Brazil’s President Faces Down the Online Right
After President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won last week’s Presidential election in Brazil, beating the far-right candidate Flávio Bolsonaro by more than four million votes, a friend there sent me a triumphal message: “Next Netanyahu, and then the U.S. midterms!” In the past year and a half, virtually every Latin American government has fallen in line with the Trump Administration, but Lula’s win countered that trend. Among Brazilians on the left, hopes have emerged that his success could begin to reverse a far-right surge in their country and around the world.
On the same day as Lula’s victory, the pro-Russia strongman Aleksandar Vučić was trounced in Serbia’s elections, and, unlike strongmen elsewhere, he recognized his defeat. In Brazil, Flávio Bolsonaro seemed uncertain how to react to losing. He rejected the results, then seemed to accept them; he made a social-media statement describing himself as Brazil’s legitimate President, then deleted it, then restored an edited version of it. But all the country’s major institutions and political parties have acknowledged that Lula won, as have most nations in the hemisphere, with the exception of Argentina, which is run by the MAGA-friendly President Javier Milei.
In the U.S., Donald Trump hedged his bets: he suggested that the election could have been “rigged,” but also declared, “I like Lula.” Perhaps he was being cautious because Brazil is the biggest economy in Latin America. Or perhaps he fears a knock-on effect. Trends in one country seem increasingly linked to trends in others. The current spasms of unrest in France, Italy, and Albania have disparate causes, but they all seem linked to an overriding mood of dissatisfaction. The same could be said of the anti-government Cockroach Janta movement, in India, and the recent Gen Z revolts in Bangladesh, Madagascar, and Nepal.
Social media has played a huge part in these kinds of events, as a means of both connection and combustion. In June, 2016, much of the world was shocked when a slender majority of Brits, concerned about joblessness and immigration and revved up by a nativist web campaign, voted to leave the European Union. Three months later, Colombians initially voted down a peace deal with the FARC, a Marxist guerrilla army that had been fighting the state for more than half a century. The reasons included a false claim, spread by right-wing politicians and social media, that the deal contained an agreement to teach “gender ideology” in primary schools.
I was in Colombia at the time, and a friend remarked, “First Brexit and now this. This means that Trump will win in November.” About a month later, Trump reached the White House, with a campaign that relied heavily on nativism, racism, and misogyny, as well as blatantly false accusations against his opponent. In 2018, in Brazil, the right-wing former Army captain Jair Bolsonaro—Flávio’s father—was elected President. His campaign also played on fears of “gender ideology,” inundating voters with WhatsApp messages claiming that his opponent promoted pedophilia.
In office, Bolsonaro and Trump were ideological soulmates, espousing anti-environment, pro-development views and fanning hatred of Black people, women, and trans people. Both were extraordinarily cavalier in dealing with COVID-19; the U.S. had the world’s largest number of reported deaths, with 1.2 million, while Brazil had the second largest, with more than seven hundred thousand.
The Trump and Bolsonaro stories overlap in eerie ways. Bolsonaro’s first campaign, in 2018, gained new momentum when he was stabbed by an assailant at a rally—a foreshadowing of Trump’s near-assassination in 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania. Trump’s response to that shooting—“Fight! Fight!”—impressed Elon Musk, who became his largest individual donor and, eventually, his DOGE czar. (Musk also began openly supporting right-wing movements around the world, using his social-media platform, X, to denigrate Lula and to support Milei and Germany’s extremist AfD Party.)
After the 2020 election, Trump blamed his loss on a Democratic conspiracy to tamper with voting machines, and encouraged supporters to assault the Capitol to halt the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Two years later, Bolsonaro lost a reëlection bid to Lula. He, too, had repeatedly claimed that the vote could be rigged. He flew to Florida and conspired with allies in the security forces back home to plot a coup. A week after Lula took office, thousands of Bolsonaro supporters attacked Brazil’s Supreme Court and National Congress buildings, trying to reinstall him as President.
Bolsonaro eventually returned to Brazil, where he was convicted of conspiracy and sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison. Later, he was remanded to house arrest on humanitarian grounds. Since he was unable to run for office this year, his son Flávio, a lawyer and legislator in his forties, became a candidate in his place. Flávio said that his goal was to see his father freed and to punish the jurists who had upheld his conviction. He also suggested that he would weaken environmental protections, combat “wokeness,” and encourage development and foreign investment. To ingratiate himself to Trump, he promised to join the Shield of the Americas, a program in which U.S. troops can be deployed to Latin American countries, ostensibly to fight narcotrafficking.
Brazilian elections generally have two rounds of voting. In this year’s first round, in early October, Bolsonaro came out ahead. But, in an unprecedented three-week social-media campaign, a tech-savvy politician named André Janones enlisted millions of Brazilians to serve in “Lula’s Army.” By synchronizing their messaging, he gained an algorithmic advantage over the right-wing trolls who had dominated Brazil’s social media for years. (One prominent troll operator is Fernando Cerimedo, an Argentinian ally of the Bolsonaros, who was indicted in Brazil for alleged involvement in the coup attempt, although prosecutors ultimately declined to charge him. Since then, Cerimedo has helped Milei get elected, in Argentina, and has aided other right-wing politicians around the Americas. In August, while he was working out of Bolivia’s Presidential palace, he was arrested on suspicion of hiring gunmen to assassinate his girlfriend, who is pregnant. She survived; he remains in jail, and denies all charges against him.)
Janones’s digital “war” succeeded despite some obstacles. The country’s electoral court twice blocked his WhatsApp channel, at Bolsonaro’s request. But the same court also imposed an injunction on Meta, after Lula’s campaign provided evidence that the company had doctored algorithms to favor Bolsonaro in search results. Although Meta denied this, it acknowledged “technical issues” and promised to fix the problems. The allegations of interference troubled many Brazilians. Walter Salles, the director of “I’m Still Here,” an acclaimed film about Brazil’s years of military dictatorship, told me recently, “This has probably been happening for some time in past elections throughout South America.”
After losing the election, Flávio surreptitiously crossed the border into Argentina, boarded a private jet, and fled to Florida, as his father had following his own loss; he was one step ahead of Brazilian police, who want to question him in a money-laundering investigation. He had covert assistance from the Milei government and the Trump Administration; a White House aide evidently helped charter the jet. When he arrived, along with his wife and children, they were allowed entry on parole status, and the State Department said that it plans to issue them visas. It is not yet clear what he intends to do with his time. His father spent his time in the U.S. strolling around a Publix supermarket near Orlando, eating K.F.C., and taking selfies with Brazilian tourists, while plotting a comeback. The younger Bolsonaro may do something similar. Or, like many other Latin American fugitives in Florida, he may live out his days pining for home and playing golf.
In Brazil, there are signs that Lula’s more inclusive vision is gaining purchase. Erika Hilton, a thirty-three-year-old Black trans woman and a former sex worker, became the most-voted-for female congressional candidate in the country’s history. Ana Elisa Santos, a twenty-one-year-old Black influencer, also won a seat in Congress, despite death threats from white supremacists. Meanwhile, Janones’s services have been requested by the left-leaning Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, who faces a tight race for reëlection in late November. In France, “Janonisme” is being emulated by activists working to counter the influence of the far-right Presidential candidate Marine Le Pen.
Brazil’s essential polarization has not gone away. Crime rates are high, and the markets, which had risen in the expectation that the market-friendly Bolsonaro would win, plummeted after Lula’s victory. Still, Lula’s supporters feel that there is now a chance to fortify the country’s still fragile democracy. A friend of mine there, who worried about the fate of the Amazon if Bolsonaro won, wrote to me to say, “Much more than the future of Brazilian democracy is at stake. We Latin Americans know that democracies can die, but, in time, they can also be restored. There is a great deal of suffering along the way, but it has been done.” ♦