‘Two Brazils on the Ballot’: This Upcoming Presidential Election Will Define the Nation’s Place in the World

With less than a month before the first round on October 4, Brazil’s presidential race has tightened into a genuine dogfight. Polling released in the first half of September shows current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva leading every first-round scenario, with Senator Flávio Bolsonaro consolidating a solid second place. The real drama, however, lies in the almost certain second round on October 25: virtually all polling institutes place Lula and Flávio within one to two points of each other, with some giving either the current president or the senator a razor-thin edge and others a technical tie. Whatever the final tally, Brazil is heading toward its tightest election in a generation—and the two front-runners represent not just different governing styles, but two competing visions of where Brazil belongs in the world.

For decades, Brazilian foreign policy has oscillated between what scholars, drawing on anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro’s civilisational framework, describe as “Westernism” and “Autonomism”. One tradition seeks legitimacy through convergence with the Euro-Atlantic core, headed by the United States; the other insists Brazil can define its own terms of development, sovereignty, and global engagement as a leading voice of the Global South. Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro map almost perfectly onto this old fault line, and the choice voters make in October will decide which orientation prevails for at least four more years.

Lula’s platform for a fourth term explicitly frames sovereignty as the organising principle of Brazilian diplomacy. His campaign document commits Brazil to independent decision-making “without any kind of strategic subordination”, rejecting automatic alignment with any single power while deepening South-South cooperation. BRICS sits at the centre of that architecture: Lula proposes strengthening the bloc’s financial mechanisms, expanding the New Development Bank’s lending capacity, and using BRICS alongside the G20 as platforms to assert the interests of the global majority. This is continuity, not reinvention—the same logic that drove Lula’s earlier governments to help found BRICS in 2009, settle Brazil’s IMF debt as a gesture of financial sovereignty, and, during Dilma Rousseff’s tenure, champion the creation of the NDB at the 2014 Fortaleza summit. It also explains Brazil’s posture during the 2025–26 tariff standoff with Washington, when Lula publicly rejected what he characterised as an attempt to interfere in Brazil’s sovereign decisions after Trump threatened tariffs against countries aligned with BRICS.

Flávio Bolsonaro’s foreign policy instincts, by contrast, point the other way. Long before formally inheriting his father’s political movement, he positioned himself as Brasília’s most reliable interlocutor in Washington, courting figures inside the Trump administration and publicly promising that American sanctions against Brazilian officials would end the day Bolsonaro returned to the presidency. His campaign platform calls for renewed proximity to the United States and the “conservative West”, while favouring a serious push for OECD accession. Flávio has also lobbied the US Trade Representative’s office to keep Brazil’s Pix payment system outside cross-border settlement arrangements associated with China and BRICS, and has floated resuming full diplomatic warmth with Benjamin Netanyahu, a marked departure from Lula’s behaviour, who has harshly criticised Israel’s operations in Gaza. None of this is entirely new: it echoes the earlier Jair Bolsonaro government’s own courtship of Trump and Netanyahu and its scepticism toward BRICS, when then-Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo, who served from 2019 to 2021, openly questioned the bloc’s value and proposed a rival “nationalist” grouping anchored in the United States and Israel.

That reservoir of goodwill toward Washington, in particular, is precisely what a Flávio Bolsonaro presidency would try to convert into strategic alignment, much as his father did between 2019 and 2022. Nowhere is that alignment more explicit than in critical minerals. At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Texas in March this year, Flávio Bolsonaro told an American conservative audience that Brazil could solve Washington’s dependence on Chinese rare earths, arguing the country should stop shipping raw ore abroad only to buy back finished electronics. Months later, reporting surfaced on a 22-page campaign memo, “Prosperity Partnership”, drafted by an ally and stamped with Flávio’s 2026 branding, laying out a plan to position Brazil as the primary rare-earth supplier and processing hub for the Western Hemisphere in partnership with the United States—while describing the incumbent Lula government as pro-China and geopolitically ambiguous. The vision contrasts sharply with the Lula camp’s response: legislation moving through Congress to create Terrabras, a state-led company meant to coordinate mineral exploration under Brazilian control, with local-content rules attached.

This contest over rare-earth mines has become a small but telling preview of the wider choice on the ballot. An eventual Lula victory in the next elections would keep Brazil betting that its future lies in diversification and “Autonomism”, represented by deeper ties with BRICS, a louder voice in reforming global governance institutions, and continued insistence that a country of Brazil’s size deserves to help write the rules that manage the international system. A Flávio Bolsonaro presidency would favour “Westernism”, represented by closer relations with Trump’s administration, a discourse centred on so-called “traditional values”, and scepticism of BRICS and China.

Be it as it may, Brazil’s 1988 constitution has long placed national independence as one of its main foreign policy principles. Yet, every generation has had to answer, in practice, what independence actually means. In October, more than 150 million Brazilian voters will decide that question again—and whichever way it is split, the rest of the world, from Beijing to Washington, will be watching Brazil’s answer closely. The result will say as much about the future of the Global South as it does about Brazil itself.