Brazil’s right-wing political landscape is bracing for a major showdown this October, as scandal-plagued senator Flavio Bolsonaro, eldest son of imprisoned former president Jair Bolsonaro, formally launched his bid for the nation’s highest office on Saturday. The launch, hosted at a Sao Paulo convention by the ruling Liberal Party (PL), comes as the 45-year-old candidate attempts to unseat incumbent leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who is seeking an unprecedented fourth term at age 80.
The elder Bolsonaro, a far-right firebrand who was recently sentenced to 27 years in prison for orchestrating a coup attempt following his narrow 2022 election loss to Lula, personally tapped Flavio as his political heir. The convention venue, a warehouse adjacent to Sao Paulo’s iconic Pacaembu Stadium, was packed with enthusiastic supporters clad in Brazilian national team jerseys—now a widely recognized symbol of the Bolsonaro movement—who drummed and waved national flags in a display of grassroots enthusiasm. “We would have liked our candidate to be Jair Bolsonaro, but today Flavio is the best choice,” Fernando Moeno, a 50-year-old retired military police officer in attendance, told Agence France-Presse.
Flavio has centered his campaign on a promise of sweeping national change, framing his platform as a mission to “free” Brazil from pervasive violent crime, persistent inflation, crippling high taxes, and what he casts as the failed governance of Lula. “We are on a plane without a pilot,” he claimed at a recent campaign event, criticizing the incumbent administration’s leadership.
However, Flavio’s campaign has been derailed in recent weeks by a cascade of damaging scandals that have eroded his polling numbers. Until the wave of controversies broke, the senator was locked in a neck-and-neck race with Lula. The first scandal emerged in May, when a leaked audio recording caught Flavio requesting that disgraced banker Daniel Vorcaro—who is currently facing charges in connection with a multi-million dollar fraud scheme—finance a biographical film about his father. Flavio had previously publicly denied any contact with Vorcaro, telling reporters hours before the leak that the allegation was “a lie.” He now claims his interactions with the banker were limited exclusively to the film project. On Thursday, a Supreme Court justice ordered a formal investigation into the film’s financing, deepening the cloud over the campaign.
A second, equally damaging crisis erupted just days before the convention, when Flavio’s stepmother Michelle Bolsonaro, the popular former first lady and a key asset to the right-wing movement among female and evangelical voters, published an Instagram video accusing Flavio of disrespect and mistreatment, claiming he had dismissed her by saying she “didn’t understand anything about politics.” As internal party divisions worsened, Flavio released a public letter on social media purportedly from his imprisoned father calling for party unity—a move that violated the terms of Jair Bolsonaro’s house arrest. In response, a Supreme Court justice blocked Flavio from visiting his father until after the first round of October voting. In a last-minute bid to heal the rift ahead of the convention, Flavio published a video public apology to Michelle, who quickly accepted the gesture.
ideologically, Flavio has positioned himself as a more moderate alternative to his father’s unapologetic far-right rhetoric, but he retains hardline stances on crime and this repetition repeated his father’s debunked claims about vulnerabilities in Brazil’s electronic voting system, echoing the 2022 election misinformation that preceded the coup attempt. He has also struggled to build necessary alliances with Brazil’s powerful centrist political bloc, with multiple key centrist parties announcing they will remain neutral in the October 4 vote.
Compounding Flavio’s troubles is the recent backlash over trade policy, after the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, a close ideological ally of the Bolsonaro family, imposed two new rounds of tariffs on Brazilian exports this month. The Bolsonaro family publicly supported the earlier tariffs, which were framed as retaliation for Jair Bolsonaro’s conviction and sentencing. In response, Lula has publicly accused the entire Bolsonaro family of committing treason against Brazilian economic interests.
The latest polling data, published Friday by leading Brazilian pollster Datafolha, shows Lula holding a narrow lead in a projected runoff matchup: the incumbent would capture 48% of the vote, compared to Flavio’s 43%, a shift that follows the recent string of scandals hitting the right-wing candidate.