Brazil Watches Lula’s Edge Shrink as Old Certainties Fade Fast

Americas Quarterly reports that Brazil’s election race has tightened quickly, as economic progress clashes with corruption concerns, digital challenges, religious conservatism, and voter worries about crime. This has left Lula less shielded by economic success than his team expected a few months ago.

The Breeze Has Gone Still

Six weeks ago, the situation seemed almost decided. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva appeared to be heading toward reelection with the kind of confidence that incumbents hope for and rivals envy. Unemployment was at record lows, the stock market at record highs, and inflation had ended 2025 at its lowest point in seven years. Jair Bolsonaro was in prison, and his chosen candidate was Flávio, the son many in Brazil’s political circles saw as the least charismatic of the family’s four sons. “We know it won’t be easy,” a Lula adviser told Americas Quarterly, “but the wind is at our backs.”

Now, that sentence feels less like a plan and more like a distant memory.

A Datafolha survey released Sunday showed Lula leading Flávio Bolsonaro by only three points in a possible runoff, down from a 15-point lead in December. Other polls, Americas Quarterly says, show similar trends. Some of this is familiar—Lula’s last win was close, and Brazil hasn’t seen easy election wins lately. But the quick shift matters because it shows the economy isn’t providing the emotional support Lula’s team expected.

This is the first tough truth of the race. A government can show better numbers but still fail to reassure people. In Latin America, where voters have grown skeptical of good news that doesn’t really change daily life, economic success on paper is often only part of the story.

Part of Lula’s difficulty seems painfully human. He will be 80 on Election Day. This is his seventh presidential run since 1989. A politician can become historic and repetitive at the same time. Americas Quarterly notes that Lula does not carry a cell phone, a detail that feels almost intimate in a country with some of the world’s highest social media use. His Instagram following remains only half the size of Jair Bolsonaro’s, and the latest reel on his account was a six-minute video, which in digital politics can feel like a small eternity. It is not just that Lula is older. It is that the machinery around him still seems, at moments, to speak in a slower language than the country now does.

A Scandal Revives Old Ghosts

Then came Banco Master.

Lula himself hasn’t been implicated, but the scandal involving the small bank, which has deep ties across Brazil’s political and business worlds, has brought back something more dangerous than direct accusations. It has brought back memories. And in Brazilian politics, memories can hurt more than proof, especially when they keep coming up again and again.

Americas Quarterly says the case has brought back memories of mensalão and Car Wash, scandals that hit the Workers’ Party in the 2010s and sent Lula to prison for nearly two years before his conviction was overturned. That history still hangs over Brazil like humidity in old walls. It doesn’t need fresh attention to be felt. The chance that more revelations will come as the campaign heats up only adds to the feeling that Lula is fighting on familiar ground, where economic skill can suddenly be overshadowed by moral fatigue.

But the more serious threat to Lula is not the scandal alone. It is that Brazil itself may have shifted beneath him.

A recent book by pollster Felipe Nunes, Brasil no espelho, cited by Americas Quarterly, argues that Brazil is moving rightward in ways that are broader than any single candidate. Based on a nationwide Quaest survey, the book suggests that the Bolsonaros’ slogan of “God, country, and family” increasingly fits the national mood. That phrase might once have sounded like ideological branding. Now it sounds closer to cultural weather.

Brazil has always been more conservative than its global image suggested. Samba and bikinis were never the whole country. Lula won before because he understood how to build majorities across contradictions. What Nunes describes, though, is more than ordinary conservatism. It is a reversal of the progressive drift seen in the 2000s and 2010s, a return to attitudes closer to those of the mid-1990s. One major force behind that, the book argues, is the spread of Evangelical Christianity, from 7% of the population four decades ago to around 30% today. In the working-class peripheries of major cities, areas once central to Lula’s strength have become some of the Bolsonaros’ most committed terrain.

That is not just an electoral shift. It is a social reordering of who feels spoken for.

The New Voter Wants Something Else

Nunes’ book captures two other movements that may explain why Lula’s old instincts are not landing with the same certainty. The first is the rise of crime as the leading concern of Brazilian voters. Lula has struggled here, including when he said last October that drug dealers are “victims of drug users.” That may have been intended as a structural analysis. In political terms, it sounded out of step with a society asking first for control, safety, and order.

The second shift is quieter but possibly just as important. Brazilians increasingly say they would rather be self-employed than hold a salaried job. Americas Quarterly contrasts this with an older Brazil, where a carteira assinada once represented not only stability but status. That aspiration has changed. Many voters now seem to want less of a benefactor state and more of a government that guarantees basic security and leaves room for individual hustle. It is a harsher social mood, more solitary, more suspicious, less union-shaped. Lula’s party, built in the trade union world of the 1980s, is still trying to fully grasp it.

This is where Flávio Bolsonaro may benefit from being underestimated. He lacks his father’s aggressive energy. He lacks the attack dog style. But that blandness may actually widen his appeal among voters who share the family’s conservative agenda yet recoiled from Jair Bolsonaro’s rhetoric and pandemic record. His own vulnerability, tied to alleged money laundering and salary misdirection, now appears smaller in comparison to the Banco Master scandal. He has denied wrongdoing.

Those around Lula remain calm. His job approval is still about 47% in the latest Datafolha poll. Advisers believe that if the campaign becomes a referendum on the economy, he can still win. Real wages have risen by almost a fifth during his term. New subsidies on natural gas and a tax break for working-class Brazilians are arriving at exactly the right political moment.

Still, the race no longer feels secure. The war in the Middle East is just one of several uncertainties looming in the months ahead. Americas Quarterly suggests the most likely outcome is a close contest where one surprise, at home or abroad, could change everything. Brazilians are familiar with that feeling. What’s different now is that Lula started the year expecting a steadier, easier path.

Instead, Brazil has become its usual self again—restless, polarized, and hard to predict until the very end.

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