I was in Colombia at the time, and a friend said, “First Brexit, now this. This means Trump is going to win in November.” About a month later, Trump won the White House with a campaign that relied heavily on nativism, racism and misogyny, as well as blatantly false accusations against his opponents. In Brazil, in 2018, right-wing former army captain Jair Bolsonaro (Flavio’s father) was elected president. His campaign also played on fears of “gender ideology”, inundating voters with WhatsApp messages claiming his opponents promoted pedophilia.
While in office, Bolsonaro and Trump were ideological soul mates, espousing anti-environmental, pro-development views and inciting hatred against black people, women and transgender people. Both of them behaved extremely arrogantly in handling matters coronavirus-19; The United States has the highest number of reported deaths in the world, with 1.2 million, while Brazil ranks second with more than 700,000 deaths.
The stories of Trump and Bolsonaro overlap in strange ways. Bolsonaro’s first campaign gained new momentum in 2018 when he was stabbed by an assailant at a rally, setting the stage for Trump’s near-assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania, in 2024. Trump’s response to that shooting — “Fight! Fight!” — impressed Elon Musk, who became Trump’s largest individual donor and, ultimately, his president. dog tsar. (Musk also began openly supporting right-wing movements around the world, using his social media platform X to denigrate Lula and support Milley and the extremist Alternative for Germany party.)
After the 2020 election, Trump blamed his defeat on a Democratic conspiracy to tamper with voting machines and encouraged supporters to storm the Capitol to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Two years later, Bolsonaro lost his re-election bid to Lula. He has also repeatedly claimed that the vote may have been rigged. He flew to Florida and plotted a coup with allies in his homeland’s security forces. A week after Lula took office, thousands of Bolsonaro supporters attacked Brazil’s Supreme Court and Congress building in an attempt to reappoint him as president.
Bolsonaro eventually returned to Brazil, where he was convicted of conspiracy and sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison. He was later remanded under house arrest on humanitarian grounds. Since he was unable to run for office this year, his forty-something son Flávio, a lawyer and parliamentarian, stood as a candidate in his stead. Flavio said his goal was to free his father and punish the jurists who upheld his conviction. He also suggested he would weaken environmental protections, crack down on “wokeness” and encourage development and foreign investment. To curry favor with Trump, he pledged to join the “American Shield” program, which would deploy U.S. troops to Latin American countries, ostensibly to combat drug trafficking.
Brazilian elections generally have two rounds of voting. In the first round in early October this year, Bolsonaro was in the lead. But in an unprecedented three-week social media campaign, a tech-savvy politician named André Janones recruited millions of Brazilians to join “Lula’s Army.” By synchronizing their messages, he gained an algorithmic advantage over the right-wing trolls who have dominated Brazilian social media for years. (Fernando Cerimedo, an Argentinian ally of Bolsonaros and one of the known troll operators, was indicted in Brazil for his alleged involvement in the coup, although prosecutors ultimately declined to charge him. Since then, Cerimedo helped Milley get elected in Argentina and has helped other right-wing politicians across the Americas.
Despite some obstacles, Yanones’ digital “war” was successful. At Bolsonaro’s request, the country’s electoral court twice blocked his WhatsApp channel. But the same court also issued an injunction against Meta after Lula’s campaign presented evidence that the company had modified its algorithm to favor Bolsonaro in search results. Although Meta denied this, it admitted there were “technical issues” and promised to fix them. The interference accusations have troubled many Brazilians. Walter Salles, the director of “I’m Still Here,” a critically acclaimed film about Brazil’s years of military dictatorship, recently told me, “This has probably been happening for a while in past elections throughout South America.”