A terrorist designation gives a foreign government legal tools to reach into Brazilian banks and businesses, and the US has already used the “narco-terrorist” label to justify military strikes elsewhere in the region. Someone who asks another country to take that kind of power over his own is not defending the nation. Lula called it treason. I’d at least call it a strange kind of patriotism.
What’s under the ground
To understand why Washington cares so much about Brazil right now, it helps to look at what’s under the ground. Brazil holds around a quarter of the world’s known rare earth reserves, the second-largest after China. These are the metals in the magnets that drive electric cars, wind turbines, smartphones and guided missiles. China controls most of the world’s supply and processing, and it has shown it’s willing to restrict exports when it’s under pressure. The US badly needs another source, and Brazil is the obvious one.
The US is already moving in. Serra Verde, in the state of Goiás, is the only large-scale producer outside Asia that can supply all four of the key magnet metals. It has received US$565 million in financing from a US government development bank. All of its output of those four metals is committed for 15 years to a buyer backed by US government entities. In April, an American company, USA Rare Earth, agreed to buy the whole operation for about US$2.8 billion, and Brazil’s competition authority is reviewing the deal. Washington has proposed a national critical minerals agreement to Brasília, and while it waits for an answer, it has signed a preliminary agreement directly with the state government of Goiás.
Brazil produced around 0.5% of the world’s rare earths in 2025. The question is whether Brazil becomes a country that processes these minerals and builds industries around them, or one that digs them up and ships them out raw, as it did with gold, rubber and iron ore before.
The two candidates have given different answers. At CPAC in the US in March, Flávio presented Brazil as “the solution” for America’s rare earth problem, a way to break US dependence on China. In September, Lula signed a national critical minerals law. It prioritises processing inside Brazil over exporting raw ore, and it creates a council linked to the presidency that can scrutinise changes in corporate control, foreign influence and international supply deals. “We are not a colony and we will not be a colony of anyone,” he said. Brazil has also signed a rare earths agreement with India, so it isn’t trading one dependency for another.
I’m not against selling minerals to the US. Brazil should sell to whoever pays a fair price. But there’s a difference between negotiating as an equal and offering yourself as a solution to someone else’s strategic problem. The tariffs, the sanctions and the pressure on Pix all landed in a country that Washington now sees as essential to its supply chains. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
Standing up without walking out
Lula’s response is the part I find most convincing. He condemned the tariffs and sanctions publicly. “We do not accept being treated like a banana republic,” he said. But he kept talking. He spoke to Trump by phone, went to the White House in May, and set up a ministerial working group to negotiate.
What he didn’t do was trade away the Supreme Court, Pix or Brazil’s own security policy in exchange for tariff relief. Being firm without breaking off contact is harder than it sounds, and it matters well beyond Brazil. Every country in the Global South is watching to see whether economic coercion works.
The backyard, again
Brazil isn’t the only country under pressure. Across South America, governments have been lining up with Washington one after another.
In October 2025, the US Treasury gave Argentina a US$20 billion currency swap. Trump said openly that the support depended on Milei winning the midterm elections: “If he loses, we are not going to be generous.” Milei won. In January this year, US forces struck Venezuela, seized Nicolás Maduro and flew him to New York, and Trump said the US would “run” the country and sell its oil. Whatever you think of Maduro, and I’m no fan, a US president announcing that he’ll manage another country’s oil reserves should worry anyone who knows the region’s history.
By one count, the right has won every presidential election in the region since Trump returned to office. Kast won in Chile, Paz in Bolivia, Keiko Fujimori in Peru and Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia. In March, Trump launched the Shield of the Americas, a US-led security coalition, at his golf resort in Florida. Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru and Colombia have joined, along with most of Central America and the Caribbean. Flávio wants Brazil to join too.
I don’t want to oversimplify. These elections were won by local candidates, voting on crime, inflation and slow growth, and many voters had good reasons to be angry with the governments they replaced. But Washington has also made clear which outcomes it prefers. It has offered money and security deals to friends, and tariffs and sanctions to everyone else.
Latin America has been here before. The US supported the 1964 coup that began Brazil’s dictatorship and the 1973 coup in Chile, and spent decades treating the region as its backyard. The methods are different now: currency swaps instead of tanks, terrorist designations instead of the Cold War. The idea seems to be the same. Brazil is the largest economy in South America, and it’s one of the last major ones that hasn’t signed up. If it does, the region will have very little left in the way of independent voices.
amazon AT RISK
In 2021, under Jair Bolsonaro, the Brazilian Amazon lost more than 13,000 square kilometres of forest. In 2025 it lost about 5,800. Deforestation has fallen four years in a row, and satellite alerts for this year point to the lowest official rate since records began in 1988. The Cerrado is falling too.
Last November Brazil hosted COP30 in Belém and launched a fund that pays countries to keep tropical forests standing, with billions already pledged. Scientists warn that the Amazon is close to a tipping point, beyond which large parts could turn to savanna. It drives rainfall across much of South America and stores carbon the whole planet depends on. A government that weakens environmental enforcement again won’t only be a Brazilian problem.
A coup with consequences
In September 2025, Brazil’s Supreme Court convicted Jair Bolsonaro of plotting a coup to stay in power after losing the 2022 election. He was sentenced to 27 years and three months. His former defence minister and running mate, General Braga Netto, got 26 years.
That had never happened before. Brazil lived under a military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985, and the generals responsible were covered by an amnesty. For the first time, a former president and senior officers were held to account for trying to overturn an election.
Undoing the verdict
Flávio has promised to reverse this. Congress has already started. In December it passed a bill reducing sentences for crimes against democracy. Lula vetoed it on 8 January, the third anniversary of the attacks on Brasília. In April, Congress overrode his veto.
If the presidency goes to the person promising amnesty and a pardon, and a right-leaning Congress is ready to help, there’s no one left to say no. The message to the rest of the world would be simple. A failed coup costs you one election cycle.
Whose security counts?
Flávio’s security plan is the part most likely to win votes, and I understand why. Brazilians live with real violence. But El Salvador’s mega-prisons came with mass detention, suspended rights and very little due process, and labelling criminal gangs as terrorists is exactly what invited Washington into Brazilian affairs. Security that depends on giving up rights at home and sovereignty abroad isn’t security for ordinary people. It’s security for whoever holds power.
Food on the table
In 2022, 70.3 million Brazilians lived with moderate or severe food insecurity. By 2024 that figure was 28.5 million. In July 2025, the UN took Brazil off its Hunger Map for the second time. The first time was in 2014, and that progress was undone within a few years, which is a reminder of how quickly these gains can disappear.
Unemployment is at the lowest level since the current survey began in 2012. Since January, anyone earning up to R$5,000 a month pays no income tax, and the cost is covered by a minimum tax on around 141,000 people who earn more than R$600,000 a year. For the first time in a long while, the people at the top are paying a little more.
Where Lula falls short
None of this makes Lula a saint, and I’ve never thought he was. He has pushed hard for Petrobras to drill for oil near the mouth of the Amazon, and he publicly attacked Ibama, his own environmental agency, for resisting. That sits badly with everything he says about the climate.
Indigenous land demarcation has also been far slower than he promised. Congress, dominated by agribusiness interests, overrode his veto of the *marco temporal* law, and his own minister admitted demarcations had stalled. I still think he makes too many concessions. As I wrote in 2022, perhaps that’s what governing a democracy designed to serve a few looks like. But the choice on Sunday isn’t between Lula and perfection.
What a fourth term should deliver
If Lula wins, the people who voted for him should hold him to more than “at least it wasn’t Bolsonaro”. What could that look like?
– No new oil frontiers in the Amazon. A country that hosted COP30 can’t open one of the world’s most sensitive ecosystems to drilling.
– Indigenous territories demarcated at the pace that was promised, with the government fighting the *marco temporal* in the courts, not just on paper.
– Pix, the courts and Brazil’s security policy kept off the negotiating table, whatever the tariff pressure.
– Rare earths processed in Brazil, with the new critical minerals law enforced, and the jobs and industry kept here. No Brazilian rare earth deal should repeat the history of raw ore going out and finished products coming back.
– A real defence of the coup verdict, including support for the challenge to the sentence-reduction law at the Supreme Court.
– A successor. One of my frustrations with Lula has always been that he never made room for someone to follow him. A fourth term should be the last, and it should end with the left ready to win without him.
Sunday
This isn’t an endorsement of everything Lula has done. It’s a judgement about what’s at stake. On one side is a government that makes mistakes but has cut deforestation, taken Brazil off the Hunger Map and refused to hand its courts to a foreign power. On the other is a candidate who asked that foreign power for help, offered it Brazil’s minerals as a solution to its rivalry with China, and has promised to free the man convicted of trying to overturn the last election. If he wins, the biggest country in South America will join the rest of the continent in lining up behind Washington.
If you’re Brazilian and can vote, including from abroad, please vote. If you’re not, talk to the Brazilians you know. And if you see this differently, I’d like to hear why.