Aug 11 2026 | Nº 19

Brazil: 13 Candidates, 2 Poles, and One Fear

By Paulo Abrão
Executive Director of the Washington Brazil Office

With the party conventions now concluded, the shape of Brazil’s presidential election is definitively set. The parties have chosen thirteen tickets and now await formal registration with the Electoral Court. The diversity of candidacies is significant, but it does not, at least for now, translate into an equally fragmented contest: Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro remain far ahead of the other candidates and dominate the real race for the presidency. In a sense, this is a long-established pattern in Brazil: since 1994, the country’s presidential elections have largely centered on two predominant political forces.

The conventions also revealed distinct strategies and vulnerabilities. Lula enters the campaign with the only ticket formed by two parties, keeping Geraldo Alckmin from the Brazilian Socialist Party as his running mate and preserving a broader coalition of parties around his candidacy. Flávio Bolsonaro, by contrast, enters the race with a ticket composed exclusively of his Liberal Party, facing the challenge of turning his father’s political legacy into a coalition-building capacity of his own. Ronaldo Caiado from the Social Democratic Party, Romeu Zema of the Novo Party, and Renan Santos of Forward (Avante) is betting on the public recognition he earned outside politics. Candidates from the radical left and smaller parties broaden the election's programmatic diversity, even if they start from very low levels of electoral support. From this point on, nothing within the realm of the foreseeable appears likely to alter a race that, so far, remains essentially bipolar.

At the same time, the campaign is beginning to show that the national election will also be decided in the states. The first gubernatorial debates placed public security at the center of the agenda and revealed contests that could directly influence the presidential race. São Paulo offers the clearest example: the clash between the current governor, Tarcísio de Freitas, and former PT presidential candidate, Fernando Haddad, in the first debate broadcast on national television foreshadows not only one of October’s most important state-level battles but also a possible reorganization of national political leadership ahead of 2030. In other states, candidates leading the polls chose to skip the first debates, illustrating how carefully each campaign is beginning to calculate the risks of public exposure. In Minas Gerais, the right is reorganizing around Cleitinho, while the left is divided between Kalil and Patrus. In Bahia, the right hopes to regain ground amid corruption allegations involving local left-wing leaders. In Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul, the center-left is rebuilding with competitive candidacies after many years of successive and decisive defeats.

We have repeatedly argued that an external variable is likely to shadow the entire election. The latest diplomatic escalation between Brazil and the United States — now involving the revocation of the Brazilian ambassador’s visa in Washington in response to the impasse over the appointment of the new U.S. ambassador — shows that the bilateral relationship has definitively entered electoral mode. After months of tensions, sanctions, trade disputes, and criticism of the quality of Brazilian democracy and its justice system, concern is growing that the conflict may not remain confined to relations between the two governments but could also affect how Washington responds to the electoral process and the outcome in October.

There is a growing fear that escalating U.S. tensions with Brazil may simply lay the groundwork for a refusal to recognize the election result should the outcome fail to align with Washington’s interests.

Washington has issued a public statement saying that it respects the Brazilian people and any government they freely choose through free and fair elections in Brazil. But the devil is in the details: what are the United States’ current standards for determining whether an election is free and fair?

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Brazil's Big Center is choosing neutrality

Every four years, the loose bloc of parties known as the Big Center, or centrão, becomes the belle of the ball, courted by candidates on the left and the right. It also explains much of why governing Brazil is so hard.

The name misleads. The Big Center is not a caucus of moderates but a coalition of conservative forces, born in the 1987-88 Constitutional Assembly to block what its founders saw as a left-wing wave that would saddle a young democracy with an unaffordable welfare state. Its members are pragmatists rather than ideologues, willing to deal with any president in exchange for pork. Most backed Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva during his first terms and, years later, the far-right Jair Bolsonaro with equal ease.

The bloc's leverage is arithmetic. Dominance in city halls and large benches in Congress make these parties unavoidable for anyone trying to pass legislation, Eduardo Grin, a political scientist at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, told this observatory.

In 2026, the Big Center has largely stayed neutral between Lula and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, knowing either winner will need it to govern. That is less about ideology, Grin said, than about keeping options open in a tight race. The stance has frustrated the Bolsonaro camp, which counted on the bloc's most conservative fringes to build a coalition. But for the Big Center, fence-sitting is the surest way to keep power.

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Brazil's presidential tickets are set. Here's who made the cut

Brazil's parties wrapped up their nominating conventions last week, locking in the field for the Oct. 4 first round. Thirteen tickets emerged from the conventions, pending registration. Only two are genuinely competitive:

• Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers' Party, PT)

Lula, 80, is seeking an unprecedented fourth term. A metalworker who led the ABC region strikes of the late 1970s against the military dictatorship, he helped found the Workers' Party and lost three presidential races before finally winning it in 2002. He governed from 2003 to 2010, was jailed on corruption convictions later annulled, and returned to office in 2023. Lula's is the only mixed ticket in the field; all twelve others are single-party. Vice President Geraldo Alckmin, of the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB), is again his running mate.

• Flávio Bolsonaro (Liberal Party, PL)

Flávio Bolsonaro, 45, a lawyer and senator from Rio de Janeiro, is the eldest son of former President Jair Bolsonaro and Lula's closest challenger in the polls. He served four consecutive terms in Rio's state legislature before winning his Senate seat in 2018. He is running in his father's stead: the elder Bolsonaro is ineligible and imprisoned, serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup. Alfredo Gaspar, a federal lawmaker, is his running mate.

• Renan Santos (Mission)

Santos, 42, a São Paulo businessman and writer, co-founded the Free Brazil Movement (MBL), the digitally native group that helped drive the 2016 impeachment of Dilma Rousseff. He dropped out of law school at the University of São Paulo to work in his father's company. An early Bolsonaro backer who broke with him once in office, he now calls himself a non-Bolsonarist conservative. His party was registered only last November. Aroldo Medina, a retired lieutenant colonel, is his running mate.

• Ronaldo Caiado (Social Democratic Party, PSD)

Caiado, 76, an orthopedic surgeon, has been one of Brazil's most durable agribusiness politicians since founding the Democratic Ruralist Union, a landowners' lobby, in 1985. He first ran for president in 1989, finishing near the bottom, then served five terms in the House and one in the Senate before being elected governor of Goiás in 2018 and re-elected in 2022. PSD chairman Gilberto Kassab, a former mayor of São Paulo, is his running mate.

• Romeu Zema (Novo)

Zema, 61, ran his family's retail and fuel conglomerate before entering politics, and was elected governor of Minas Gerais in 2018 and again in 2022, winning the latter outright in the first round. A business-school graduate and fiscal hard-liner, he built his record on austerity in a state buried in debt. His running mate is Senator Eduardo Girão of Ceará, among the loudest Bolsonaro supporters calling for an insurrection to overturn the 2022 result.

• Leonardo Avalanche (Brazilian Labor Renewal Party, PRTB)

Leonardo Alves de Araújo, 37, known as Leonardo Avalanche, is a businessman and systems analyst from Anápolis, in Goiás, and the son of an evangelical pastor. He has led the PRTB since 2024 and managed Pablo Marçal's 2024 São Paulo mayoral campaign. São Paulo prosecutors charged him in January with rigging the party's 2024 leadership vote using forged documents and with political violence against a female party officer. He denies any wrongdoing.

• Edmilson Costa (Brazilian Communist Party, PCB)

Costa, 76, an economist with a doctorate from the University of Campinas, is a university professor, author and secretary general of the PCB, the country's oldest, founded in 1922. He ran for vice president on the party's 2010 ticket and is making his first bid for the top job, on a platform of breaking with what he calls Brazil's entrenched oligarchic order. Cleusa Santos is his running mate.

• Hertz Dias (United Socialist Workers' Party, PSTU)

Dias, 55, teaches in Maranhão's state and municipal school systems and is a rapper and black rights activist. He co-founded the hip-hop collective Quilombo Urbano and fronts the group Gíria Vermelha. A party member since 2010, he ran for vice president in 2018, for mayor of São Luís in 2020 and for governor of Maranhão in 2022. Vanessa Portugal, a public school teacher in Belo Horizonte, is his running mate.

• Samara Martins (Popular Union, UP)

Martins, 38, is a dentist in the public health system and an organizer in Brazil's grassroots movements. She ran for vice president in 2022 on the ticket of Léo Péricles, her party's chairman, and this year heads one of two all-women tickets in the race. Raquel Brício, a port security guard and union leader, is her running mate.

• Augusto Cury (Avante)

Cury, 67, is a psychiatrist who became one of Brazil's best-selling authors, writing on emotional intelligence and personal development in books translated into dozens of languages. He has never held or sought public office, and enters the race with no political record to defend and no organized base beyond his readership. Júlio Delgado, a lawyer and former federal deputy from Minas Gerais, is his running mate.

• Wilson Grassi (Democrata)

Grassi, 56, is a veterinarian from São Paulo who built his political profile around animal welfare. As a board member of the state's small-animal veterinary association, he worked on the creation of Brazil's first public hospital for dogs and cats, in São Paulo. He unsuccessfully ran for the São Paulo city council in 2024 on the PRTB ticket.

• Clariana Barão (Christian Democracy, DC)

Barão, 39, is a lawyer with postgraduate training in public management and administrative law, and heads the party's Mato Grosso chapter. She is not the party's first choice: DC first offered the nomination to former Supreme Court Justice Joaquim Barbosa, who declined. It is the first time since the party's founding in 1995 that its presidential candidate is not José Maria Eymael, who created it.

• Rui Costa Pimenta (Workers' Cause Party, PCO)

Pimenta, 69, a journalist and writer, founded the PCO and has run for president four times, in 2002, 2006, 2010 and 2014. The party then spent 12 years offering critical support to Lula rather than fielding its own candidate. Trotskyist and unapologetically marginal, the PCO has never won more than a fraction of a percent of the vote. The Federal Police are probing whether Pimenta has turned the party into a personal piggy bank.

OTHER STORIES WE’RE FOLLOWING

First gubernatorial debates

Public security dominated the first debates of the 2026 gubernatorial races on Sunday, broadcast by TV Bandeirantes across 12 states.

In São Paulo, Governor Tarcísio de Freitas and Fernando Haddad, the former finance minister, clashed over crime, schools and sanitation in a civil exchange analysts likened to a runoff — and a rehearsal for 2030.

Eduardo Paes in Rio de Janeiro and Sergio Moro in Paraná skipped their debates. Both lead their races, and both stayed away rather than serve as lightning rods. Rivals called each a runaway.

In Brasília, Governor Celina Leão was pressed on Bank of Brasília's dealings with Banco Master, a fraudulent deal that left a hole that may reach BRL 8.8 billion. In Ceará, Elmano de Freitas, of the Workers' Party, tried to associate challenger Ciro Gomes to Jair Bolsonaro.

US-Brazil relations keep deteriorating

The United States revoked the visa of Brazil's ambassador in Washington, Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti, on Tuesday, in retaliation for Brasília's refusal to grant agrément to Daniel Perez, a Florida Republican and Trump's pick as ambassador to Brazil.

The Explaining Brazil podcast, produced by The Brazilian Report and the Brazil Office Alliance, took up the case. Editor-in-chief Gustavo Ribeiro and James Green, board chairman of the Washington Brazil Office, discuss the escalation and where it may lead — including whether isolating Brazil sets up a challenge to the October results.