Bolsonaro clan shifts focus to Congress

Despite Flávio Bolsonaro’s defeat in the presidential race, the family of former president Jair Bolsonaro emerged from the election stronger in Congress, with four members of the political clan elected to office. While the results should secure the Bolsonaros a foothold in the legislative arena, they also pose a challenge: maintaining their dominance on the right after losing two consecutive presidential elections to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. On Monday (26), the day after the election, Flávio said he intended to “organize the opposition” to the government in the coming period. He will leave the Senate in January, ending a 24-year run in elected office.

Analysts say Bolsonarism is undergoing a leadership reshuffle amid uncertainty over the former president’s situation. Jair Bolsonaro is under house arrest following his conviction for attempting a coup. The relationships among elected family members and rivalries within the broader right-wing camp will also be decisive for the movement’s future, experts told Valor.

Flávio received 48.21% of valid votes in the runoff, trailing reelected President Lula by 3.58 percentage points. On the eve of the vote, a poll released by Quaest found that 45% of voters said they feared the Bolsonaro family’s return to power more than Lula remaining in office. Meanwhile, 42% said they were more concerned about the PT leader’s reelection than a return of Bolsonarism. Another 4% feared both scenarios, 4% feared neither, and 5% did not know how to answer.

In the first round, the family secured two Senate seats, with terms running through 2034, and two seats in the Chamber of Deputies. The lawmakers represent the Federal District, Santa Catarina, and São Paulo, and all belong to the Liberal Party (PL).

Jair Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelle Bolsonaro, won a Senate seat in the Federal District, becoming the most-voted senator in the capital’s history, with nearly 940,000 votes (29%), in her first-ever run for elected office. She also became the first former first lady in Brazil to win an elected mandate.

The other Senate seat secured under Jair’s plan to expand right-wing representation in the chamber—and advance initiatives such as impeachment petitions against Federal Supreme Court justices—went to Carlos, the former president’s second son, who was elected senator for Santa Catarina. Following Jair’s instructions, Carlos transferred his electoral domicile from Rio de Janeiro, where he had served as a city councilor since 2001, to the southern state, one of the region’s strongholds of Bolsonarism.

The strategy had previously been used with the youngest son, Jair Renan, who left the Federal District, where he lived, to make his electoral debut in 2024. That year, he was elected to the city council in Balneário Camboriú, Santa Catarina. Running under the ballot name “Jair Bolsonaro,” he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies with the fourth-highest vote total in Santa Catarina, receiving 131,000 votes.

One of his colleagues in the lower house will be his uncle Renato, who was elected in São Paulo. Jair’s younger brother first won a seat on the Praia Grande city council in 1996 but subsequently suffered a series of defeats. His most recent loss came in 2024, when he ran for mayor of Registro, São Paulo state. This year, running with an easily remembered ballot number consisting of four consecutive twos and promoted by his party as a potential vote-getter for other candidates, he received the sixth-highest number of votes for a federal deputy among São Paulo voters, with 379,000.

Renato took over the ballot number previously used by his nephew Eduardo, who helped pioneer Jair’s political expansion beyond his electoral stronghold of Rio de Janeiro. Eduardo first ran for the Chamber of Deputies in São Paulo in 2014 and was reelected in 2018, when he received 1.8 million votes, the highest total ever recorded by a federal representative in Brazil at the time, a record that was later surpassed. He won reelection again in 2022. Eduardo now lives in the U.S. and lost his seat after being removed from office for excessive absenteeism.

“We were all elected on the strength of Jair Bolsonaro’s name and legacy,” Renato told Valor last week while campaigning for Flávio in cities across the interior of São Paulo state. The incoming representative said he expected Jair to act as “a senior adviser” to the family’s congressional bloc. He also spoke of “alignment” and “unity” but did not explain how they would work together.

“Carlos has his own way of thinking, Michelle has another, and Renan is very young. I will be available to support my brother, but I also have my own opinions and my own way of seeing the world,” Renato said. The transfer of Jair’s political capital to his relatives can be seen as evidence of the former president’s continued influence, even while under arrest and without access to social media.

“Today, the movement’s identity and the family’s unity depend on its leader, Jair Bolsonaro. [However,] based on everything we know so far, there is a strong chance the family will split. They barely managed to campaign together,” said political scientist Maria Hermínia Tavares de Almeida, professor emerita at the University of São Paulo (USP).

One sign of internal tensions within the clan was Michelle’s limited involvement in Flávio’s campaign. Four months before the election, the stepmother and stepson had a falling-out that damaged the senator’s candidacy. Weeks later, they publicly announced a reconciliation, but the former first lady remained largely absent from campaign events alongside the presidential candidate.

Robson Carvalho, who holds a doctorate in political science from the University of Brasília (UnB) and researches political dynasties in Brazil, said Michelle has an opportunity to establish herself through her Senate office, particularly by engaging with evangelical voters and women. However, he noted that her stepsons are also seeking to carve out political space.

“Michelle could emerge as a bulwark. Some say she could even distance herself from the family, but I still see power as closely tied to the family’s political core, despite the leadership she has among evangelicals, which represents a different form of political capital,” he said.

Despite the family’s presence in Congress, Carvalho noted that losing the presidency represents a setback for the Bolsonarist project. “The group’s family-based political power is diminished because it will once again lack the power of the presidency. The group will turn its attention to Parliament, but it will not control the heart of the Executive branch,” he said.

One distinctive feature of this election for the Bolsonaro family is that it will encourage its members to operate across different parts of the country, according to the political scientist. “The Bolsonaro family goes beyond the conventional pattern of political dynasties because we see kinship operating upward, downward and horizontally,” Carvalho said.

He authored a study on “the dimensions of family-based political capital in the Senate and the harm it causes to democratic representation.” According to him, the combination of family ties and positions of decision-making power in Brazil is associated with obstacles to political renewal and risks stemming from the concentration of power.

In Almeida’s view, Bolsonarism—which she describes as the local expression of “far-right populism”—“is much bigger than the family. It is a political and social movement with considerable electoral appeal.”

That strength has enabled the election of a number of “young male and female representatives” who secured substantial vote totals by campaigning on Bolsonarist platforms, said the political scientist. “These are emerging leaders who do not have the Bolsonaro surname,” the professor said, commenting on the rise of Bolsonarist figures outside the family.

*By Joelmir Tavares— São Paulo

Source: Valor International

https://valorinternational.globo.com/