From Left to Right: Associate Professor Jorge Alves, Assistant Professor Karla Mundim, Editor-in Chief Brian Winters, Moderator Enrique Desmond Arias
On Wednesday afternoon, a panel at Queens College, CUNY packed a room to answer one deceptively simple question: can Lula win again? Two hours later, the honest answer was probably, but not comfortably. The country he's trying to win looks very different from the one that first elected him.
The panel, "Brazilian Politics in 2026," brought together three scholars and analysts: Brian Winter of Americas Quarterly, political scientists Jorge Antonio Alves and Karla Mundim of CUNY, and moderator Enrique Desmond Arias. They gathered to take stock of Brazil ahead of its October general election, a vote that will pit 79-year-old President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva against the Bolsonaro political machine, now operating without Jair himself, who is currently in prison following his conviction for participation in the January 8, 2023 coup attempt. The backdrop was hard to ignore: days before the panel convened, police in Rio de Janeiro had killed more than 120 people in a single operation, the deadliest such raid in Brazilian history. Violence, it turned out, was the thread that ran through almost everything.
CUNY Graduate Center, Midtown Manhattan
The state of the race
Brazil's electorate has hardened into two fairly immovable blocs. Alves cited recent research showing roughly 80% of voters are now locked in, either left or right, with very few genuinely persuadable. Lula and Flavio Bolsonaro (Jair's eldest son, designated as the family's candidate while his father sits in prison) are running roughly even, somewhere in the mid-40s. The last election was decided by about two percentage points, roughly two million votes in a country of 205 million people. There is little reason to think 2026 will be dramatically different. The election will be decided by a thin slice of centrists and by which candidate can build the more effective coalition from Brazil's bewildering 30-plus party system.
Lula has a problem that goes beyond polling. Winter described a president who feels increasingly out of step with his own base. Some 85% of Brazilians say they'd rather work for themselves than have a boss, a profound shift from the formal-employment culture Lula built his identity around. Twenty years ago, he noted, securing a signed work card proving formal employment was the maximum aspiration for many working-class Brazilians. Today that same population is entrepreneurial by necessity and skeptical of the state as a provider. "You sense that when you're there," Winter said. "Across social classes, across geographies."
"80% of the Brazilian electorate is now sunk in, either on the left or the right, and they don't change their vote anymore. So now you're fighting for very few."
The issue that could decide it all
If the election becomes a referendum on security, the panel broadly agreed, Flavio Bolsonaro wins. Violence leads every major poll by roughly 20 points over the next closest concern. The left has historically struggled to field credible security policy, partly as a legacy of the dictatorship era when many of today's left leaders came of age associating law enforcement with repression. That history is understandable, Alves noted, but it is also 2026. As he put it: "It's not fair to assign all the blame, but many of the most violent cities in the Americas are now in Brazil's northeast, which has been governed by the left. People know that." The federal government has recently pushed constitutional amendments to give itself more coordination authority over what is currently a state-based security system, but the panel was skeptical that those moves would fully close the messaging gap before October.
If the election is about the economy, Lula likely wins. Growth has been solid and the macroeconomic story is reasonably good. But strong economic fundamentals didn't save the incumbent side in the United States in 2024, and the panel raised that comparison explicitly. Voters in both countries have shown a persistent gap between what the data says and what people feel. Mundim noted that Lula has been making deliberate attempts to reconnect with organized movements, including positioning himself in favor of a shift from a six-day to a five-day workweek and engaging more directly with feminist organizations on femicide. Whether those efforts move enough voters before October remains an open question.
Rio de Janeiro police detain a suspect during a security operation in the city's favelas. Days before this panel convened, a police raid in Rio killed more than 120 people in what was described as the deadliest such operation in Brazilian history. (Photo: Getty Images)
The Bolsonaro wildcard
The left celebrated when Jair chose Flavio over his more combustible son Eduardo or his wife Michelle. Winter thinks that may have been a mistake. Eduardo spent much of 2025 in the United States lobbying the Trump administration, which in July announced 50% tariffs on Brazil in what appeared to be a response to Jair's prosecution. The move backfired, triggering a nationalist reaction that boosted Lula's numbers. By September, Trump had effectively reversed course. Eduardo's attack-dog energy plays well with the base but alienates the center. Flavio is different: bland, soft-spoken, almost professorial in his social media appearances. His perceived moderation could be an asset with exactly the centrist voters who will decide the race.
The religious dimension compounds this. Winter cited a nationwide poll of more than 5,000 Brazilians in which 96% agreed that "God is in command of your life" and 86% agreed that faith is worth more than science. Evangelicals have grown from 7% of Brazil's population in the 1980s to roughly 30% today. The Bolsonaro message of God, family and country lands differently when the country has become, in Winter's words, "as conservative as it was 30 years ago." Lula is Catholic and mentions faith occasionally, but the panel noted that many Brazilians find it unconvincing. The Bolsonaro family, by contrast, has made it the center of their political identity.
Christ the Redeemer (Cristo Redentor) overlooks Rio de Janeiro from atop Corcovado mountain. A nationwide poll cited at the panel found that 96% of Brazilians agreed that "God is in command of your life" — a number that helps explain why faith has become one of the defining fault lines of the 2026 election. (Photo: iStock)
Three things to watch
The Northeast. Lula won it by 39 points in 2022 and it was the only reason he won at all. His net favorability there is now roughly 7%. If that number doesn't recover, his path to victory gets very narrow very fast.
The coalition game. Pragmatic centrist parties, especially the PSD (currently the holder of more mayoralties than any other party in Brazil), will read the polls and go where the power is. Their alignment will likely tip the result, and that decision is still very much in play.
The unexpected. Both candidates have serious health histories. Trump is unpredictable and has already used Brazil as a foreign policy chess piece once. And a race likely decided by under two percentage points has very little margin for anything to go sideways. Surprises are not hypothetical. They're likely.
Brazil's election is still eight months away. But the panel left little doubt that the country is already in campaign mode and that the outcome is genuinely open.
At MODA Vi, we spend a lot of time looking at cities and the forces that shape them: how people work, how they feel about safety, whether they trust the institutions around them. What struck us about this panel is how familiar those fault lines felt. A working class rewriting its relationship with employment. Voters whose lived experience diverges sharply from what the economic data shows. Institutional trust eroding in ways that no single policy can quickly repair. Brazil is grappling with the same pressures reshaping cities and communities across the world right now, and its 2026 election is one of the clearest places to watch how those tensions play out. We'll be paying attention.