How the Brazilian people humiliated Meta, Donald Trump, and the Bolsonaros; or, The Incredible Story of Brazil’s 2026 Elections

Emanoel.

The West’s second-largest democracy, Brazil is too big a lion for America’s backyard.

First: hi.

How are you?

As I was saying, Brazil doesn’t fit in America’s backyard. Donald Trump, a fundamentally pathetic little man (I suspect even those closest to him privately agree), every now and then gives the world a glimpse of his embarrassing delusions of grandeur. One of these was his attempt to interfere in Brazil’s 2026 elections, after remarks by Secretary of State Marco Rubio about Latin America supposedly being “America’s backyard.” Could Rubio be even remotely aware of how laughable he is?

This past Sunday, October 25, Brazil stopped conspirators who are enemies of the 1988 Constitution from getting another chance to impose their will by force. For anyone who has forgotten: former president Jair Bolsonaro is in prison because he plotted a coup after losing the 2022 election to Lula da Silva; the plan, uncovered by the Federal Police, involved assassinating the president-elect by poisoning, gunning down the vice president-elect, Geraldo Alckmin, and blowing up Alexandre de Moraes, a justice of the Supreme Federal Court (STF).

Why the US bet on the wrong horse

In the 2026 race, Flávio Bolsonaro, the jailed former president’s son, was the one chosen to serve the interests of the Brazilian bourgeoisie and the United States’ desperate need for rare earths, so crucial to its geopolitical rivalry with China. A terrible choice: there are abundant signs of his ties to criminals in Rio de Janeiro, hired killers among them, and messages revealed by Intercept Brasil caught the senator pressing banker Daniel Vorcaro—the central figure in the biggest bank fraud scandal in Brazil’s history—for part of the 134 million reais promised to finance Dark Horse, a film about his own father.

There wouldn’t be room here for the many other criminal matters involving this typical Brazilian gangster, such as the fact that he and his family bought no fewer than 50 properties with cash whose source is impossible to trace; the mansion he lives in alone cost 6.2 million reais, a purchase glaringly out of line with a senator’s income.

Why the Brazilian people see Bolsonarism as the enemy

Perfectly at ease airing his agenda against ordinary Brazilians, Flávio Bolsonaro proposed across-the-board cuts to public spending, opposed ending Brazil’s six-days-on, one-day-off work schedule, floated the privatization of major state-owned companies, and assured Donald Trump that Brazil would be “the solution to the United States’ rare earth problem.”

How the US meddled in Brazil’s elections

The New York Times denounced the unfit Trump administration’s interference in Brazil’s electoral process in this opinion piece.

“Outside interference in the elections of a democratic state is undemocratic: Americans, after all, are not part of the Brazilian body politic. Underlying the Trump administration’s interventions is the disrespectful message that Americans think they know better than Brazilians what is best for Brazil,” reads one passage.

Meanwhile, in this statement, UN experts warned of interference by Meta, the American tech giant behind Instagram and WhatsApp.

The “algorithmic asymmetry,” as the UN experts called it, had already been noticed by the Brazilian people: posts related to the grassroots campaign for Lula da Silva saw their organic reach throttled by Instagram’s algorithm, while even the most run-of-the-mill posts about Flávio Bolsonaro’s campaign soared to dizzying heights under the platform’s opaque content distribution.

The prime example is that of federal lawmaker Nikolas Ferreira, a young man who plays next to no part in the political life of the Chamber of Deputies and who has been found liable in court for transphobia. During the campaign, his Instagram posts outdid the reach of figures like Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, and Kim Kardashian. Tellingly, the very same videos got no more than middling reach on his YouTube and TikTok accounts. See what I mean?

How the Brazilian people trampled Meta

In April, federal lawmaker André Janones created a WhatsApp channel called Exército do Lula (Lula’s Army), which launched with about 50,000 followers and ended the campaign with more than 10 million. I’ll say it again: more than 10 million Brazilians receiving material and daily “missions” to carry out on social media, punching through Instagram’s blockade from inside another of Meta’s own platforms, and going further still: boosting hashtags on X, formerly Twitter; engaging with YouTube livestreams; and prompting searches about the darker chapters of the opponent’s biography (and it was quite a menu).

At the request of the campaign of a now-desperate Flávio Bolsonaro, the president of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), Kassio Nunes Marques (appointed to the STF, let’s not forget, by Jair Bolsonaro), ordered the channel suspended more than once, even though no wrongdoing had been established. Exército do Lula came back online after being registered with the electoral courts, a last-minute requirement that experts considered unlawful. Shortly afterward—get this—Meta had to concede that it had found no irregularities in it whatsoever.

And then, of course, there was the staggering power of the streets, in mobilizations that have already gone down in Brazilian history. On October 11, a week after the first round, Lula addressed thousands of people on Avenida Paulista, in São Paulo, and on the following day, a public holiday, there were rallies in more than ten cities. In Belo Horizonte, my hometown and the capital of Minas Gerais, home to Brazil’s second-largest electorate, the march with Lula on Wednesday, October 21, drew some 200,000 people. To my mind, the largest political rally in the city’s history. In fact, scenes as striking as this one played out throughout the runoff, the length and breadth of the country.

Why Flávio Bolsonaro refused to accept defeat

In response to the antidemocratic conduct of mayors aligned with Bolsonarism, Lula da Silva’s party petitioned the Supreme Federal Court to extend voting by two more hours so that voters would have time to reach their polling stations. Shortly afterward, and I’m speculating here, Flávio Bolsonaro’s party, afraid of being seen as staying on the sidelines amid the resounding backlash in the press and on social media, also asked for the extension. Justice Cristiano Zanin, of the STF, extended voting until 7 p.m. at polling stations that were still open.

Once the result was announced, Flávio Bolsonaro called what had happened sacanagem—crude Brazilian slang for a dirty trick, roughly an American “screw job”—and did not acknowledge Lula da Silva’s victory. His central argument is that the extension changed the rules with voting already underway. The gaping hole in this complaint: according to analyses of TSE data, fewer than 35,000 votes were cast after 5 p.m., in an election decided by a margin of more than 4 million votes. And let’s not even get into the fact that his own ticket had also asked for the extension. In plain terms: a sore loser’s spiel.

David versus Goliath? Think again.

You can’t call it a David-and-Goliath victory. For one thing, the giant in this story is the Brazilian working class, not its enemies; for another, the clique of conspirators, rats skulking in the shadows, comes nowhere near even the slight stature of the biblical David.

In this photo, I’m smiling beside my wife and daughter. Outside, there were fireworks in the sky and the people were shouting that their country belonged to them; we discovered that no one shouts louder than a people whose country belongs to them. We joined them shortly after.

The polls showed Lula gaining ground. Even so, on the eve of the vote, the pollsters Datafolha and Quaest still had Flávio Bolsonaro at 51% of valid votes (which exclude blank and spoiled ballots) to Lula’s 49%, a statistical tie within the margin of error. Once the votes were counted, Lula, who had finished the first round with 45.16%, finished the second with 51.79%, jumping from about 53.9 million to more than 64 million votes. No presidential candidate had ever overturned a first-round deficit in the runoff. Not one. Then again, before Lula, no factory worker had ever reached the presidency, either.

Bolsonarism’s last, desperate attempt

With the possibility of defeat already in the air, Bolsonarist mayors across Brazil, in cities with a long-standing preference for Lula da Silva, did not run their full public bus service on election Sunday, as the Supreme Federal Court requires. Is it crude? Yes. Is it criminal? Obviously. But it’s not exactly new.

In 2022, when Jair Bolsonaro was president, the Federal Highway Police received orders from its director-general, the now-imprisoned Silvinei Vasques, to make it harder for voters in pro-Lula regions to reach their polling stations.

This is what the United States of America has allied itself with.