Brazil's leading opposition figure sits in a cell serving 27 years while the man who spent 580 days imprisoned for corruption campaigns for a fourth presidential term — and the global press calls it democracy.
The pattern is unmistakable. In 2018, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was jailed on corruption charges and barred from running. The supreme court later quashed his conviction — not by clearing his name on the merits, but by ruling the court lacked jurisdiction. Out he walked, and in 2022 he defeated Jair Bolsonaro by a razor-thin margin. Now Jair Bolsonaro is the one behind bars, convicted in 2025 for what the Guardian calls a "failed post-election power grab" and the AP more carefully terms an "attempted coup." His son Flávio, a 45-year-old senator, wears a bulletproof vest on the campaign trail and says he's received 1,800 death threats.
If this sounds like the lawfare playbook deployed against Donald Trump, that's because it is. Imprison your opponent, install your candidate, and let compliant media frame the whole operation as the rule of law. The Guardian dutifully calls Bolsonaro "far-right" while describing Lula's corruption-plagued tenure as one where he was "credited with fighting hunger." Reuters buries the corruption scandals entirely. Only the Guardian mentions that Lula's imprisonment cleared the path for Bolsonaro's 2018 win — an inconvenient fact that undermines the narrative that Bolsonaro's rise was illegitimate.
Lula launched his campaign in São Bernardo do Campo, the factory town where he rose as a union leader nearly five decades ago. But the working class he claims to represent has moved on. Reuters reports that formal employment has cratered from 46.7% in 2010 to 38.2% last year, even as unemployment hit a record low. Over 2.1 million Brazilians now work gig jobs through digital platforms — a workforce that grew 170% in a decade. A 2023 survey found just 20% of platform workers identify with the left, while 40% lean right. One delivery driver told Reuters the government "doesn't know what we need or how we work." Lula's attempts to regulate gig work have stalled twice in Congress.
Flávio Bolsonaro, meanwhile, launched on Rio's Copacabana beach with a crowd the AP describes as smaller than his father's rallies. He vowed to purge left-wing "ideology" from schools and told supporters every student "has the right to dream of being Elon Musk someday." Moderate parties are keeping their distance. He's clearly not his father — he said so himself, comparing the gap to Pelé's son versus Pelé. But he's carrying a torch that the Brazilian state tried to extinguish.
Polls show Lula at 43% to Flávio's 40%. That's within the margin — and that's with the opposition's standard-bearer locked away. Lula, for his part, is already warning about "foreign interference" in the election, with allies accusing the U.S. government of boosting Bolsonaro's bid through tariffs and visa revocations. The AP reported those claims without noting the irony: a man freed by judicial intervention complaining about outside influence.
Here's the open question: if Lula is so confident in his record and his popularity, why did his allies need to put his opponent in prison to feel safe? The same question hangs over Washington. Lawfare isn't just a Brazilian problem — it's the global establishment's insurance policy against the people's will.
