Lula says only he can stop 'fascists' as Brazil votes in pivotal election

Brazil's president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, told supporters in Rio de Janeiro on Friday that he is the only obstacle preventing far-right 'fascists' from taking back power, as he staged what his team billed as a victory march ahead of Sunday's vote. The 80-year-old leftwinger said he decided to run for a historic fourth term because he believed only he could stop the family of his rightwing rival, Flávio Bolsonaro, from returning to government. According to The Guardian, Lula told the podcast Flow that without him standing up to them, they would win easily, adding: 'It's either me, or it's barbarism.'

Hours after that interview, Lula flew to Rio for a march between two downtown sites tied to Brazil's struggle for democracy under the 1964-1985 military dictatorship. The parade began at the Candelária church, where more than a million people — Lula among them — gathered in 1984 to demand direct presidential elections, and headed a mile south to Cinelândia, scene of the 1968 March of the Hundred Thousand. Speaking after the march set off, Lula said the stakes were not one man's victory but the victory of an idea and of democracy, warning that Brazil would either consolidate democracy or lose it.

Lula also appeared to take aim at foreign interference, vowing that 'no gringo is going to lay a finger on Brazil's things' — an indirect reference, according to The Guardian, to claims that Donald Trump's administration is using economic and diplomatic pressure to sway the vote in the Bolsonaros' favour. The choice of rally route reflected renewed anxiety among Brazilian democrats about the future of Latin America's largest democracy. Election-eve polling suggests Lula holds only a narrow lead over his adversary.

Flávio Bolsonaro, 45, has promised during the campaign to pardon his 71-year-old father, the former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a failed coup after losing to Lula in 2022. Some observers have speculated that Jair Bolsonaro could take a ministerial post, while his son Eduardo, a radical former congressman with ties to Trump's Maga movement, is reputedly hoping to become foreign minister. Flávio Bolsonaro has announced plans to appoint five firmly conservative judges to the supreme court. Many Brazilian democrats fear a Bolsonaro win would quickly free the jailed ex-president and his fellow coup-plotters, and that democratic institutions such as the supreme court would then be dismantled or co-opted.

According to the Datafolha pollster, the election is likely to go to a second-round runoff between Lula and Bolsonaro on 25 October, with Lula expected to take about 45% of votes on Sunday against Bolsonaro's 40%. At Friday's rally, Lula claimed he could still pull off a shock first-round win by clearing 50%. In an online broadcast, Bolsonaro insisted his campaign would prevail, telling undecided voters that Brazil was hours from deciding its future for decades and that it marked the end of the Workers' party era.

Supporters and allies framed the vote as a defining moment. Marcelo Freixo, a politician from Lula's Workers' party (PT) running for congress, said it was the most important election of their lives, warning that a Bolsonaro family victory would spell the end of Brazil's democratic process and institutions. Valmir Aleixo, a 55-year-old history teacher at the demo, described the choice as one between democracy and far-right fascism, while 74-year-old Noni Ostrower carried a banner reading 'Democracy Is Valuable', saying she did not want to see fascism return to Brazil. The anthropologist and writer Luiz Eduardo Soares predicted the election could be the last of his generation's lifetime, comparing the Bolsonaros' potential speed of change to Hungary's transformation under Viktor Orbán, and samba singer Diogo Nogueira said a win in the first round was needed so that 'this type of people' would not return for 10 or 20 years.