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Brazil’s general election on October 4 delivered a severe warning to the left. Flávio Bolsonaro, the presidential candidate of the Liberal Party (PL), finished ahead of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, with approximately 47% against 45%. Neither secured a majority, sending them into a runoff on October 25. More troubling than this narrow presidential gap was the advance of bolsonarismo through Congress. The election has strengthened a political movement whose ambitions extend beyond defeating Lula to reshaping the institutions that obstruct its exercise of power.

The imprisonment (house arrest) and electoral exclusion of Jair Bolsonaro have not dissolved his movement. His son Flávio carries its presidential banner, while other members of the family have won seats in Congress. Michelle Bolsonaro, Jair’s wife, and Carlos Bolsonaro, his son, enter the Senate; Jair Renan, another son, and Renato, Jair’s brother, enter the Chamber of Deputies. Nepobolsonarismo is an appropriate name for this family’s expansion through the state. Yet the family is only the most visible expression of a broader project, rooted in powerful economic interests and a deeply organized reactionary politics.

A presidential contest with continental stakes

Lula remains the principal obstacle to the return of this project to the presidency. His defeat would affect workers and peasants throughout Brazil, but also the possibilities for regional cooperation and an independent Latin American foreign policy. Brazil’s size, industrial capacity, raw minerals (such as critical minerals), agricultural resources, and diplomatic reach give its political direction continental significance. A government that subordinates these assets to Washington’s priorities would weaken the space available to neighboring countries seeking their own paths of development.

The first-round geography demonstrates both Lula’s strength and his difficulties. He retained a commanding position in the Northeast, while Flávio led across the other four regions. São Paulo’s enormous electorate provided a particularly important advantage to the right. These divisions cannot be explained by an opposition between an enlightened population and an ignorant one. They require an examination of the different conditions of work, the organization of political life, and the capacity of competing movements to interpret people’s frustrations.

Lula approaches the runoff with a substantial social record. Unemployment fell to 5.3% in the quarter ending in August, the lowest rate for that period in the statistical series beginning in 2012. Such improvements matter enormously to families for whom a regular wage brings relief from daily uncertainty. But an improved national indicator does not settle the political argument. Employment can coexist with exhausting journeys, expensive housing, inadequate public services, and the insecurity of debt. The distance between statistical improvement and lived experience remains terrain on which the right operates.

Bolsonarismo, or Brazil’s far right of a special type, translates these frustrations into resentment against the left, all public institutions, and vulnerable sections of society. Its promise of order offers an immediate language for fear, while concealing the economic arrangements that produce insecurity. The left cannot answer this merely by advertising government achievements. It must connect those achievements to a credible program for changing everyday life, and explain which interests prevent further advances. A worker struggling with debt needs more than reassurance that the economy is performing well. This has been the problem for Lula, whose program for the future does not seem to promise more than what has been delivered till now.

The senate: a struggle over institutional power

The Senate election is particularly consequential because 54 of its 81 seats were contested. Senators serve eight-year terms, so the results will shape national politics well beyond the next presidential administration. The PL won 19 seats and will hold 28 in the new Senate, making it the largest party. The PT will have nine. The bolsonaristas have therefore established a formidable position, although the PL itself remains short of a majority and must bargain with other parties.

Michelle Bolsonaro and Bia Kicis took both seats in the Federal District, while Carlos Bolsonaro and Carol de Toni won the two seats in Santa Catarina. These victories show the movement’s ability to organize coordinated campaigns and concentrate support behind its candidates. There were important successes for the left: Rui Costa and Jaques Wagner won in Bahia, Humberto Costa retained representation in Pernambuco, and Marília Campos won in Minas Gerais. These results preserve points of resistance within an increasingly hostile chamber. The Senate’s significance extends beyond ordinary legislation. The bolsonaristas have made their confrontation with the Supreme Federal Court a central political objective, including demands to impeach its ministers. Their strengthened representation increases their capacity to pursue that confrontation and to influence the election of the Senate president. Predictions of an automatic majority for impeachment should be treated cautiously: party affiliation, campaign declarations, and votes in a specific proceeding are different things. Nevertheless, the danger of using legislative power to intimidate the judiciary has plainly grown.

This is part of a struggle over the conditions under which the far right can govern. The judicial proceedings against Jair Bolsonaro did not remove the social forces supporting him. Those forces now seek greater leverage over institutions capable of restraining them. For the left, defending democratic space must therefore accompany the struggle to expand social rights. Workers’ organizations cannot afford to lose the freedoms through which they organize, educate, and confront capital.

Federal deputies: the right advances, the left finds openings

All 513 seats in the Chamber of Deputies were up for election this year. The PL secured 121, consolidating its position as the largest party in this chamber as well as in the Senate. The federation of the Workers’ Party, Communist Party of Brazil, and Green Party won 88 seats, with the PT itself taking 70. The federation’s growth is significant, but it leaves Lula’s allies far from a majority. Parties of the right hold 303 seats, while the broader parliamentary left holds 124.

The outcome strengthens the far right of a special type within a legislature already dominated by conservative interests. It also weakens some established brokers of parliamentary power, such as the centrão, the collection of parties that trades legislative support for influence over appointments and public resources, although it remains indispensable for majority building. What bargaining will take place within the centrão will now take place alongside a larger and more assertive PL. If Lula wins in the second round, he will confront substantial congressional resistance, but if Flávio wins, the same Congress could facilitate a reactionary program.

Yet the election also brought important representatives of a fighting Left into the Chamber. Jones Manoel, the communist historian elected through PSOL in Pernambuco, received 249,077 votes and finished first in Recife. Elias Jabbour, the communist geographer, was elected for the PCdoB in Rio de Janeiro. Their victories suggest an audience for political education and socialist arguments, even amid the right’s advance. They offer resources for rebuilding confidence among people who have grown impatient with the narrowing ambitions of parliamentary politics. Jones Manoel has already offered to assist Lula’s runoff campaign, including its digital communication, while proposing stronger attention to demands such as free public transport. This is a useful example of political clarity: criticism of the government’s limitations can coexist with active mobilization against the far right of a special type. Such unity does not require workers to abandon their demands. It becomes stronger when those demands supply the campaign’s energy and direction.

The task before October 25

The runoff cannot be won through negotiations among party leaders alone. It requires organized activity in workplaces, neighborhoods, universities, and rural communities, with a program people can recognize in their own lives. Transport, wages, housing, debt, public healthcare, and the time consumed by work must become the substance of a democratic campaign. Defense of sovereignty becomes tangible when it is connected to the ability to use Brazil’s wealth for the needs of its people.

The angry tide has advanced, but it has not carried away the millions who still seek another Brazil. The new communist deputies, the surviving mass organizations (especially the landless workers of the MST), and Lula’s enormous electoral base provide foundations for resistance. The immediate task is to defeat Flávio Bolsonaro. The longer task is to build a popular power strong enough to prevent the oligarchy from deciding, election after election, how little change the majority will be allowed.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. He is the author of forty books, including Washington Bullets, Red Star Over the Third World, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, and How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa, written with Grieve Chelwa. He is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, the chief correspondent for Globetrotter, and the chief editor of LeftWord Books (New Delhi). He also appeared in the films Shadow World (2016) and Two Meetings (2017).

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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Last week, 7 ARAD-7 rifles of Israeli manufacture were seized by the Brazilian Federal Police at a transport company located in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, while they were being prepared to be sent to drug traffickers of the Terceiro Comando Puro (TCP) organization. These are the same drug traffickers who control a territory called “Complexo de Israel,” which brings together the favelas Cidade Alta, Parada de Lucas, Vigário Geral, Cinco Bocas, and Pica-Pau.

Two years ago, we wrote here at the Strategic Culture Foundation an article about the danger of “narcopentecostalism” – the deep linkage between drug trafficking and neo-Pentecostalism in some favelas – pointing to this new phenomenon as a possible national security threat for Brazil, as well as a potential focus of activities aimed at destabilizing the social fabric and religious persecution. Indeed, in TCP territories, Catholic churches and Afro-Brazilian religious centers are closed and violently attacked.

Nevertheless, at the time we wrote that article, in July 2024, there were not yet enough material elements to incisively affirm the existence of a direct connection between narcopentecostalism and the State of Israel. TCP traffickers exalted the State of Israel, used Israeli patches and uniforms, but all of this was circumstantial and could be explained by mere adherence to evangelical discourse.

Now, however, we have more specific evidence to be able to return to the topic and raise concern about the possible link between Israel and one of Brazil’s main drug trafficking organizations.

After all, to date it is still not known how these modern Israeli rifles reached the logistical branch of an important Brazilian criminal organization, when this specific rifle is still uncommon among Brazilian police forces and nonexistent among the military.

The first objection that could be raised would be about Israel’s “interest” in arming or financing a criminal organization in Brazil. Well, it would not be the first time.

In the 1980s, 500 automatic weapons (including IMI Galil rifles and Uzi submachine guns) and 200,000 rounds of ammunition were found in a warehouse belonging to the Medellín Cartel, one of the largest drug trafficking organizations in Colombia. At the time, “independent investigations” concluded that the person responsible for the operation, the mercenary and retired Israeli military officer Yair Klein, had acted on his own. Klein himself, however, always stated that his activities in Colombia (which involved not only arms sales but also the training of paramilitary groups) had the knowledge and authorization of Israeli authorities.

Klein’s link to the Israeli state apparatus, demonstrating that he was not really an “independent agent,” is confirmed by the fact that when he was arrested in Sierra Leone in 1999 for selling weapons to insurgents of the Revolutionary United Front, the State of Israel intervened to secure his release, as well as refused all extradition requests.

Another interesting and recent piece of news involves Mexico, where authorities declared that 80% of the weapons found with soldiers of the drug cartels were of U.S. origin… and most of the remaining 20% were of Israeli origin. Indeed, Israel officially exported 24,000 automatic weapons between 2006 and 2018 to Mexico’s military and police institutions, and another 18,000 in more recent years. Note, however, that estimates from independent observatories suggest that Mexican cartels as a whole possess an arsenal of several hundred thousand automatic weapons. If something like 15-20% of these weapons are of Israeli origin, then we are talking about any number between 20,000 and 100,000 Israeli-origin weapons in the hands of the cartels. These are numbers that simply do not match the figures of official Israeli arms exports to Mexican security forces.

One last point that may draw attention is the recent attention the U.S. has given to Brazilian criminal organizations, with the PCC and CV groups categorized as terrorist groups by Donald Trump’s government. What draws attention is the fact that the TCP – the 3rd largest criminal organization in Brazil, with a presence in some other countries in the region, operations in several Brazilian states, and at least one verifiable link to an individual connected to Al-Qaeda’s financing network, not to mention an operational alliance with the PCC – was left out of the categorization.

Naturally, it could be a coincidence. But even so, it is an interesting coincidence that the neo-Pentecostal criminal organization apparently armed by Israel is exactly the one that was not categorized as terrorist by the White House.

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