Millions of Brazilians are casting their votes Sunday in a hotly contested presidential runoff that, for one half of the ballot, doubles as a family restoration project. Left-wing incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is fighting for another term to cap off a storied career against right-wing Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, who wants to return his family name to the presidential palace. Flávio also wants to free his father Jair, who is serving a 27-year sentence under house arrest for plotting a coup following a 2022 presidential election defeat to his son’s opponent.
Bolsonaro the younger has constructed the comeback campaign with familiar populist materials: a focus on law and order, smaller government, and promises to wage a crusade against Lula’s Workers’ Party and a judiciary supposedly captured by political elites. He has done so without an open endorsement from one of his father's most notable supporters: Donald Trump. There’s little doubt where the White House stands on the race, though.
The Trump and Bolsonaro families have each railed against entrenched political elites and made anti-establishment politics part of their brand, only to seed loved ones into positions of power to create an establishment of their own. Trump and the elder Bolsonaro go back years. When the Brazilian president visited the White House in 2019, the two found much to admire in each other—nationalist bombast, culture-war politics, disdain for conventional politicians and a fondness for presenting themselves as the only men who could clean up a rotten system.
That resemblance persisted after their respective defeats. A year after the insurrection on Capitol Hill in 2021, Bolsonaro spent 2022 attacking Brazil’s electronic voting system, then cried fraud after narrowly losing to Lula. The disgraced former president was later convicted of plotting a coup, and handed the septuagenarian a sentence that might as well be a life term.
Enter son Flávio, whose pledge to pardon his father and restore his freedom constitutes one of many campaign promises. Unlike Trump, the Bolsonaro family are no political outsiders. Jair spent nearly three decades in Congress, while his sons built political careers of their own.
Their ascent, he said, was powered by Brazil’s evangelical churches and fierce opposition to the Workers’ Party. But just like Trump’s MAGA movement, the cult of “Bolsonarismo” has always been “highly personalistic,” said Gustavo Flores-Macías, dean of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy. Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner served as senior White House advisers during his first term.
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