WASHINGTON — Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, the eldest son of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, defied expectations to finish first in Brazil's presidential election, edging out incumbent President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Should Bolsonaro win the runoff on the 25th of this month, a "blue tide" of successive conservative victories could sweep Latin America, three years after the region was swept by a "pink tide" of leftist governments.
With 99.99% of ballots counted in the first round held on the 4th, the conservative Bolsonaro of the Liberal Party (PL) took 47.03% of the vote to advance to the runoff, ahead of Lula's 45.16%, according to major foreign news outlets. Under Brazilian electoral law, if no candidate wins a majority in the first round, the top two finishers must contest a runoff.
Pre-election polls had shown Lula leading Bolsonaro by 1 to 3 percentage points, but the actual result told a different story. Foreign news outlets attributed Lula's underperformance to the high cost of living, security concerns stemming from the nationwide expansion of criminal organizations, and high lending rates. Bolsonaro, by contrast, courted voters by pledging to designate drug cartels as terrorist organizations and to build five new maximum-security prisons modeled on El Salvador.
A Bolsonaro victory in the runoff would further strengthen the conservative wave sweeping South America. Eight of the region's 12 countries already lean conservative — a count that includes Venezuela, whose governing party is nominally leftist but has aligned closely with the Donald Trump administration — and Brazil would add to that total.
The shift marks a retreat for the leftist governments that dominated Latin America in the early 2020s, beginning with Lula's return to power in Brazil. The conservative run began with the 2023 election of Argentine President Javier Milei, followed by Rodrigo Paz Pereira in Bolivia last year and, this year, Jose Antonio Kast in Chile, Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia and Keiko Fujimori in Peru. Reuters assessed that South American voters have begun ranking economic weakness and rising crime as their top concerns, allowing hard-right candidates who were once a political minority to gain support by promising tough crackdowns on crime.
A change in government is also expected to shift Brazil's foreign policy away from China and toward the United States, as Bolsonaro has campaigned on improving relations with Washington. Trump has opposed the imprisonment of Bolsonaro's father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is serving time on corruption charges, and has imposed steep tariffs on Brazil. Bloomberg noted that Brazil had been the last country resisting Trump's "Donroe Doctrine" of expanding U.S. influence in the Western Hemisphere, and said a final Bolsonaro victory would accelerate Trump's efforts to reassert American primacy in the region.
The outcome is expected to benefit Brazilian financial markets. Lula pursued expansionary fiscal policies to stimulate demand over an extended period, pushing Brazil's nominal fiscal deficit to about 10% of gross domestic product and public debt to 80% of GDP. Bolsonaro has pledged sweeping cuts to government spending, following the model of Milei in Argentina, and financial markets have been anticipating his victory.
