Brazil Without a Successor: The Failure of the Left and Implications For Regional Stability

How Lula’s dominance has exposed the Brazilian left’s succession dilemma and reshaped the future of regional politics.

Brazilian foreign policy maintained a striking degree of continuity in the decades following re-democratisation in 1985. Across governments of varying ideological orientation, the broad pillars remained largely stable: active multilateralism, openness to international trade, and formal non-alignment in major global conflicts.

The election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2002 marked the moment this tradition found its fullest expression, as Brazil moved from a regional actor to an assertive voice of the Global South and a leading actor among emerging economies. No single figure has shaped Brazil’s international identity as decisively as Lula, whose personal stature became, for a generation, virtually inseparable from the country’s own standing on the world stage.

The scale of that transformation was captured, perhaps unintentionally, by a remark by then-U.S. President Barack Obama, who greeted Lula at the 2009 G20 summit in London with the words: “That’s my man right here. I love this guy. He’s the most popular politician on Earth” (Steward, 2009). Brazilian polling at the time placed Lula’s approval rating above eighty percent, levels that no Brazilian president has approached since (Bonin, 2010).

Lula left office in January 2011 with record popularity and endorsed Dilma Rousseff, his chief of staff, as his successor. Rousseff became Brazil’s first female president and was re-elected in 2014, but her second term was cut short in 2016 when the Brazilian Senate voted to remove her from office (BBc, 2010).  Following impeachment proceedings centered on alleged violations of federal budgetary law a process that a significant portion of the Brazilian left continues to characterize as a parliamentary coup (Vilela, 2021). Her vice president, Michel Temer, completed the remainder of the term.

By the time of the 2018 election, Lula himself had been convicted on corruption charges connected to the Lava Jato investigations and was serving a prison sentence that rendered him ineligible to run. His Workers’ Party authorized Fernando Haddad, the former mayor of São Paulo, to stand in his place. Haddad lost to Jair Bolsonaro, then an obscure federal deputy known principally for inflammatory rhetoric and a long-standing defense of the military dictatorship that had ruled Brazil between 1964 and 1985.

Academic commentary on the election attributed the result substantially to what one analysis termed “the politics of disillusionment” a broader exhaustion with the political establishment that the Workers’ Party, after thirteen years in power, had come to represent for a large segment of the electorate (Vale, 2018).

The Bolsonaro Interregnum and its Reversal

Throughout the Bolsonaro government, Brazil saw the most significant rupture in Brazilian foreign policy since re-democratization (Buarque, 2022). The country grew markedly more isolationist in multilateral forums, aligned itself ideologically with international right-wing populism, prioritized close relations with the United States and Israel, and repeatedly clashed with the prevailing international consensus on environmental governance and human rights.

By 2022, the Brazilian Supreme Court had annulled Lula’s earlier corruption conviction, and he ran for president again. In the closest presidential contest in the history of Brazilian re-democratization, Lula came out on top with 50.9% of the vote against 49.1% for Bolsonaro (Nugent, 2022). Bolsonaro initially declined to concede, and his most committed supporters staged a violent attack on federal government buildings in Brasília on 8 January 2023 an episode that would later form the basis of criminal proceedings against the former president (Terado, 2023).

Those proceedings concluded in September 2025, when a panel of the Supreme Court convicted Bolsonaro on five charges, including leading an armed criminal conspiracy and attempting a violent abolition of Brazil’s democratic order. Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who presided over the trial, said the conspiracy had included a plan to assassinate Lula and his running mate, Vice President Geraldo Alckmin, and to arrest or kill Moraes himself; the plot collapsed only after failing to secure the backing of senior army and air force commanders. Bolsonaro was sentenced to twenty-seven years and three months in prison and began serving that sentence in November 2025 (Dias Carneiro, 2025).

Four Years Later, a New Bolsonaro on the Ballot

Bolsonaro’s political project has reconstituted itself around his eldest son, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro of Rio de Janeiro, who entered the 2026 race with his father’s public endorsement, issued from inside the federal police facility where the former president is serving his sentence. With the election approaching in October, victory is far from certain: pre-election polling through the first half of 2026 showed a genuinely competitive race, with several surveys placing Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro within the margin of error of one another in a potential second-round runoff.

But the odds have shifted. Flávio’s numbers fell sharply in May 2026, when Intercept Brasil reporting linked him to Daniel Vorcaro, the former controller of Banco Master, a financial institution liquidated by Brazil’s Central Bank after regulators uncovered an accounting shortfall estimated between US$7.6 and US$10 billion (Hermosilla, 2026).

The leaked audio indicated that Vorcaro had financed most of the budget for a film about the Bolsonaro family, and Flávio was subsequently reported to have visited Vorcaro while the banker was under house arrest (Reuters, 2026). One prediction market saw his implied odds of victory fall from 43% to 31% within a week; a Datafolha poll taken shortly after showed Lula opening a lead of 47% to 43% in a simulated runoff, having been statistically tied only days before (Polymarket, 2026; Reuters, 2026).

Against that backdrop, Flávio travelled to Washington and met with Trump, where he asked the United States to designate two of Brazil’s largest criminal organizations  the Primeiro Comando da Capital and the Comando Vermelho  as foreign terrorist organizations, explicitly contrasting his request with Lula’s own recent visit to Washington, where the Brazilian president had argued against such a designation, warning it risked exposing Brazil to unilateral US enforcement action on its own soil (France24,2026). The designation was announced on 28 May 2026; Brazil’s government formally rejected the classification domestically (Bussey, 2026)

Lula, for his part, used his own meeting in Washington to assert that the senator is risking Brazil’s sovereignty, and is campaigning on the message that “Brazil belongs to Brazilians” while his supporters have accused Flávio of being a “traitor” to the country.

With more recent polling favoring the president and considering that Flávio’s father aside every Brazilian president seeking re-election since the restoration of democracy has won, Lula’s chances of a fourth term look strong. His rejection numbers, however, remain stubbornly high: a Quaest survey in March 2026 put his approval at 44% against 51% disapproval, the widest gap recorded since July 2025 (Martinez, 2025).

The Succession Nobody on the Left Built

But the next election is, in some ways, less important than the one after it. Lula’s reign might endure four more years, but the left has yet to build a viable successor. In 2010 Lula handed power to Rousseff, who clashed constantly with Congress and was ultimately impeached. In 2018, he launched Haddad, who lost to Bolsonaro. No left-wing figure who has tried to inherit Lula’s coalition without him directly on the ballot has yet won the presidency.

The right, meanwhile, has plenty of names waiting in line. Federal deputy Nikolas Ferreira of Minas Gerais  elected in 2022 with roughly 1.4 million votes, the largest individual total of any candidate for the Chamber of Deputies that year, and commanding a social media following above 17 million  represents an entire generation of young, evangelical, digitally native conservatives ready to inherit the Bolsonarista coalition regardless of how any single election turns out (Petrov, 2025)

On the left, the bench is thinner. Haddad himself, now serving as Lula’s Finance Minister, lacks the populist touch Lula built over five decades in public life. Guilherme Boulos, Secretary-General of the Presidency and a longtime leader of the Homeless Workers’ Movement, represents the more committed wing of the left but has historically lacked the pragmatic, cross-class appeal that let Lula build coalitions well beyond his own party’s base. Neither has shown the ability to reproduce Lula’s particular mix of working-class biography, coalition-building instinct, and personal charisma.

Brazil’s public opinion numbers tell the same story from another angle. Even when Lula’s approval has climbed into the mid-to-upper forties, his disapproval has stayed anchored close to 40%   a sign that a large bloc of voters has settled into durable opposition to him regardless of circumstance. That bloc is fertile ground for whoever the right consolidates around next, Bolsonaro name or not.

A Regional Pattern – Not Only a Regional One

Brazil’s succession problem doesn’t exist in isolation. Across South America, the political centre of gravity has shifted markedly to the right over the past decade, leaving only two of the region’s major economies  Gustavo Petro’s Colombia and Lula’s Brazil  currently under left-wing governance, and both face genuinely contested elections in the same election cycle.

The economic stakes are considerable. Brazil’s economy reached a nominal GDP of roughly US$2.64 trillion in 2026, the 10th largest in the world, with exports of US$348.7 billion in 2025 (OEC, 2026). Brazil’s trade with the BRICS bloc alone totaled US$210 billion in 2024, 35% of the country’s overall trade   BRICS absorbed 36% of Brazilian exports and supplied 34% of its imports that year. According to UNCTAD (2024), Brazil is among the three BRICS members most dependent on intra-bloc trade, alongside Russia and Indonesia (BRICS, 2025)

The Brazilian left’s inability to institutionalize itself beyond one man has implications for all of this for Mercosur, for the BRICS agenda, and for the balance of multilateral soft power across the hemisphere. Most of that architecture is, to a significant degree, personally identified with Lula rather than built into the Workers’ Party or the Brazilian state more broadly. A right-wing government aligned with the Bolsonaro project one that has already shown, through Flávio’s approach in Washington, a preference for direct bilateral alignment with the US over multilateral engagement would likely unwind a good deal of it, regardless of whatever formal commitments Brazil has made under Lula.

Should Lula win a fourth term in October, the underlying problem will simply be put off, not solved. At eighty, he cannot go on indefinitely as the only person capable of holding his coalition together or carrying forward the foreign policy he has built. The absence of a credible successor isn’t a footnote to Brazilian politics it’s a central variable in any serious read of where the country is headed, with consequences that will outlast this election regardless of who wins it.

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