Brazil heads to general election with Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro as front-runners - BBC News.

The main contenders for president are incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Flavio Bolsonaro, the son of the former president Jair Bolsonaro. Well, Washington has backed closer ties with Brazil's right wing, while Lula da Silva has accused Bolsonaro's camp of encouraging foreign interference. The election has raised questions about US influence, trade tariffs, organised crime and Brazil's sovereignty. BBC's Ione Wells explains. Brazil's government has accused the US of trying to interfere in its elections over the last couple of months. Washington calls that faceless. So what's going on? There is a huge presidential election coming up in Brazil in October and the main race is between the current left-wing president Lula da Silva and his right-wing challenger Flavio Bolsonaro. He's the son of the former right-wing president and Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro, who's currently serving a 27-year prison sentence for plotting a coup after losing the last election. Trump has shown a big interest in this election. In June, he shared an article on Truth Social calling this election the next big test of his project to make the Americas great again. In recent years, many countries in Latin America swung to the right and elected Trump-aligned presidents, making it easier for him to push forward some of his agenda when it comes to issues like migration and security. Brazil is the biggest prize left. Last year, the US imposed tariffs on Brazil, partly in response to Jair Bolsonaro's coup trial. Many Brazilians were furious, including some in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors whose exports were hit, even in areas which had previously voted heavily for the Bolsonaro family. Lula used that anger and accused the Bolsonaro family of handing Brazil's sovereignty to a foreign power and his poll numbers went up. The tariffs were later negotiated down, but the US reimposed them earlier this year. Flavio Bolsonaro, for his part, has accused the current president and his party of being soft on organised crime. Earlier this year in Washington, he lobbied the US administration to designate Brazilian gangs as foreign terrorist organisations. And he argued he was the only one who could sit down with the US as an equal. Lula says that that risks more US interference, possibly even US military intervention on Brazilian soil. In July, Brazil even blocked the visas of US officials which it said were coming to the country to sow doubt on the electoral system, a claim that the US called baseless. Now, it's not new for US politicians to show an interest in Latin America's biggest economy. Jair Bolsonaro was a close ally of Donald Trump during their first presidencies. Barack Obama once described President Lula as the most popular politician on earth. But disputes over tariffs and terrorist designations of Brazilian gangs have made the relationship with the United States a key campaign issue, with both candidates arguing that their position is in the best interest of Brazilians. Oni Wells there with me is BBC reporter Branca Lessa. So, thank you very much for being with us, Branca. What is interesting here, kind of in a global situation with these huge tensions around the US and the rivalry with China, is that Brazil is very much caught up in this. And these two candidates sort of represent a bit of a split, don't they, in terms of where they're getting their support from and their positions in terms of where Brazil faces. Just tell us about these two men. Yes, they do. So, they're kind of opposite ends of the political spectrum. You've got Lula on the left, and he is a veteran in the Brazilian left. He served his first presidential term in 2003, so he's going for a historic fourth term in office. He's about to turn 81. Some critics say a little too old. And he has been incredibly critical of what he calls US attempts to meddle in Brazilian elections. His relationship with President Trump is quite fraught. Trump has imposed tariffs in Brazil. You know, he imposed 50% tariffs last year on some Brazilian exports, which were then kind of renegotiated. And then they were reimposed 25% tariffs on other Brazilian exports this year. And in part, he cited, when he imposed those 50% tariffs, the trial of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who Trump was very close to and who is a rival of Lula. So, the relationship between the two men, not in the best place. And recently, Lula blocked the visas of two US officials, again, making these claims of attempts by the US to interfere or meddle in Brazilian politics. The US completely denies those. And on the other end of the spectrum, you have Flávio Bolsonaro. Flávio Bolsonaro is the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro. You'll remember, highly controversial, populist right-wing figure and very closely allied with Trump. And he claims, as we saw Ione Wells in her report say, he claims that he can connect to the US as an equal, that he can probably do a better job of negotiating deals that are beneficial for Brazil with the US. He also lobbied for Washington to designate certain Brazilian crime groups as terrorist organisations. But, you know, Lula's made this pitch that, actually, his campaign and his fight is one for Brazilian sovereignty in the face of US interests. And sovereignty is a really sort of big, defining issue at the moment for many countries because of the sense that the US's position and reliability, perhaps, is changing. And it comes to the fore in AI and resources. And Brazil is the second largest reserve of critical minerals after China, which is one reason why both the US and China are very interested in it and why these elections matter. Yeah, I mean, there's huge interest in Brazil. And as you'd imagine, you might remember Trump mentioning the Monroe Doctrine, a rewriting of the Monroe Doctrine, this idea of South America being, you know, America's backyard, a sphere of influence to be established there. And, you know, we've seen lots of countries in South America switch to the right. You know, we saw that in Argentina, in Venezuela, in Colombia. So Brazil is the largest economy, the largest democracy in South America. It's obviously a country with huge amounts of natural resources. So there's interest there from both the US and China in establishing that kind of influence. And depending on who, you know, gets in at this election, that may sway, you know, which country is more closely allied with Brazil. It's one that really matters. We're going to be watching it. Thanks very much, indeed. Well, let's get more on this now with Dr Christopher Sabatini, who's Senior Fellow for Latin America at Chatham House. Thanks so much for being with us. It's a very tight race. What is your understanding as to how much the US might have got involved with this political fight? We really don't know. Brazilian intelligence services recently shared with a number of people a dossier that claims the US has intervened in all sorts of ways. And it was recently revealed just a few days ago that the US has shifted funding under the Ukraine package of support for neighboring countries to supposedly support right-wing messaging, including Facebook ads, in favor of Flavio Bolsonaro. But it's clear Trump has made no bones about his efforts to try to sway this election. The Bolsonaro family is his family. In many ways, it's very similar. They use the same playbook, as your report mentioned. Iona mentioned as well Flavio's father, Jair Bolsonaro, in 2023, after he had lost the elections and claimed that the electoral system was broken and corrupt and fraudulent, tried to stage a coup d'etat. Very similar to Donald Trump. These mobs basically stormed the Supreme Court and the Congress and basically destroyed some of the buildings. So now we're looking again, a repeat of this, in very much the same playbook. They're trying to question the integrity of this electoral process. They've imposed not only just the tariffs that your reports mentioned, but when the Supreme Court justice was investigating Jair Bolsonaro for this attempted coup, the US imposed sanctions on him. Not just on him, Alexander de Moraes, but also on his family. So there's also this element, not just of national sovereignty here, there's this idea that the US is intervening to subvert democratic sovereignty. This was an independent Supreme Court in a democratic country. This is really a level of intervention that we never even saw under the previous Monroe Doctrine, the Monroe Doctrine. This is a level of partisanship and trying to line up a set of presidents across the Americas that are not just conservative or share US national interests, but are very much cut from the same cloth as Donald Trump. Yeah, and we have seen a lot of discussion around this whole idea of whether Trump is trying to bring about this sphere of influence strategy because of other nations that he's been looking at. Also, I just wanted to ask you about how important the AI factory is. Brazil holds the world's largest reserves of niobium, which is used in steel alloys and superconductors. It is the second largest holder of rare earths. It's got an estimated 21 million tonnes after China. And in this global race on AI, Brazil's role in that is really important, isn't it? It is. As you mentioned, it has the second largest reserves of rare earth minerals after China. What's going to be tricky here, whoever wins, will be trying to navigate both the relation between the US and China, in part because China is the major trade partner of Brazil. So whatever government's in power won't want to ruin that trade relationship. What it will have to do is look over its shoulder and worry about the United States slapping sanctions on or even threatening other forms of punishment if Brazil is seen as giving favourable and monopolistic control over some of these rare earth minerals that are in Brazil. And that's going to be a touchy thing. We've seen this happen in Panama when Trump claimed he was going to take back the Panama Canal and then had them basically revoke the license or contracts for two Hong Kong-based companies on either end of the canal. There are clearly red lines here, and I think giving excessive access to China to these rare earths is going to be one of those. And how that could play out could be very damaging for not just Brazil-US relations, but also Brazil-China relations. In the case of Panama, China inflicted some pain on Panama for what it did with the contracts by refusing to accept a number of Panamanian flag ships. So a lot of these geopolitical moments are playing out under the radar screen, and they're very important to the integrity and the national sovereignty of these economies and countries. Dr Christopher Sabatini, many thanks indeed.