Brazil’s Supreme Court ruled that campaign leaflets featuring a photo of former president Jair Bolsonaro do not violate election laws ahead of October elections, removing a legal hurdle for campaign material as the race intensifies. The court’s decision lands in a country where crime has emerged as the top election concern, and where voters are being pushed toward tougher promises on gangs and security by the same political machinery that keeps recycling the same names.
Who Sets the Rules
The Supreme Court’s ruling gave campaign operatives a green light on leaflets featuring Bolsonaro’s image, a small but telling example of how the legal apparatus manages the boundaries of political competition. The decision came ahead of the presidential vote scheduled for October 4, and it cleared away one more obstacle in a contest already shaped by courts, campaign lawyers and the constant pressure of electoral theater.
Crime now dominates the race. Residents are seeking tougher approaches to gangs and security, and that demand is shaping candidate promises and policy emphasis. The people living with the consequences are not the ones writing the rules. They’re the ones being asked to choose between rival managers of the same order.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, is seeking a fourth term at age 80. He asks Brazil for a fourth term on October 4, two days before turning 81. Born 27 October 1945 in Caetés, Pernambuco, Lula is a former metalworker and union leader who co-founded the Workers’ Party, or PT, and has now served three terms. The campaign is built around a familiar figure who has spent decades inside the state’s machinery, now asking for one more turn at the wheel.
The People at the Bottom Pay First
Lula was born into poverty in Brazil’s arid northeast and moved with his family to São Paulo as a child. He worked from age 12, trained as a lathe operator and lost the little finger of his left hand in a press accident at 19. In the late 1970s, he led metalworkers’ strikes that defied the military dictatorship, and in 1980 he co-founded the PT. He lost presidential campaigns in 1989, 1994 and 1998 before winning the presidency in 2002.
His record in office remains central to his political identity. He served as president from 2003 to 2010 during a commodity boom that lifted millions through Bolsa Família, raised the minimum wage in real terms, opened universities to the poor and helped Brazil pay off the IMF. He left office with approval above 80 percent and enough political capital to elect Dilma Rousseff. Those gains are part of the story, but so is the fact that the system still funnels power upward and leaves ordinary people dependent on leaders, parties and institutions to decide what relief looks like.
Lula’s political fall came in the Lava Jato, or Car Wash, investigation. Judge Sérgio Moro convicted him in 2017 of receiving a beachfront apartment as a bribe. He entered prison in April 2018 and spent 580 days behind bars, barred from the 2018 election. In 2021, the Supreme Court annulled the convictions, ruling that Moro had been biased. The annulment restored Lula’s political rights, and he returned to office on 1 January 2023 after beating Jair Bolsonaro in 2022 in the tightest presidential race in Brazil’s history, 50.9 to 49.1.
A System of Rivals, Not Liberation
The comeback presidency has been harder than the legend. Approval stands at 45 percent against 51 percent disapproval, and his rejection rate is near 50 percent, the highest in the field. Final-week polls give him the first round against Flávio Bolsonaro, with Datafolha showing 40 to 36, and a runoff inside the margin of error. Lula has framed the race as a defense of democracy against the movement of a convicted coup plotter, while his opponent frames it as a referendum on an octogenarian machine politician who has been in public life for half a century.
The first presidential debate of the campaign never happened because both front-runners stayed away, each calculating he had more to lose than to win. That absence says plenty. The public gets the spectacle, the polling, the legal rulings and the slogans, while the contenders hide from direct confrontation when it suits them.
Lula leads the first round in every in-person poll and leads no runoff simulation beyond the margin of error. The numbers show a race held together by institutions, reputations and fear, with crime at the center and the same political class asking for another mandate to manage the mess.