Fighting Against the Return of Bolsonarismo: Brazil's First Round Election w/ Felipe Antunes de Oliveira

On October 4, Brazilians voted in the first round of a general election, and for the first time since 1998 Lula did not finish first. Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, eldest son of the imprisoned former president, took 47 percent to Lula's 45, forcing a runoff on October 25, while the Bolsonaro family's Liberal Party became the largest force in both houses of Congress. Two days after the vote, Felipe Antunes de Oliveira joins us to walk through the electoral map, explain why the left did so badly, and look ahead to the second round and what a Flávio Bolsonaro presidency would mean for Brazil, the region, and Brazil's place in the world. Part two will follow the runoff.

About the guest. Felipe Antunes de Oliveira is a senior lecturer in International Relations at Queen Mary University of London and a coordinating editor at Latin American Perspectives. Outside the academy, he has served as a diplomat for the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and as General Coordinator of International Financial Affairs at the Brazilian Ministry of Finance. He is the author of Dependency and Crisis in Brazil and Argentina (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024). The views expressed in this episode are his own and do not represent the Brazilian government.

Links

• Felipe Antunes de Oliveira, Dependency and Crisis in Brazil and Argentina: A Critique of Market and State Utopias (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024): https://upittpress.org/books/9780822948100/
• Felipe's faculty page at Queen Mary University of London: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/politics/staff/profiles/antunesdeoliveirafelipe.html

From the Latin American Perspectives archive

• Brazil under Bolsonaro, Vol. 50, No. 1 (January 2023), eds. Tulio Ferreira and James N. Green: https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/lapa/50/1
• Armando Boito, "The Rise of Fascism in Brazil," Vol. 50, No. 1 (January 2023): https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221140419
• Brazil: Assessing the Past Half Decade, Vol. 50, No. 5 (September 2023), ed. Paulo Simões: https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/lapa/50/5
• Brazil and the Changing Music of the Spheres of Influence, Vol. 53, No. 2 (March 2026): https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/lapa/53/2

Latin American Perspectives is a peer-reviewed journal publishing critical scholarship on Latin America, its people, politics, and culture. Subscribe to the journal: https://www.sagepub.com/shop/subscribe-to-a-journal/latin-american-perspectives-200875#subscribe . Annual print subscriptions start at $74, with discounted rates for students and LASA members.