Could Trump’s return boost the far-right in Brazil?

Tim Young (originally published in Labour Outlook.)

President Lula of Brazil is making a good recovery from the head injury that put him in hospital last October. But as he begins the second half of his four-year presidency, what are the challenges that faces in implementing his manifesto commitments to restore economic development and stability to Brazil, address poverty and inequality in the country, reverse deforestation in the Amazon and recover Brazil’s international standing that his far-right predecessor, and long-term Donald Trump buddy, Jair Bolsonaro, had so badly damaged?

Lula’s first two years in office have seen some significant achievements. Early measures included reversing a number of Bolsonaro’s reactionary presidential decrees. Privatisation of eight state-owned companies was halted; financial support for the protection of the Amazon was reinstated; measures on illegal mining were repealed; and the issuing of new gun permits suspended.

Lula also relaunched the Bolsa Familia (Family Fund) that he first introduced during his first two terms of office (2003-2010), while boosting the number of doctors being trained to guarantee primary care health services for 96 million people, particularly those currently poorly served.

New Ministries, of Indigenous Affairs and of Racial Equality, were set up to address deep-seated problems, and Funai, Brazil’s Indigenous affairs agency that had been hamstrung by Bolsonaro, was set back to work to protect Indigenous communities’ lands from invasions by outsiders. Lula’s first year as president saw a 62% decrease in Amazon deforestation.

By the end of Lula’s first year in office, Brazil’s GDP had grown by 2.9%, its trade balance had registered its largest ever surplus and it had again become one of the ten largest economies in the world. The introduction of a long-awaited tax reform, a key part of Lula’s programme to simplify Brazil’s complex tax system, will also aid economic development in coming years.

On the international stage, Lula has repaired Brazil’s image and reasserted its role on the global stage. As of 2025, Brazil has taken over the rotating presidency of the BRICS bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) since the start of the year. This gives Lula the opportunity to focus on strengthening cooperation among nations of the Global South. The addition of five countries to the BRICS’s bloc adds weight to its push for potential a rebalancing of the existing international order, to one less dominated by Western powers, particularly the United States.

The recent US-backed coup attempt in Venezuela throws this problem into sharp relief for Latin America. While Lula chose to join Mexico and Colombia to help facilitate a dialogue between the Maduro administration and the opposition, 11 movements representing millions across the Left in Brazilian society took a much more robust stance, saying: “We repudiate any attempt at foreign intervention and internal destabilisation through violence, fake news and manipulation.”

Domestically, Lula still faces difficult challenges. His success in winning the presidential election did not provide him with a majority for his Workers’ Party in Congress, so he also faces the continuing problem of legislative blocks and restrictions on what he can achieve, particularly in some key areas.

The interests of agribusiness, for example, are defended and advanced by a powerful caucus, a multi-partisan organisation of elected representatives with strong representation in the Senate and an even stronger presence in the Chamber of Deputies.

This enables it to pass environmental and land deregulation laws – and try in the past to criminalise the work of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) through a series of Parliamentary Commissions of Inquiry, although the last of these in 2023 under Bolsonaro failed to make any headway. Nevertheless, the MST’s struggle for agrarian reform has been characteristically met locally by violence and repression.

Indigenous communities are also still at risk of attack from outsiders. For example, four indigenous people of the Avá Guarani ethnic group, including a four-year-old child, were injured in southern Brazil after an attack by armed men in early January, requiring the intervention of the Federal Police who since November 2024 have been tasked by the Ministry of Justice to protect Indigenous communities.

Perhaps the most important challenge comes from the far-right. While still president, Bolsonaro tried to get the Superior Electoral Court to rig the election in his favour – and when he narrowly lost it (by 51% to 49%) pro-Bolsonaro protestors unsuccessfully stormed the offices of the National Congress, the Presidential Palace and the Supreme Federal Court a week after Lula’s installation as president.

Lula’s immediate steps to remove the head of the military, Julio Cesar de Arruda, for stopping the police from arresting far-right rioters, as well as over 80 military officials, prevented any further insurrection.

But further detailed investigations by Brazil’s Federal Police provided evidence to the Supreme Court in November 2024 that Bolsonaro knew about a plot carried out by army special forces officers to assassinate President Lula da Silva, Vice President Geraldo Alckmin and Supreme Court Minister Alexandre de Moraes. Moreover, Bolsonaro is now charged with overseeing a strategy, with six working groups, to mount a military coup after losing the 2022 presidential election.

How this case is pursued – whether the judiciary will succeed in holding Bolsonaro and high-ranking military officials to account – remains a major test for Lula’s government. This is now complicated by Trump’s return to the US Presidency, which has been welcomed by Bolsanaro and his supporters who see it as a boost to their chances of returning to power in the future. One thing is for sure, there are interesting times ahead in Brazil.

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