The Bolsonaro Dynasty’s Hail Mary

That Flávio’s candidacy stunned the Brazilian center can scarcely be overstated. It was always likely that Bolsonaro would attempt to perpetuate his political dynasty, but to do so on the heels of a humiliating jailbreak, and to neutralize, in de Freitas, the most compelling challenger to Lula da Silva in the process, defied the usual political calculus.

Polls have the incumbent Lula enjoying a fifteen-point lead over Flávio — an untested senator who cannot leverage the insurgent appeal his father could boast in 2018. At the time of writing, Flávio has yet to gain the endorsement of a single conservative party, save the Bolsonaros’ own electoral vehicle, the Liberal Party, which remains the largest in Congress. The capitalist class likewise signaled its skepticism as 50 billion reals in value swiftly vanished from the markets following Flávio’s entry — the implicit assumption being that the Bolsonaros’ last-ditch gambit had essentially gifted Lula his fourth term in office.

While Jair’s endorsement of his son violates pragmatic considerations, it perhaps should not have been so surprising. “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight,” noted Samuel Johnson, “it concentrates the mind wonderfully.” Jair Bolsonaro is not the first far-right leader to be galvanized by the threat of prison into launching a frenzied electoral gambit. Witness Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu as precedents. An animal is most dangerous when cornered, and as his botched escape attempt suggests, Bolsonaro is desperate not to serve out his prison sentence. Backing Flávio as his surest chance of amnesty counts as much, if not more, than any wider ideological considerations.

It is difficult to tell what will come of Flávio’s candidacy. The senator initially hinted that he would cede the race “for [the] price” of his father’s freedom, before insisting that his candidacy was “irreversible.” In all likelihood, Bolsonaro Jr believes that his surname still holds electoral sway, and that an electorate beleaguered by inflation and mounting costs of living can still respond to a populist assault on the ruling establishment. Yet he will flounder without centrist allies and has accordingly taken pains to establish himself as the “most moderate Bolsonaro,” eschewing the rhetorical extremes of his father and brother Eduardo. Given his family’s increasing isolation, serious concessions in policy and personnel to the Centrão will have to follow.

The center right’s inability to secure its preferred successor to Bolsonaro sees Brazil join Chile, Argentina, and Peru on a list of Latin American states, notes Tony Wood, “where traditional conservative parties have been outflanked by more uncompromising, insurgent reactionary forces.” At stake in Brazil is whether the nebulous centrist alliance, the Centrão, can recompose itself as the country’s natural ruling apparatus — or whether it will continue to cede ground to the Bolsonaristas’ more militant energies.

As elsewhere, the center and far right in Brazil have made uneasy bedfellows. Where the Centrão’s brand of pro-capital, pork-barrel politics has seen its parties thoroughly entrenched into the machinery of state, it has recently proved vulnerable to the outsider appeal of hard-right populists. If Bolsonaro’s initial run on power shook the elite establishment, his failed electoral campaign in 2022 — which saw him split off the Liberal Party from the Centrão, before resorting to a brazen coup attempt — left the center in complete disarray.

Yet under Lula’s third tenure, the old elites rallied once again, using their strength in Congress to wrest key ministries from the reigning Workers’ Party. As the question of succession loomed, Centrão kingmakers drew up a coterie of prominent state governors, de Freitas foremost among them, hoping to empower a long-standing resident of the conservative swamp to lead the Right into 2026’s elections. This period of precandidacy — an elaborate game of patronage and backroom collusion — can be as fiercely contested in the halls of power as outright elections.

Tarcísio de Freitas represented a compromise candidate of sorts, a melding of far-right and centrist elements. A Bolsonaro protégé, de Freitas has governed from the far-right playbook in his campaign to militarize São Paulo schools and unleash a surge of police violence against the state’s cartels. Yet the governor represents Bolsonarismo with its fangs filed down. Deeply rooted in the “cosmopolitan bourgeoisie,” de Freitas’s politics are decidedly elitist, devoid of a populist’s vigor and direct communicative style. This blend of authoritarian and managerial tendencies was memorably described by André Singer as “Shrek” Bolsonarismo. The menacing ogre, rendered banal and “seemingly inoffensive.”

The governor’s fatal flaw — if Flávio’s entry has indeed forced him to relinquish his candidacy — was precisely this ambiguous suspension between the far right and center. Without Bolsonaro’s endorsement, de Freitas always ran the risk of being politically marooned. Flávio’s first action after donning the mantle of heir was to dial the São Paulo governor, embracing his vassal to better slip the knife between his ribs. De Freitas has dutifully declared his support for Flávio’s candidacy, while pointedly noting that the latter must still contend with other right-wing hopefuls remaining in the race.

As with de Freitas, so with the center as a whole. The Centrão’s inability to present a distinct, coherent political project of its own leaves it vulnerable to reactionary populists better positioned to appeal to working-class ressentiment and promise a rupture with business as usual. In seeking to mobilize Bolsonarismo’s base while tampering its populist excesses, the center right constrained itself to bait between moderates and militants, running the risk of pleasing neither. To contest the presidency, the Centrão will once again have to confront the unpredictability of politics’ more elemental forces.

Flávio Bolsonaro does not currently lack for rivals. Three governors in Brazil’s agricultural belt — Ronaldo Caiado of Goiás; Romeu Zema of Minas Gerais; and Paraná’s Ratinho Júnior — remain in the race. While lacking Flávio’s famous surname, each is likewise free of its baggage. These scions of the rural oligarchy could be more appealing to conservatives fearful of alienating moderate voters by perpetrating the Bolsonaro lineage. Ratinho Júnior in particular has cultivated a sensible, pro-capital image that could attract key Centrão parties — whereas in Caiado and Zema we witness elite insiders attempting to rebrand as populist hard-liners. The gap between the far right and center is bridged by a short step indeed.

Ronaldo Caiado is one of the more interesting of this tier of rivals. The powerful agribusiness lobby is, to some degree, a Caiado creation. In 1985, the former orthopedist founded the precursor of the current rural caucus in the União Democrática Ruralista, a lobbying outfit dedicated to crushing the burgeoning movement for agrarian reform. The Goiás governor has proven willing to outflank the center, employing a brash, folksy style that belies his oligarchic background. While de Freitas remained the front-runner, Caiado vigorously framed himself as the more militant, dynamic option, actively courting the Bolsonarista bases to fill what he sensed was a Bolsonaro-shaped void.

Now, with an actual Bolsonaro in the race, Caiado may find his space to maneuver constrained, as his attempt to fill a gap on the far right may well cut too close to Flávio. For the moment, both Caiado and Zema remain long-shot candidates, little known outside their respective state fiefdoms. Both are hedged in by the Centrão’s labyrinthine web of alliances, with Caiado’s party’s leaders inclined to support a steadier hand as their candidate.

One such steady hand is the governor of the southern state of Paraná, known invariably as Ratinho Júnior (literally, “Little Rat”). Inheriting his nickname from his father, Carlos “Ratinho” Massa — a famous television presenter and erstwhile congressman — Ratinho Júnior heads a large and wealthy state and has cultivated a sober, technocratic reputation. As yet, no serious muscle has been mobilized behind a Ratinho candidacy, though with de Freitas’s exit, he stands as a palatable alternative for key Centrão leaders reluctant to support another Bolsonaro presidency.

Looking past the crowd of reactionary contenders, it is only too apparent that Lula himself has no obvious heir. The Workers’ Party has thus far failed to incubate younger politicians with the national profile necessary to succeed its aging leader. Mired in a Congress where it lacks the coalitional strength to govern, the Left is also severed from the social movements that once sustained it at the local level. The Workers’ Party is now poised to take an eighty-one-year-old, three-time president into his seventh electoral race.

Brazilian politics thus faces a strange stasis. The Left holds a tenuous power but is hedged by hostile forces. The Right can effectively stop the Left from governing but, fragmented between its own rival camps and interest groups, has no hegemonic project of its own.

With Bolsonaro attempting to make far-right rule a family dynasty, the Centrão will face a protracted struggle to hold next year’s elections on its own terms. Should Flávio fail to inspire consensus in the Centrão, he could contest the right-wing vote alongside a more center-friendly candidate. We may well see the right-wing vote split between extreme and center (an obvious boon for Lula). Neither current of reaction will soon disappear from the body politic; each must come to terms with the other’s imperatives.

Yet ultimately, the Right does not require a coherent project or a permanent resolution to its discrepancies. In the aftermath of successive coups — in 1964 and 2016 — it has already achieved its major victories and given them constitutional solidity. It is the Left that must forge a fragile coalition each time it seeks power and, once in office, guard its mandate against the constant efforts of the Right to destroy it. If the political left is to have any chance at a substantive remaking of the state, it must return to trabalho de base: the grassroots work that integrated political struggle with the farms, factories, churches, universities, and urban peripheries. Only a project articulated across multiple levels of social life can fortify the Left with the power it needs to govern.