The Bolsonaro family. The soap opera of the Brazilian presidential elections

Caught between his mother and his stepmother, Flávio Bolsonaro heads into Sunday’s presidential run-off against Lula in an atmosphere that could well evoke one of the soap operas for which Brazil is famous. The Bolsonaro family, in fact. His father, Jair, is barred from standing as a candidate: he has been prohibited from holding public office and was sentenced to 27 years and three months for attempted coup after losing the 2022 elections, although he has been granted house arrest on health grounds. His eldest son, Flávio Bolsonaro, aged 45, is therefore running for the presidency. A lawyer by profession, he served four terms as a state deputy in Rio de Janeiro before being elected to the Senate in 2019. The second son, Carlos, is standing for the Senate; the fourth son, Renan, is standing for the Chamber of Deputies; and the third son, Eduardo, is running his brother’s campaign from the United States, where he has sought to instigate sanctions against Brazil to prevent his father’s trial, and for this he was both stripped of his seat as a deputy and sentenced to four years and two months. There is also his stepmother Michelle, who at one point broke with Flávio and even founded a party of her own, only to reach a supposedly precarious reconciliation in August in exchange for a Senate candidacy.

But the family saga is also playing out in the Lula household, with the son of Brazil’s current president, Fábio Luís Lula da Silva, known as ‘Lulinha’, coming under investigation for influence peddling just three days before his father’s official re-election bid, forcing the latter to promise he would not interfere with the proceedings. The case of Rafael Borges Amaral reads like a soap opera: the 26-year-old who died in 2024 from the psychological fallout after ruining himself through online gambling, and whose mother, a teacher, finally secured a presidential decree banning it nationwide after a two-year campaign. A clearly electioneering measure, given that it was announced eight days before the vote, it must be ratified by Congress within 120 days and was defended by Lula at his rallies, after football clubs had protested.

The general election in Brazil is due to take place on 4 October (with a possible run-off scheduled for 25 October), and four months before the vote, Lula also launched a refinancing programme for informal workers; four weeks earlier, he announced fuel subsidies; two weeks before, he approved a 15 per cent increase in the main support programme for poor families, meaning that, from six days before the ballot, between 15 and 20 per cent of voters will see their monthly payment rise from 114 to 132 euros. Flávio Bolsonaro, on the other hand, presented a 12-point security plan involving the construction of a military ‘wall’ along the borders, prisons modelled on those in El Salvador, chemical castration for rapists and the lowering of the age of criminal responsibility to 16, before adding another plan to create 500,000 prison places, following the Bukele model. However, the final stages of the campaign centred on Flávio’s alleged intention to strip Our Lady of Aparecida of her title as national patroness should he win the election – a claim that went viral on social media, stemming from a bill tabled in 2007 by a lawmaker close to the Bolsonaro family. “As long as I am president, no one will show disrespect to Our Lady of Aparecida,” Lula was quick to retort. “Everyone knows that I respect all religions. All of them!” replied Flávio.

It is an apparent paradox: the right-wing candidate accused of secularism and the left-wing candidate appealing to popular piety. But the Bible is the first of the three ‘Bs’ considered the core of the Bolsonaro electorate, alongside ‘Cattle’ and ‘Bullets’. ‘Bible, Cattle and Bullets’: Protestant fundamentalists, agribusiness and supporters of armed security. According to the polls, among Catholics, Lula has 48 per cent of voting intentions, compared with 29 per cent for Bolsonaro. Among evangelicals, the senator stands at 46 per cent, whilst the president trails at 27 per cent. And the figurehead for the evangelicals is, above all, Michelle.

It was only on 11 August that Flávio and Michelle Bolsonaro appeared together for the first time since their family feud, taking part in the filming of an election advert. “Let’s put our differences aside... ‘What family is perfect? Hands up anyone who doesn’t have family problems,’ she said at the end of the event, explaining that they had both put their differences aside in order to unite ‘for something much greater’. But a few weeks earlier, Michelle had posted two videos in which, speaking for almost half an hour, she accused Flávio of having ‘stabbed her in the back’.

“He was very rude, disrespectful and treated me badly on the phone. And I hadn’t done anything to him,” she said, adding that her stepson had also told her that she “didn’t understand anything about politics”. In short, she concluded that he had “mistreated” and “humiliated” her in party affairs, stating that she could not support the candidacy of someone who had never sought her backing. On 30 June, Michelle had also announced her resignation as chair of the women’s wing of the Liberal Party, which, after drifting through nine other political groups, eventually became the Bolsonaro party. The official reason: to devote herself to caring for her husband. However, on 9 July, she instead announced the creation of a political movement with the highly personalised name ‘Inarrestabili MB’. This movement was set to bring together people close to her, who, according to the newspaper Correio Braziliense, had expressed their disappointment at the way Flávio was centralising the party’s strategic decisions without consulting the other members of the former president’s inner circle. In short, it was a means of preserving the former first lady’s political capital and maintaining her mobilisation structure, so much so that the new platform had immediately begun with motivational posts, using clips from the film “Wonder Woman” to illustrate a message aimed at the conservative female electorate and evangelical communities.

All this had made it even harder for Flávio to win over female voters. After several failed attempts at reconciliation, Flávio published a video in July in which he apologised to Michelle and invited her to join his campaign. She eventually accepted the invitation, thereby securing the Senate candidacy for the Federal District of Brasília. Michelle’s name had also been mentioned as a possible presidential candidate until, at the end of 2025, Flávio announced that his father had asked him to stand. This is said to have strained their relationship, which deteriorated further when, in late 2025, MP André Fernandes, president of the Liberal Party of Ceará, announced his support for Ciro Gomes of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) for the post of state governor, with the aim of building an opposition front against the Workers’ Party (PT). This is an example of the more moderate image that Flávio is trying to cultivate, but Michelle had vehemently opposed it: in statements and videos published from May 2025 onwards, she had pointed out that Gomes had called her husband a ‘chicken thief’ and a ‘genocidal maniac’ during the Covid pandemic. Fernandes and Flávio had defended the agreement as a tactical decision endorsed by Jair Bolsonaro himself, and it was Flávio who had made the acrimonious phone call that led to the rift.

It should be noted that there are actually 13 candidates, but the race now appears to be centred on Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro. The other eleven trail far behind: only four are polling above 1 per cent, and Augusto Cury, a mental health specialist whose self-help books have been translated into over 90 languages, is the only one to have reached 10 per cent in a poll, although in the most recent surveys he stands at around 6 per cent. According to the latest available polls, Lula is leading in the first round with 39 per cent against Flávio’s 34 per cent; in a run-off, however, the two are neck and neck at 42 per cent.