This paper is written by Andrei Roberto, Brazilian political analyst and writer.
Bolsonaro is imprisoned, barred from office and forbidden to appear in campaign broadcasts. His party has just built the largest caucus in the history of the Brazilian Senate.
I am writing from Santa Catarina, in southern Brazil, the morning after a night the Brazilian press spent trying to explain why it got things wrong.
On Sunday, 4 October, Flávio Bolsonaro, senator for the state of Rio de Janeiro and eldest son of Jair Messias Bolsonaro, closed the first round with 47.03% of valid votes against 45.16% for Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The day before, Datafolha, the polling institute of the Folha de S.Paulo media group and the most widely cited in the country, had put Lula three points ahead. The final margin of 1.87 points is the narrowest ever recorded between first and second place since 1989, when Brazil returned to electing its president by direct vote after twenty-one years of military rule (1964–1985). Flávio Bolsonaro won roughly five million more votes than his father did in 2022.
The next morning the financial markets answered before the analysts did. The Ibovespa, the benchmark index of the São Paulo stock exchange, rose 7.70% and closed at 206,911 points, above 200,000 for the first time in its history and its biggest one-day gain since March 2020. The dollar fell 4.12%, to five reais. Traders christened the session “Flávio Day”. Anyone who wants to know what Brazilian capital thinks of a third Lula term will find the answer there, in a single chart, more candid than any editorial.
How Brazil votes
Before the argument, a few differences of institutional design, because Italian readers tend to project their own system onto ours, and almost nothing here works the same way.
Brazil is a presidential republic. The president is elected directly, not drawn from parliament, and if no candidate wins more than 50% of valid votes in the first round, the top two meet in a run-off, this year on 25 October. Voting is compulsory between the ages of 18 and 70, which means abstention carries a political weight here that it does not carry in Italy: staying home means paying a fine and breaking a legal obligation.
Congress has two houses. The Chamber of Deputies has 513 federal deputies elected by open-list proportional representation: voters choose a name rather than a party list, and each candidate’s personal vote decides who takes the party’s seats. The result is caucuses built on personal loyalty, parties with no programmatic discipline, and what we call the Centrão, a patronage bloc that sells its support to any government in exchange for ministries, appointments and budget earmarks. Remember that word. It explains Sunday’s result. The Senate has 81 seats, three per federative unit, with eight-year terms renewed alternately by one third and two thirds. This time 54 of the 81 were at stake.
There is also a tier Italy does not have. The 26 states and the Federal District elect their own governors and their own legislative assemblies, whose state deputies are distinct from the federal deputies who sit in Brasília. When I say someone was elected a state deputy, I mean a regional parliament, not the national Congress. In all, 158.7 million Brazilians are registered to vote.
The Italian blood of the Bolsonaros
There is a chapter of this story the European press never tells when it treats the Bolsonaros as an exotic tropical phenomenon, and for an Italian reader it changes the nature of the subject.
Thirteen of Jair Messias Bolsonaro’s sixteen great-great-grandparents were Italian. The other three were two Germans and a Brazilian of untraced ancestry. The surname was originally spelled with a z, Bolzonaro, and derives from bolzon, the crossbow bolt of medieval warfare. The family comes from the Veneto, from the small comune of Anguillara Veneta in the province of Padua.
The ancestor who crossed the Atlantic has a name and a date. Vittorio Giovanni Bolzonaro, born in 1878 and died in 1959, the former president’s great-grandfather, sailed from Genoa in April 1888, aged ten, with his father, his mother and two siblings, among roughly a thousand people who left the same comune in that wave of emigration. They landed at the port of Santos, on the São Paulo coast. Vittorio’s son Angelo married a Brazilian woman of German descent, of the Hintze line from Hamburg. Their son Percy Geraldo, Jair’s father, was born in 1927.
On the maternal side the origin is Tuscan, and entirely so. Olinda Bonturi, the former president’s mother, descends wholly from Italians from Lucca; her grandparents were born there, Guido Bonturi in 1893 and Argentina Pardini in 1892. A third family line, the Caliòs, came from Calabria.
None of this is genealogical trivia without political consequence. On 20 October 2021, the town council of Anguillara Veneta, a comune of just over four thousand inhabitants, approved honorary citizenship for Jair Bolsonaro on the proposal of its mayor, Alessandra Buoso of the Lega. The ceremony took place on 1 November that year and set off one of the noisiest local controversies the Veneto saw in that period. ANPI, the national association of partisans, came out against it. The Democratic Party of the Veneto called the proposal chilling. Trade unions, students and the diocese of Padua protested, some two hundred people took to the streets, and the town hall was daubed with graffiti. After the storming of public buildings in Brasília in January 2023, there were calls to revoke the title, which the local administration resisted on the grounds that there had been no court ruling.
The family that the Brazilian left presents as the antithesis of European civilisation is, by thirteen sixteenths, its offspring. And it was once an honorary citizen of a village in the Veneto.
Where the votes came from
Here is the point international coverage will get wrong, as it always does. The Brazilian right did not grow by devouring the left. It grew by devouring the Centrão.
In the Senate, the right and centre-right went from 32 to 48 of the 81 seats. The centre collapsed from 31 to 17: the Social Democratic Party (PSD) lost nine seats, and the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), which governed the country in the 1990s under Fernando Henrique Cardoso, was left with two. The left slipped from 17 to 14, a modest loss. In the Chamber, the União Progressista federation lost 18 seats and the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB) five, while Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT) gained six and reached 70.
Read those figures together and the conclusion is uncomfortable for both sides. The left did not shrink, it consolidated: it lost ground in its satellites, the Democratic Labour Party (PDT), the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB) and the Green Party (PV), and recovered all of it in the PT. What was ground down was the patronage centre. Brazil’s conservative voters did in 2026 what Italian voters did in 2022: they grew tired of funding parties-for-hire with their own votes and moved to parties that say what they think.
The Liberal Party (PL), the party of Jair and Flávio Bolsonaro, elected 19 senators and jumped from 15 to 28 seats, the largest caucus any party has ever held in the Brazilian Senate and more than three times the size of the runner-up. In the Chamber it went from 99 to 121 deputies. Together, the right and centre-right hold 258 of the 513 seats.
The names Brazil elected
Caucus totals hide what really happened. What the right elected on 4 October was a generation of figures formed outside the traditional parties, many of them from online activism and from the legal backlash against the PT, and their personal vote totals have no precedent in the history of the Republic.
The two most-voted federal deputies of all time in Brazil were elected on Sunday, both for the PL. Lucas Pavanato, 28, a São Paulo city councillor running for national office for the first time, took 2,856,411 votes in the state of São Paulo. Nikolas Ferreira, 30, re-elected for Minas Gerais, took 2,794,182, equivalent to 27.97% of every vote cast for federal deputy in his state. The previous record belonged to Eduardo Bolsonaro, with 1,843,735 votes in São Paulo in 2018. Both new record-holders beat it by more than a million.
In Santa Catarina, my own state, home to just over seven million people in the south of the country, the right made its cleanest sweep. Caroline de Toni, a federal deputy who left the Chamber to run statewide, was elected senator with 33% of the vote and became the most-voted senator in the state’s history, finishing first in 289 of its 295 municipalities. Santa Catarina’s second Senate seat went to Carlos Bolsonaro, the former president’s second son and Flávio’s younger brother, who had been a city councillor in Rio de Janeiro and moved his electoral domicile to run. Júlia Zanatta, also of the PL, was re-elected federal deputy with 560,223 votes, the highest total ever recorded for the Chamber in the state. And Ana Caroline Campagnolo, a teacher and one of the most combative voices of the Santa Catarina right, was elected state deputy to the Legislative Assembly with 387,523 votes.
In Paraná, the surprise came from the Novo party, economically liberal and without the patronage machinery of the others, but also a party of the right and an ally of the PL. Jeffrey Chiquini, a 30-year-old criminal defence lawyer in his first campaign, known nationally for defending Filipe Martins, a former Bolsonaro adviser investigated in the coup case whom the Brazilian right regards as a political prisoner, was elected federal deputy with around 390,000 votes, the highest total in the state’s history for the office. He beat the mark of 358,924 votes set in 2010 by Carlos Massa Ratinho Junior, now the state’s governor. Under Deltan Dallagnol’s leadership, Novo elected eight federal deputies in Paraná.
And then there is the return of the two faces of Operation Car Wash (Lava Jato), the anti-corruption investigation that between 2014 and 2021 convicted contractors, executives and top-tier politicians and became the most divisive judicial episode in Brazil’s recent history. Deltan Dallagnol, the prosecutor who led the task force, was elected senator for Paraná on the Novo ticket. Sérgio Moro, the judge who convicted Lula in 2017 and whose rulings the Supreme Federal Court annulled in 2021, holding that the Curitiba court lacked jurisdiction and that the judge had been biased, was elected governor of the same state. The man the Court declared partial will govern Paraná from February.
In Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost state, Marcel van Hattem of Novo, one of the opposition’s best-known figures on the floor of the Chamber, was elected senator. In the Federal District, the capital territory built in the 1950s, former first lady Michelle Bolsonaro was elected senator with 28.97% of the vote, and Bia Kicis of the PL took the second seat.
The family completed the picture. Of the eight relatives of Jair Bolsonaro who ran, four won: Michelle to the Senate for the Federal District, Carlos to the Senate for Santa Catarina, Jair Renan, 28, federal deputy for Santa Catarina with 131,555 votes, and Renato Bolsonaro, federal deputy for São Paulo. In Santa Catarina, tellingly, the activist outpolled the surname: Caroline de Toni won more votes than Carlos Bolsonaro.
Why Bolsonaro was convicted, and what is disputed
Jair Bolsonaro was not on the ballot, and that requires explanation, because the case is more complex than international reporting suggests.
On 11 September 2025, the First Panel of the Supreme Federal Court sentenced the former president to 27 years and 3 months in prison under a closed regime. The Supreme Court is Brazil’s constitutional court: eleven justices appointed by the president, confirmed by the Senate and serving until the age of 75, divided into two panels of five. There were five counts: armed criminal organisation, attempted violent abolition of the democratic rule of law, coup d’état, aggravated damage to federal property, and damage to listed heritage. The last two relate to the storming of the seats of the three branches of government in Brasília on 8 January 2023, a week after Lula’s inauguration, by demonstrators contesting the election result.
The prosecution argued that Bolsonaro led a plan to prevent the president-elect from taking office, relying on plea-bargain testimony from his former aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Colonel Mauro Cid, on a draft decree seized by investigators, and on an operational plan that envisaged killing Lula, Vice-President Geraldo Alckmin and Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Eight defendants were tried. Bolsonaro is the first Brazilian president convicted of attempting a coup.
What the international press seldom conveys is the dissenting vote. It did not come from the defence; it came from inside the Court. Luiz Fux, a justice of the Supreme Court itself, voted to acquit and found the proceedings absolutely void. Four of his arguments withstand any test of legal seriousness.
Jurisdiction, first. Bolsonaro was no longer president and held no office carrying privileged jurisdiction, and under the case law the Court itself had established, the case should have been heard at first instance, with the possibility of appeal.
The bench, second. A former president of the Republic was tried by a panel of five justices, not the full Court of eleven. The vote was four to one. Four votes decided the conviction of a former head of state on a court with eleven seats.
The right of appeal, third, and this is where the case should interest anyone who works with human rights conventions. When a constitutional court tries a case in original jurisdiction, there is no higher court to appeal to. Fux invoked the Pact of San José, the American Convention on Human Rights, whose Article 8.2.h guarantees every convicted person the right to appeal to a higher judge or court. In 2009, in Barreto Leiva v. Venezuela, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights held that a state may create special jurisdictions to try public officials but may not abolish the right of appeal. In a later ruling it accepted that a trial by a criminal chamber, subsequently reviewed by the full court sitting in a different composition, would satisfy the guarantee. That is precisely the path that was not taken.
The right of defence, last. Defence counsel received some seventy terabytes of evidentiary material a few days before trial, which Fux treated as a restriction on the adversarial principle. Any criminal lawyer knows what it means to read seventy terabytes in a week.
One fact remains that neither side denies. The justice who presided over the investigation, served as rapporteur in the criminal case and conducted the trial was, according to the prosecution’s own case, among the targets of the plot he was judging.
There is a symmetry worth recording. In 2021, the Supreme Court annulled Lula’s convictions because it found that the court that had tried him lacked jurisdiction. In 2025, a Supreme Court justice argued that the court that tried Bolsonaro lacked it too. The difference is that in the first case the argument prevailed.
For the Brazilian right this is no procedural technicality. It is political persecution, and that is exactly how the electorate treated it on 4 October.
Barred from office until 2030 by two rulings of the Superior Electoral Court and now serving his sentence, Bolsonaro personally chose his eldest son to inherit the candidacy, passing over his own wife and his third son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, who were also seeking the nomination. The decision was announced in July and absorbed without a rupture by a party that, only months earlier, had been debating the succession in public.
The country is not convinced
The erosion does not show only at the ballot box. In September, Datafolha recorded a 47% negative rating for the Supreme Federal Court, the worst in a series that began in 2019, against 23% approval. Nearly half the country disapproves of the Court that the foreign press describes as the lone guardian of Brazilian democracy.
The bill now coming due
In Brazil, it is the Senate that tries impeachment requests against Supreme Court justices. Around a hundred have been filed, most of them against Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Since Sunday the counts have diverged: the news site Metrópoles finds 49 senators in favour, other tallies reach 54. Exactly 54 are required, two thirds of the chamber. The right has reached the edge of that number, or the number itself.
Two locks remain in place. In December, by a ruling of Justice Gilmar Mendes, the same two-thirds majority became necessary even to open proceedings, where 41 votes had previously sufficed. And whether the matter moves forward is decided by the president of the Senate: Senator Davi Alcolumbre, who has been holding the requests back and emerged from this election weakened, having failed to elect the candidates he backed. The contest for the presidency of the Senate in February 2027 matters more than it appears.
Bolsonarismo is no longer one man
It is worth measuring what happened. A man under house arrest, without social media, forbidden to speak to the press or to have his face appear in his own sons’ campaign material, elected more members of Congress than the sitting president of the Republic, who had the entire federal machine on the other side. The same press that predicted the movement would fall apart after its leader’s imprisonment spent Sunday night searching for words.
Bolsonarismo has stopped being a man and become a structure. It has the family, it has cadres formed outside the family, it has a caucus, it has governors, and it has a generation of legislators in their twenties and thirties with vote totals no strongman of the past ever reached.
The question for the next four years is whether that structure has discipline. With 121 deputies and 28 senators, will the PL operate as a cohesive ideological bloc, with coordination and a voting strategy, or behave like the Centrão in a new shirt, trading votes for jobs? Brazil has not had an organised right in Congress at any point since the return to democracy in 1985. Now it has the numbers to try. If the PL brings its allied parties along, the country will see something unprecedented in its republican history.
What remains open
The third way foundered. Together, Augusto Cury of Avante, Renan Santos of Missão, Ronaldo Caiado of the PSD and Romeu Zema of Novo took 7.58%: 2.9%, 2.25%, 2.19% and 0.27% respectively. That is nearly nine million votes without a home, and tactical voting proved once again that in a polarised Brazil the centre has no electoral address. Caiado is waiting for the position of Gilberto Kassab, who chairs the PSD. Cury endorsed no one.
Abstention was 21.08%, 33.4 million absent voters, the highest since 1998. In a country where voting is a legal obligation, thirty-three million people preferred to pay the fine.
Lula enters the run-off from behind, a position he has not faced since 1989. He holds the Northeast, where he took 62.94% and where his cash-transfer programme remains the most effective policy of his career. Flávio has São Paulo, the country’s largest electorate, with Governor Tarcísio de Freitas re-elected in the first round, and thirteen of the twenty state governments decided on Sunday.
It was at the Pacaembu, as it happens, that all of this began. The Liberal Party launched Flávio’s candidacy at a convention in the Paulo Machado de Carvalho Municipal Stadium, opened in April 1940 for seventy thousand spectators, a venue for six matches of the 1950 World Cup and the traditional stage for São Paulo’s great political rallies. Javier Milei, the president of Argentina, took the stage. The election was seventy-one days away, and the polls had Lula ahead.
Twenty days remain until the run-off. And for the first time since Jair Bolsonaro was imprisoned, it is the other side that is on the defensive.