By Juliano Zaiden Benvindo
The first round of Brazil’s presidential election produced a shocking result for many Brazilians, with far-right candidate Flávio Bolsonaro securing more votes than incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. However, facing the threat of autocratization, Brazilian civil society mobilized on an unprecedented scale, perhaps the largest campaign in the country’s history. In the second round, Lula da Silva defeated Flávio Bolsonaro and secured another term as president. In his op-ed, Juliano Zaiden Benvindo analyzes this mobilization as a form of militant democracy and argues that it holds broader relevance for democratic movements confronting contemporary threats of autocratization.
Avenida Paulista, in the city of São Paulo, has long been the main avenue for protests in Brazilian history. Many pivotal demonstrations in the country’s recent history took place there. On Paulista, President Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2022) rallied thousands of supporters, particularly on Brazil’s Independence Day (September 7), to defend his government and his autocratizing agenda. In 2021, he went so far as to declare that he would no longer comply with any decisions issued by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, even calling him a “scoundrel.” In March 2026, when Jair Bolsonaro was already under house arrest after being sentenced to 27 years in prison for, among other crimes, attempting a coup d’état, his son, Flávio Bolsonaro, made his first public appearance since announcing his intention to run for president. In case of victory, his father would ascend the ramp of the Planalto Palace alongside the Brazilian people, the younger Bolsonaro announced.
It was shocking to see Jair Bolsonaro’s son as a presidential candidate so soon after a conviction that had placed Brazil at the forefront of democratic resistance amid a global wave of autocratization. A Flávio Bolsonaro victory would have lent weight to the prediction that Brazil would experience developments similar to those in the United States, or perhaps worse, with a two-year lag. While the conviction suggested, as Tom Daly argued, that “Brazilian institutions (…) weathered the Bolsonarist storm better than their U.S. counterparts in the face of Trumpism and wider antidemocratic political maneuvers,” the Bolsonaros seemed to have found a potentially successful way around this obstacle. The family – and the authoritarian mindset that defines it – would remain a powerful force. It is no wonder that Flávio Bolsonaro declared on Paulista that his first act would be to pardon his father.
A serious crisis involving the Supreme Court would likely have been unavoidable, particularly because the Court had already signaled that offenses against democratic rule are ineligible for pardon or amnesty (STF, ADPF 964/DF, Rel. Min. Rosa Weber, 10 May 2023, Opinion of Justice Luiz Fux). Such a crisis could have been further aggravated by a major corruption scandal that had drawn at least four Supreme Court justices, including Justice Alexandre de Moraes, into public scrutiny over reported personal, professional, and financial ties, either directly or through relatives, to Daniel Vorcaro, a banker involved in a multibillion fraud scheme.
If Flávio had won, Justice Alexandre de Moraes – and, possibly, others – would almost certainly have faced impeachment. The scandal would have provided a rationale for such impeachment beyond revenge for the convictions of Jair Bolsonaro and his allies. Holding roughly a third of the Senate, where impeachment bids against Supreme Court Justices are put to a vote, the Liberal Party would have been well positioned to advance that agenda. Moreover, one Supreme Court seat is currently vacant, and three more vacancies are expected during the next presidential term. Brazil’s appointment process resembles that of the United States Supreme Court, so Flávio Bolsonaro could have appointed up to four justices without accounting for any additional vacancies resulting from impeachment. On a court of eleven justices, we already know where this could have headed.
This paradox has come to the fore in Brazil’s political and institutional landscape this electoral cycle. On one hand, Brazil’s Supreme Court has exemplified democratic resistance to concrete threats of autocratization, in what I have elsewhere called an “exercise of militant democracy.” However, the Court’s own dysfunction and the alleged misconduct of some of its justices triggered a legitimacy crisis, severely weakening its ability to defend democracy. The very Court that earned praise for checking Jair Bolsonaro’s authoritarian moves and later convicting him and others of attempting a coup d’état would have now faced one of its gravest threats. The alleged conduct of some of its justices could have made it vulnerable to an all-too-familiar tactic of autocratization: targeting a Court powerful enough to restrain the executive.
Against this backdrop, the presidential election was the most consequential since Brazil’s transition to democracy in 1985. A substantial body of research and numerous cases suggest that a second term can accelerate autocratization (Steven Levitsky, Lucan A Way and Daniel Ziblatt, ‘The Price of American Authoritarianism: What Can Reverse Democratic Decline?’ (2026) 105(1) Foreign Affairs 30.) – Flávio Bolsonaro’s presidency would have been a second term for the political project his father began. While Brazil’s institutions had already shown some capacity to resist authoritarianism, suggesting the country might be able to withstand Bolsonarismo once more, the prospect was particularly threatening because those same institutions now seemed less resilient.
Naturally, institutions have a learning curve in how they can challenge autocratization, but the movements driving it can also adapt their strategies as circumstances change. It is no wonder that, despite the damage wrought by Jair Bolsonaro’s administration and his 27-year prison sentence, his movement gained ground in Congress. It shifted further toward the far right as Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party (PL) won 121 of the 513 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, up from 97 in 2022. Its gains were even more striking in the Senate, where the party secured 29 of the 81 seats in the new legislature, nearly doubling its results in 2022. With the Supreme Court’s legitimacy already under strain, a Flávio Bolsonaro victory would have given his administration and its allies in Congress an opening to advance their authoritarian project. Facing a deepening crisis, the Court would likely have prioritized its own survival, leaving it less able to defend Brazil’s democracy.
The three weeks between the first round and the runoff make Brazil’s election especially fascinating for the broader world. Flávio Bolsonaro finished the first round about 2.22 million votes ahead of Lula, with 47.03% of the valid vote compared to Lula’s 45.16%. The campaign had drawn little public engagement, and the result defied polls that had put Lula narrowly ahead. The shock was so drastic that civil society began to mobilize the next day. Law students at Fluminense Federal University in Niterói, in the state of Rio de Janeiro, called an assembly that spilled out of the auditorium and evolved into a march. In sequence, many residents came down from their buildings and joined the students in the streets. During the following days, Brazil’s National Union of Students called for assemblies and demonstrations across the country, urging students to take the campaign into neighborhoods where Lula had lost ground since 2022. This mobilization rapidly spread to trade unions and social movements, which sought to persuade those who remained undecided or had not voted in the first round. On October 11, social movements and artists organized a March for Democracy that drew thousands to Avenida Paulista. From Paulista protests, marches and events spread across the country again and again, possibly the most engaged campaign in Brazilian history.
The scale of mobilization was especially striking given the support Flávio Bolsonaro enjoyed among influential figures in business, politics, and parts of the press. Lula’s campaign also expanded its online reach even as it accused Meta of restricting its ads and posts, treating the two campaigns differently with the help of AI tools. The co-chairs of Meta’s Oversight Board even criticized the company for having applied its anti-fraud rules too aggressively to Lula’s advertising accounts. In this context, the WhatsApp channel Exército do Lula (“Lula’s Army”), created by federal deputy André Janones, played a key role. Janones encouraged supporters to share and interact with pro-Lula content and to avoid engaging with Bolsonaro’s posts, since even critical reactions could help those posts reach more people. The WhatsApp channel drew more than 11 million followers and was crucial in showing Lula’s supporters how to amplify his campaign’s message and challenge the right’s longstanding dominance on social media.
Lula went on to win the runoff with 51.79% of the valid vote, defeating Flávio Bolsonaro by 4,43 million votes. He gained more than 10 million votes between the two rounds, an outstanding outcome never seen before in Brazilian elections. It was a profound relief for Brazil’s democracy and an emotional day for many Brazilians, who saw footage of young people accompanying their grandparents to vote and of voters, some in tears, speaking about what the moment meant for the country’s future. In an election with so much at stake, Brazil’s left both regained the streets and learned how to combat the far right online.
President Lula will face a difficult term. The mobilization came too late to affect the congressional elections, which were decided in the first round and left the far right stronger in Congress. Moreover, the institutional crisis at the Supreme Court persists and demands urgent attention. The judiciary, including the Supreme Court, needs reform. A democratic environment, however, allows for debate in which people can disagree about how to reform the judiciary while defending its independence. Through street politics and online mobilization, progressive movements can exert pressure for the government to advance their agenda of defending democracy against far-right attacks.
From this perspective, Brazil’s 2026 election has not only brought to the fore an important strategy for challenging the far-right but also revealed how, in an age of digitalization and evolving strategies of autocratization, society can “act in concert” to defend democracy, fostering a coordinating strategy that has become even more crucial in fending off the new wave of autocratization (See B Weingast, ’Designing Constitutional Stability’ in R Congleton and B Swedenborg (ed.), (MIT Press 2006) 349.) This could be seen as a distinct form of militant democracy which relies less on institutions coordinating democratic safeguards from above and more on bottom-up movements that use social media and online networks to coordinate their efforts to defend democracy. A long road lies ahead; however, despite many challenges, Brazilian democracy breathes, and the people who rallied to defend it have shown where its strength lies.
Juliano Zaiden Benvindo is a Full Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Brasília.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
