“Brazil is Key to U.S. Ambitions”: A Socialist Perspective on Brazil’s Presidential Election

On October 4, 2026, Brazil will hold its presidential election. The main race is between incumbent president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula), who is running for a fourth term with the PT (Workers Party) he founded, and far-right senator and candidate for the right-wing PL (Liberal Party), Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro who is currently imprisoned for attempting a coup. The two candidates are virtually tied and it is likely neither will win a majority on October 4, resulting in a runoff. The lead-up to the vote has been marked by U.S. interference and a bank fraud scandal implicating members of the country’s Supreme Federal Court in corruption.

To understand the political dynamics shaping the election and the implications its outcome holds for Latin America, Left Voice editor Samuel Karlin spoke with André Barbieri, editor of Left Voice’s sister site in Brazil, Esquerda Diário. The two discussed the election in depth, as well as the Far Right’s support for U.S. imperialism, the failure of Lula’s reformist strategy to win meaningful sovereignty or advance the conditions of Brazil’s working class, and the need for an independent Left in Brazil to confront the Far Right and imperialist threats.

The transcript of this conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

As you were saying, these are the most important elections in Latin America now, because they happen in the context of severe political shifts in the continent, and amid a growing imperialist interference by Donald Trump in Brazil and Latin America, more in general.

A few days before the start of this electoral process in Brazil, the United States Department of State released a video glorifying the Monroe Doctrine and framing Trump as its major defender, including this new idea of the Donroe Doctrine. So the political message has been clear: Latin America must increasingly submit to the dictates of U.S. imperialism as its backyard. Just as Trump is imposing its rapacious protectorate in Venezuela, well helped a little bit by the Chavista regime of Delcy Rodriguez, and choking Cuba’s economy. 

This is part of a major plan of reconquest of the Western Hemisphere, the new national security strategy in the U.S. that was created as a response to the United States’s hegemonic decline in the world, which is evident in its military and political defeat in Iran and its open competition with China. We could also mention its defeat domestically too; the great “general strike” in Minneapolis against ICE. So Trump is really in dire straits. U.S. imperialism is in a process of decaying hegemony, and it feels the need to recover ground, especially here in Latin America.

Brazil is a top spot for Trumpist interventionism measures such as sweeping tariffs against Brazil, designation of PCC, which in Portuguese would be “Primero Comando da Capital,” and Red Commando — both are militias connected to organized crime here in Brazil that were designated as terrorist organizations by Trump — and even diplomatic crises that went as far as the revocation of the Brazilian ambassador’s visa, are all part of this backdrop. The United States wants to increasingly condition Brazilian policy to suit its interests, relying on allies like presidents Javier Milei in Argentina and Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia.

Now, economically, Brazil is key to U.S. ambitions. It is the tenth largest economy in the world, with an estimated GDP of 2.6 trillion dollars, double that of Mexico, more than three times that of Argentina. While Brazil produces around 3.4 million barrels of oil per day, and is one of the world’s leading producers of iron ore, of soybeans, and concentrates mineral resources of, I don’t know, staggering magnitude. It holds like 25 percent of the world’s rare earth reserves. So stockpiles values estimated at equivalent of twice of Brazil’s GDP, as well as 8 percent of global lithium reserves and over 93 percent of world’s niobium reserves, a key mineral for aerospace and defense industries.

So naturally, Trump wants all this, and Flávio Bolsonaro is his preferred candidate in the presidency, despite all the demonstrations of affections that Lula gave him these last few years. Flávio Bolsonaro is an avowed Trump ally, an absolute bootlicker, yes-man of Trump, and wants to give everything to the U.S. in a speed that even Lula’s moderation cannot match. We saw that in the tensions between Lula and Trump amid the UN General Assembly in New York, when Lula said that Brazil is nobody’s backyard and accused Trump of intervening in Brazilian elections as an emperor. So tensions are high. Trump wants his preferred candidate to win, and if Trump gets the result he wants, he would have more options to mask his own fragility, heading towards a likely defeat in the midterms there in the United States.

This is important data for us to think because Trump is in a difficult situation, but if his allies win these elections here in Latin America, of course he’s going to try to use this to advance the American imperialism plan to reconquer this part of the world in connection with this structural competition against China.

That’s why this process here is so important, and why a revolutionary socialist perspective begins with an adamant anti-imperialist stance against U.S. intervention and U.S. presence here in Latin America, hands off Cuba and Venezuela, and against Trump.

Flávio Bolsonaro is a continuation of the project of his father, Jair Bolsonaro, the ex-president of Brazil. He’s from the Far Right. He’s connected with agribusiness, with evangelical churches, including organized crime here in Brazil. He’s like, well a horrible, horrible political figure that is connected with politicians that come from the military dictatorship here in Brazil. They defend the legacy of the military dictatorship. So clearly, there is a big portion of Brazilian society that hates him for everything he represents.

Lula, on the other side, is a reformist politician, a very traditional politician, maybe the most important figure of Latin American politics for the last 40 years. He has an immense amount of experience commanding the Brazilian state. This is his third term as Brazilian president, and now he’s fighting for his fourth presidential term, which would be unheard of in these places. He comes from the Workers’ Party, “Partido dos Trabalhadores” in Portuguese. This party was created in the last few years of the 1970s, the start of the 1980s, at the last uprising of the Brazilian working class against the dictatorship. But after that it became more and more bureaucratized, more and more absorbed within the state, the Brazilian bourgeois state.

So these are the two candidates that are facing each other, and probably are the two candidates that are going to get to the runoff at the end of October. But before talking about their campaigns, it’s important first of all to note that these elections in Brazil are marked by the biggest bank fraud in the country’s history, a scandal involving a bank that is called Banco Master, that has deeply shaken Brazil’s political establishment because it exposed widespread links between financial bourgeois groups and justices of the Supreme Federal Court.

Implicated first and foremost, Alexandre de Moraes, the judge who put Jair Bolsonaro in jail, but several other justices like André Mendonça, Gilmar Mendes, Kassio Nunes Marques, and other names that nobody is going to remember. But it’s important just to give a general overview about this crisis, which is very very deep within the political system.

It’s important to note also that in 2016, the same Supreme Court was instrumental in a coup d’état against former president Dilma Rousseff and the imprisonment of Lula in 2018. The Supreme Court was responsible for the manipulation of the election so as to give the victory to Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. In these last few years, as its relations with extreme right, the Far Right became strained, the Supreme Court started to oppose Bolsonarists’ endeavors and appeared publicly as a kind of defender of democracy, an absolute false image of it. The problem is that major sectors of the institutional Left in Brazil hailed the Supreme Court as the defenders of democracy, and now they are having to deal with the fact that justices are involved in this scandal with a bank that financed Bolsonaro’s political campaign.

Now the Far Right is trying to capitalize on this crisis, though it is completely involved in it. It is completely involved in the scandal, including Flávio Bolsonaro, who personally received tens of millions of reals (Brazilian currency) from this banker, Daniel Vorcaro, which is the banker, the owner of Banco Master, and the person who has like a million ties with every elite politician we have here in Brazil. So one of the ministers of of the Supreme Court, who’s called André Mendonça, is now doing everything to control politically each step of the investigation, each step of the scandal, in order to benefit Flávio Bolsonaro in the electoral run, protecting him from the investigation and leaking stuff against his adversaries.

This proves Karl Marx’s point that the state is a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. In Brazil, in fact, the state is a republic of bankers against the workers and the poor. This is something that is coming out in the open for everyone, and everyone is in a bit of an anger about this. The Supreme Court is not legitimized anymore, and new powers are coming to the forefront in order to intervene in the elections. And of course, Trump is taking advantage of this. 

So Lula and Flávio are campaigning in this context. Lula is ahead in the first round of the presidential election, which is coming about now this Sunday, but Flávio gained ground with this crisis in the Supreme Court, and now the projections say that they are tied in a runoff. So as I said, Flávio Bolsonaro is a continuity of his father, a despicable copycat Javier Milei and Abelardo de la Espriella, who’s trying to convert Brazil into a puppet state and hand over all our natural assets to Trump, facilitating his designs in all Latin America.

Lula’s trying to figure out what to propose. He’s taking, these last few days, a more confrontational approach because conciliation alone hasn’t worked so far for him. Lula just published a bill that puts an end to online betting companies, which have caused massive family debts among the population. This is a measure supported by the overwhelming majority of the people, so this maybe can give him some edge. We don’t know yet. He has increased Bolsa Família, which is a social assistance program, and granted other social benefits that tend to help him in these last few days.

It’s really hard to make any projections, any predictions. But what is certain is that Lula has a big share of his responsibility in preserving the strength of the Far Right, taking into account that in his four-year term he never touched these structurally reactionary policies of Jair Bolsonaro’s tenure, and made all possible alliances with the Far Right politicians. This is a big explanation of why, after such an important crisis the Far Right had in Brazil these last few years, why they’re so strong right now. This shows that this policy of class conciliation from Lula, from the Workers Party, only strengthens the Far Right.

This is an important question. We try to theorize a political category to try to understand what is happening, what happened in this third term of Lula’s government. We developed this idea of Senile Lulaism, which basically means that Lula now is a reformism without reforms, a trait we see in several moderate center-left formations in Latin America. But for Lula’s political figure, it has a special connotation because he ensured the preservation of the core attacks approved under Michel Temer, the president that came right after the coup d’état in 2016, and Jair Bolsonaro, the president that came in 2018, in those manipulated elections by the Supreme Court. So all of them made major attacks against the working people, the oppressed people in Brazil, that formed the basis of Lula’s current broad Popular Front agreements, the agreements he has with many right-wing politicians.

In this third term, Lula took advantage of the weakening of Bolsonaro’s formation, and he tried to pick up several right-wing politicians for his own formation, for his own cabinet in the government. So Lula maintained, for example, the neoliberal labor reform and the pension reform that were approved under Michel Temer and Jair Bolsonaro. Both reforms that are hated by the majority of the people here in Brazil. Lula expanded the precarity of labor in these labor contracts that cannot guarantee even a decent condition of living. Lula created what is called here “Arcabouço Fiscal,” which is a fiscal framework, a very neoliberal formulation of a spending ceiling against health and education. So the government is not spending public money on health and education because they have to pay the external debt. As you mentioned, also this is the country of the 6×1 work schedule. So you work six days a week and you have a virtual non-one day rest, which relies on about 40 million informal workers, and which during this current Lula administration saw at least five million workers with signed employment cards shifted into being independent contractors without guaranteed rights.

Aside from that, Lula also failed to promote an improvement in the living conditions of the masses and fed the roots of Bolsonarism. He made alliances economically and politically with agribusiness. He has a — here in Brazil we call “Plano Safra” — which is money that you spend financing the big farmers, the big wealthy farmers in Brazil, and they spend nothing less than 500 billion reals on this sector of the economy, a sector which supports Bolsonaro. Lula put many of Bolsonaro’s allies in his cabinet, as I was saying.

We could go on here explaining. So this is what we describe in the concept of Senile Lulaism: the incapacity to promote reforms in the context of the end of the commodity boom in the 2000s and the preservation of the ultra-liberal economic agenda that came from the coup d’etat in Brazil in 2016. Lula’s policies differentiate themselves from the Far Right, obviously, but that happens within the framework that emerged from this pendular movement to the right we had in Brazil in 2016. This is what frustrates a lot of people that expected his government to overturn the disasters Bolsonaro did, but he didn’t do that. So this policy of permanent conciliation with the right-wing parties, this strategy of administration of capitalism, obviously strengthens Flávio Bolsonaro and all his adversaries on the Far Right, and of course, it helps Trump’s policies here in Brazil too.

Despite the fact that Lula has his own margin of autonomy, it’s very different in this aspect from Flávio Bolsonaro, who wants to give everything to the United States. Lula is more like a multilateralist. He wants to make deals with everyone. He wants to turn to China. He wants to turn to Europe. He wants to make deals with the United States, but of course he doesn’t support this old unilateral decaying U.S. order that came about in the last few decades. So this is the major difficulty here: the frustration Lula caused in the Brazilian population, who cannot see any real difference he made structurally and economically over the disasters the previous administration made.

The far-right movement in Brazil is actually losing steam in these last few years compared with what it was in 2018, when Jair Bolsonaro campaigned in the streets saying that he would shoot and kill any people from the Left. This was a really difficult situation we had. We have nothing of the sort now here in Brazil, but as I stated before, the Far Right draws its energy from Lula’s class collaboration strategy and the frustration of the people who cannot see structural measures that solve everyday life’s problems in employment, in better conditions of living, in better labor contracts. So Flávio Bolsonaro really gets his steam from this frustration. And well, Flávio Bolsonaro swears by the U.S. flag, is a sellout and a lickspittle of Trumpism, is a supporter of Netanyahu, Zionist genocide in Palestine, and the occupation of Latin America by Trump’s troops.

Leon Trotsky used to say that it is impossible to confront the most reactionary forces of the national bourgeoisie without confronting imperialism. Without a doubt, this position proves its strength today. If you want to defeat the Far Right in Brazil, if you want to defeat Flávio Bolsonaro, you have to be real and serious in the struggle against imperialism and the struggle against Trump.

The problem is that Lula has so far shown his good chemistry with Trump, negotiating our oil, negotiating our rare earths with him. Lula actually allowed the sale of the country’s main rare earth mining company to a North American company linked to the Trump administration and backed by capital from the Department of War. So this obviously won’t help Lula in his policy, like getting closer to the people. There’s no doubt that Trump is interfering to some degree, in the elections, as Lula said at the UN Assembly, and we need to fight seriously against it.

But what I ask is, what serious fight can you put up against the U.S. if you don’t restructure every piece of economic deal the U.S. has imposed on our country in these last few decades? What serious fight can be made if you accept Trump’s atrocious intervention in Venezuela? Lula spoke against it in the UN Assembly, but for the whole year he kept silent about it and said that he hoped democracy would prosper in Venezuela. How can it prosper with Trump’s helicopters and bombs in Caracas? Well, in Cuba, Lula, for example, could send oil to help the Cuban population against Trump’s embargo, but he doesn’t send the oil from our state oil company, Petrobras, because he knows Trump is going to chastise him if he did that.

So these are his limits, clear limits, in his talk about sovereignty and his talk about independence, because it is impossible to defend the country’s sovereignty without a clean break from capitalist monopolies and the fraud that is the external debt contracted during the period Brazil was a colony, during the military dictatorship, and well during the the 1990s. And yet not even this moderation has paid off because for Trump, any margin of autonomy is reason enough for punishment. What Washington needs are not governments that negotiate terms, as Lula is trying to do, but governments that obey without hesitation. The model is Javier Milei. So he wants someone like Milei here in Brazil too. So this is the political framework we are facing.

We are putting all our strength into fighting the Far Right, Flávio Bolsonaro, and U.S. imperialism, while at the same time fighting for class independence to build an anti-imperialist mobilization here in Brazil, in the streets, which is the only way to combat the interests of Trump and his representatives here in the country. We are fighting to build an organization in Brazil that surpasses the historical experience from the Workers Party, from the Left, in the context of Lula’s final elections, whether he wins or loses, which will greatly impact the entire regime and the strategic perspectives for the Left here in our country. So this is one thing important to stress, and politically, of course, we need to fight against the Far Right, against everything that Flávio Bolsonaro represents, but not in support of the strategy of the broad front with sectors of the bourgeoisie.

Up to now, in light of the crisis in the regime, we focused on a program that could question the entire structure upon which power is organized in Brazil. As revolutionary socialists, our goal is the destruction of this bourgeois state and its replacement by a workers’ democracy, a transitional soviet state based on the self-organization of the masses. This is our strategic perspective.

However, since broad sectors of the population still place their trust in these democratic institutions, we propose to fight for the most radical outcome that bourgeois democracy can offer: a free and sovereign constituent assembly imposed by class struggle, which allows the majority of the masses to discuss and decide on the country’s political, economic, and social foundations. A free and sovereign constituent assembly, won through popular mobilization with elected and recallable representatives, could bring into question the issues that current institutions seek to keep out of the majority’s reach. Who should control the financial system? Who should decide over our natural wealth? Why can a banker make millions while a teacher receives a salary that barely allows them to live? Why can unelected judges exercise such broad powers in the political destiny of our country? A constituent assembly of this type must start from the concrete needs of those who work, placing the main decisions regarding everything I said in the hands of the majority of the working class population.

So, for example, an independent socialist program starts with a reduction of the work week, the elimination of the 6×1 work schedule that we have here in Brazil, without wage reduction. So, this must be a part of a program that puts workers’ time and lives above profit, full rights for delivery and app-based workers are an absolute urgency. It’s dignified employment rights for all, placing production at the service of social needs rather than the accumulation of a minority. Also, the nationalization of the banking system under workers’ control would make it possible to place the financial system at the service of social needs. Oil and rare earths could be treated as common natural goods belonging to the Brazilian people, not to Trump, rather than as sources of profit for private companies.

So all these measures could exercise a real political class struggle against the bourgeoisie, and in the course of the struggle, workers and our allies among the youth, the poor, the oppressed people could realize the need to develop their own organs of power based on direct democracy to confront the inevitable resistance of the property-owning classes. So this could result in an exceptional development of the activity and initiative of the workers, the women, the youth, and possibly open the way to a political experience of breaking with capitalism, fighting for a new socialist society. This is our horizon. Concretely, now in Brazil, discussing with everyone the importance of having a class independent stance facing the elections, not to cede ground to this pressure of lesser evilism, and trying to put up a real and serious fight against the Far Right that goes way beyond the elections.