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A number of United States countermeasures against Brazil, including tariffs and local sanctions criminalsplaying with Brazilian voter sentiment ahead of October’s presidential election.
As a leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva seeking a fourth, non-consecutive term, he will compete with Flavio Bolsonaro of the Liberal Party, the son of former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who is serving 27 years in prison.
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Brazil will have the first round of the general election on October 4, with a repeat, if Lula is Flavio Bolsonaro before all that, on October 25th.
Lula is he threw himself as a defender of the Brazilian regime in response to the US prices and prohibited.
Last week, the administration of US President Donald Trump announced 25 percent tariffs for many Brazilian goods, the results of a one-year study showing that Brazil’s trade was “absurd”.
The U.S. said Brazil unfairly favored state-run Pix’s payment system over private competitors, imposed an 18 percent tariff on US ethanol imports, and failed to fully enforce logging laws, thus benefiting Brazilian loggers.
The tariffs are one of the ways the administration is rebuilding its tariff wall after the Supreme Court ruled in February that Trump had used emergency powers to impose tariffs on many of his trade partners.
Previous taxes of up to 50 percent in Brazil were linked to the case against Jair Bolsonaro for trying to influence the results of the 2022 elections, which Lula lost. Trump called the investigation a “witch hunt”.
The latest Quaest poll in Folha de S Paulo has Lula leading Flavio Bolsonaro 45% to 37% in the second election.
“His political group, Bolsonarismo, fears that higher tariffs will strengthen Lula’s support in the upcoming elections, because Brazilians are very disgusted with US tariffs,” said Gimena Sanchez, director of the Andes at the Washington Office for Latin America (WOLA).
He also said that Bolsonaro’s victory in October will help Washington’s interests.
Trump’s early relationship with Bolsonaro
Mr Trump was the initiator and backbencher of Bolsonaro, whose 2018 rise to the presidency of Brazil he compared to Mr Trump’s political style. Before asking Bolsonaro to run for re-election in 2022, Trump recorded a video, calling him “one of the greatest people in all of politics”.
After Bolsonaro lost the race, he disapproved and questioned the reliability of Brazil’s electronic voting system. After some time, many people who followed him entered the government buildings in Brasilia, the government district.
Critics say Bolsonaro and his allies conspired to stay in power. In July 2025, while the trial was in progress, Trump issued the first sentence to Brazil and accepted Brazil. Supreme Court Justice overseeing the case.
“Mr. Trump has been a leader not only for the Bolsonaros but for many right-wing politicians in Latin America since his first term,” said Gustavo Blum, a geopolitics researcher in Brazil.
He said the connection was easier in 2018, when Trump’s focus was on China, Brazil’s trading partner and other countries in the region, as well as the continent’s leftist political leaders.
“Now, by imposing and reimposing trade tariffs, it has been difficult for the Bolsonaros to give the impression that Trump is looking out for the interests of Brazilians and not just Americans,” Blum said.
A family facing legal problems on two fronts
In June, Brazil’s Supreme Court found Eduardo Bolsonaro, Jair’s third son, guilty. to strengthen the US intervening in his father’s case. Eduardo moved to the United States full time to “concentrate 100 percent” of his energy on “one thing”: freeing his father.
The board said that what Eduardo did was to pressure the Brazilian judges and sentenced him to four years and two months in prison.
Flavio, on the other hand, has been under different scrutiny at home since May, when reports emerged that he demanded $24m from Daniel Vorcaro, the jailed and fallen boss of Banco Master, to help pay for a film about his father.
Flavio admitted that he asked for the money but denied doing anything inappropriate or wrong.
Blum said the scandal has increased the couple’s problems with Washington and Brasilia. “The family has not been able to make good use of the contact with Mr. Trump,” he said.
Flavio asked Washington to delay the new tariffs until after the election, arguing that they would give Lula “exactly a political victory that has been engineered”.
Lula accused Bolsonaro of inviting himself, calling the request “another conspiracy against the Father”.
Governance as a campaign argument
WOLA’s Sanchez said the lobbying campaign in Bolsonaro’s camp and Washington has failed to produce results.
But one request helped. Days after Flavio met Trump at the White House in May, the State Department designated two Brazilian gangs, the PCC and Comando Vermelho, as foreign “terrorist” organizations.
Flavio himself asked to be named and said it was due to attraction. Lighten up called measurement an “involuntary” step that threatened Brazil’s sovereignty.
A tax bill passed by Washington weeks later branded Pix, Brazil’s state-run free payment system used by more than 90 percent of Brazilians, as an unfair trade practice.
Flavio, defending the plan in front of the US authorities, said that Pix was “good for Brazil”.
Business support is developed with great care
Brazilians across the political spectrum disagreed with Trump’s participation in the election.
“Even right-wing Brazilians, when they see President Trump trying to disrupt the Brazilian elections, they are not very happy, because they think that Brazil’s problems should be solved in Brazil, not in Washington, DC,” said Patricio Navia, a political analyst at New York University.
Navia said the move also shows Brazil’s desire to avoid a major conflict between the US and China, its biggest trading partner.
“China is their most important trade partner; the US is their most important partner,” he said. They don’t want their best friend and most important business partner to fight each other.
Brazil’s manufacturing and business sectors, which supported Bolsonaro in 2018 and 2022, have been more cautious amid economic pressures from Trump’s tax policies.
Navia said the uncertainty surrounding the Trump administration’s use of tariffs makes it difficult for allies to build around it. “Even those who claim to be friends of Trump can’t tell you what’s going to happen,” he said.
