Bloomberg
Trump of the Tropics Confounds Brazil’s Right
Jair Bolsonaro’s long legal saga has taken another dramatic turn with Brazilian police arresting the former president after he tampered with his ankle monitor.
The weekend’s developments may have further complicated the Brazilian right’s chances of beating an emboldened Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva next year.
Bolsonaro, under house arrest since August, is any day now set to begin serving a 27-year sentence for attempting a coup. He was detained amid fears that he was planning to abscond after taking a soldering iron to his monitor, a decision he blamed on a bout of medication-induced “paranoia” that there was a listening device inside it.
His downward drift is in contrast to Lula, who is riding high in the polls in large part due to his robust response to draconian tariffs Donald Trump slapped on Brazil in an effort to save Bolsonaro from his legal woes. The latter’s arrest came little more than 24 hours after Lula scored tariff relief on core exports.
Back in 2018, the former army captain who became known as the “Trump of the Tropics” surged to power as the Latin American face of a brasher form of right-wing identity politics. He presaged victory for fellow Trump ally Javier Milei in Argentina, while José Antonio Kast, a figure in his mold, is in poll position to win the presidency in Chile.
But in Brazil, Bolsonaro’s antics threaten to derail any repeat in the 2026 election.
Banned from office and rejected by most independent voters, he has no apparent political future except as a kingmaker for the movement he built. But he’s refused to pick an heir, not even São Paulo Governor Tarcísio de Freitas, an investor favorite.
Bolsonaro is thus robbing election hopefuls of valuable time to prepare — while his old nemesis Lula polls better than anyone the right might field. — Augusta Saraiva and Travis Waldron