Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the 80 year-old president of the world’s fifth largest country, is facing a tight race in a bid for his fourth presidential term in Brazil’s general elections on Sunday (4 October). The EU, which earlier this year concluded a landmark trade deal with the Mercosur bloc, which includes Brazil, will be watching the polls closely.

He holds a narrow poll lead over Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the country’s former president Jair, who is currently serving a 22 year prison sentence for staging a coup against Lula’s newly formed government in 2023.

The left-wing leader’s third term, won by with a slim 50.9 percent majority in 2022, distinguished itself for leading anti-deforestation policies and getting the EU-Mercosur trade partnership across its long-awaited finish line, 26 years after negotiations started.

Though Brussels suspended animal product imports from Brazil on 3 September, due to insufficient guarantees of antibiotic regulation compliance, “President von der Leyen commended President Lula’s role and political leadership in the negotiations leading up to the agreement,” the EU commission said in a statement.

The Mercosur deal marked a historic diversion of EU energies South of the Rio Grande river, at a time when Europe and Latin America were both being bombarded by tariff threats from Washington.

The Bolsonaros’ professed support of US president Donald Trump have critics worrying “this election could have major implications for the direction of Brazil’s foreign policy, its global influence,” wrote Dr. Christopher Sabatini, Latin America director at the Chatham house think tank.

Election interference by the US was discussed throughout Lula’s campaign, most notably with Meta disabling his Facebook ads just days before Brazilians went to cast their votes, state-run Agência Brasil reported on 25 September.

At a time when virtually every other democracy on the South American continent has pivoted to the right, a win for a Brazilian Trump enthusiast and supporter of environmental commodification would be a setback for the EU’s climate ambitions.

“A Flávio Bolsonaro government would represent a much stronger geopolitical alignment with Washington and the Trump administration. That could affect climate cooperation, deforestation policy, critical minerals and European access to Brazilian commodities and industrial partnerships,” said Eduardo Raguse, climate co-coordinator at NGO network Friends of the Earth Latin America.

Brazil’s climate observatory recorded its biggest annual fall in emissions in 15 years, with a 16.7 percent reduction in 2024 from the previous year, largely due to a drop in forest clearance in the Brazilian Amazon, which was halved over Lula’s third term.

But Lula has been simultaneously expanding Brazil’s national petrol company’s drilling area into the Amazon’s depths.

“Lula’s government has increasingly framed critical minerals as an issue of national sovereignty and industrial policy,” Raguse told EUobserver, since the Workers’ party leader has referred to Brazil’s petrol reserves as its “passport for the future.”

But along a global pivot to the right, a win for Bolsonaro’s heir or Lula’s renewed interest in fossil fuel politics would not stray too far from the EU’s current conservative climate script, and according to Socialist and Democrat MEP Leire Pajin, will mean little for EU trade.

“Whoever wins the election in Brazil, the EU-Mercosur relationship goes far beyond electoral cycles or trade,” the Spanish vice-president of the Euro-Latin American parliamentary assembly told EUobserver. “Governments may differ in priorities or pace, but the agreement transcends them.”

Europeans have lead the field on access to abortion, but a conservative comeback has caused a lot of those advances to regress.

Research published earlier this week (28 September) by the Centre for Reproductive Rights (CRR) found that despite an upward trend of legalisation, some countries are still seeking to enforce barriers and rolling back entitlement to abortion care.

This resistance to change is also evidenced in the lack of member state participation in safe abortion funds available since the the ‘My Voice, My Choice’ European citizens’ initiative for safe and accessible abortion was passed into law last February. 

EU funds could since then be used to create regional programmes for safe abortion care for anyone who can’t access it in their own country, as well as financing travel to a country where abortion is available.

However, no funds have yet been used.

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As the EU seeks budget cuts to break a stalemate in member states’ talks, women’s rights groups are on the chopping bloc, prompting advocates’ concern that the cause is fading from the common agenda.

Research published on Monday (28 September) by rights initiative MOTERIS showed a consistent loss of funding for feminist organisations across EU countries.

Some groups are also facing political conditions on the money they receive, for instance in Poland and Croatia, alongside groups reporting increasing dependance on unpaid work.

And the trajectory points toward decreased funding in the 2028-2034 EU multi-annual framework (MFF), which is currently being haggled in Brussels, making matters worse.

Feminist groups pointed toward AgoraEU as evidence of the trend – the proposed new single-funding stream is to merge grants for culture, media, equality and civil society under in the same MFF bracket, in what would make equally worthy causes and their defenders compete against one another for diluted resources.

And the ongoing cuts at national level meant that “EU funds are a crucial lifeline for many women’s rights groups where state funding is insufficient,” MOTERIS said.

Small, grassroots rights groups, many of whom MOTERIS represents, find it even harder to access grants due to heavy administrative requirements.

Meanwhile, the Czech Republic and Lithuania served as examples of EU countries whose philanthropy was dependent on external top-ups, making them “more vulnerable to geopolitical shifts, such as the withdrawal of US funding.”

MOTERIS staged a protest to push for MFF support for women’s rights groups outside the European Parliament in Brussels on Tuesday (29 September), ahead of an MEPs’ debate on the topic. 

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EU migrant return hubs became the subject of a summit held in Munich on Saturday (26 September) as interior ministers from member and associate states met the European Commission to advance projects aimed at offshoring rejected asylum seekers. 

But the meeting made little progress, partly because many of the attendees met in Copenhagen on 4 September, where leaders had announced an expected start to the policy by 2027. 

Instead, the main takeaways from Munich included rehashed commitments on improved emergency responses as well as broadened use of Frontex, the EU’s border control agency, and migration diplomacy with third states. 

The EU’s return regulation, approved in June, expects to fly rejected asylum seekers out of Europe and into migrant facilities to be hosted by third countries, for which Rwanda and Uganda are reportedly at the top of the queue.

Though the mass border crossing into Ceuta, the Spanish enclave in North Africa, was a subject of discussion, the 18 EU and non-EU interior ministers present in Munich did not include a representative from Spain, possibly due to Pedro Sánchez’s opposition to the return hubs policy. 

But the UK’s home secretary Shabana Mahmood was present, talking of the need for close cooperation within Europe on migration issues,” Germany’s interior minister and meeting host, Alexander Dobrindt, told reporters on Saturday.  

Despite Donrindt’s focus on “innovative solutions” for those with no right to stay in Europe but no way or returning, Berlin’s migration response would also be significantly dependent on expanded powers for Europe’s border agency, Frontex. 

“We are seeing that the Pact is working. The number of irregular arrivals is dropping across the EU while at the same time the numbers of returns to third countries are increasing. That said, we cannot become complacent,” Jim O’Callaghan, Irish interior minister, told the press before the meeting. 

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