A political dynasty? Why the Bolsonaro family dominates Brazil’s right wing

For a third election in a row, a member of the Bolsonaro family is the leading right-wing contender for Brazil's presidency.

Sao Paulo, Brazil – Much has changed since the far-right army captain Jair Bolsonaro won Brazil's presidency in 2018.

Last year, the former president was sentenced to 27 years in prison for attempting to overturn his 2022 election defeat. In 2023, he was barred from holding public office for eight years after a court determined he abused his political office.

He is currently banned from using social media. His last post was published in July 2025.

And yet, Bolsonaro has forged a powerful political dynasty that is on the verge of returning to power in Brazil's October presidential election.

His eldest son, 45-year-old Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, is in a statistical tie with the race's incumbent, left-leaning President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

A September 24 poll released by the public opinion firm Datafolha showed Lula with a slim lead in a simulated run-off, earning 47 percent support to Flavio's 45 percent, well within the margin of error.

Other pollsters predict an even narrower gap between the two frontrunners.

Like his father, Flavio has faced investigation and scandal. But experts say the Bolsonaro family has endured as a political force in part by harnessing decades of frustration with Lula's Workers' Party (PT).

That resentment, in turn, has transformed into a potent election-season brand.

“There is a hyperfocus on Lula and the PT, who for over two decades have been branded by many conservatives as the ones solely responsible for rampant corruption,” said political scientist Paulo Roberto Souza of the Democracy in Check Institute, an independent research nonprofit.

Analysts told Al Jazeera that the Bolsonaro family's electoral strength does not come from a base of hardcore supporters.

Bolsonaristas, after all, are only estimated to comprise between 15 and 25 percent of Brazil's electorate. Instead, experts credit "antipetismo" — a trend of hostility against Lula's PT movement — with fuelling the Bolsonaro family's rise to political power.

The PT has won all but one of the last six presidential elections in Brazil. The only exception has been Jair Bolsonaro himself, with his 2018 win.

Jair Bolsonaro did not invent "antipetismo", according to Mario Sergio Lima, a Brazil analyst at Medley Advisors, a political advisory firm.

But his arrival as a presidential frontrunner in 2018 gave the movement a political identity, Lima said. The elder Bolsonaro was able to “condense anti-PT sentiment into his own persona”.

Lima predicted Flavio would likewise benefit from the wave of "antipetismo" when he competes against Lula in the October 4 general election.

“It is easy for anyone who is already against the PT to vote for Flavio or anyone who carries the Bolsonaro name, because Jair managed to personify a feeling that already existed in Brazilian society,” Lima explained.

Formerly a long-serving member of Brazil's Chamber of Deputies, Jair Bolsonaro has become the fulcrum for a political movement based around his own nuclear family.

Each of his four sons has embarked on a political career. In October's general election, his second oldest son Carlos is running for a Senate seat. His youngest son Jair Renan is competing for the Chamber of Deputies.

Meanwhile, his third son, Eduardo, moved to the United States in 2025 to lobby President Donald Trump for help with his father’s trial.

He lost his congressional seat that December because of repeated absences, and in June, a Brazilian court ruled that Eduardo's efforts amounted to illegal foreign interference.

Even former First Lady Michelle Bolsonaro commands her own political clout, enjoying immense popularity among Brazil's conservative evangelical Christians.

In the lead-up to the 2026 election season, Michelle was floated as a possible right-wing candidate for the presidency. But in December, Jair offered a jailhouse endorsement to his son Flavio.

Though imprisoned, the ex-president remains a powerful figure in the Liberal Party, a right-wing juggernaut.

Columnist Fabio Zanini, a political analyst for Brazil's biggest newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo, described the Bolsonaro family as a nest of competing interests.

“It’s a dysfunctional family. They often fight among themselves,” he said.

But their disparate political activities have created what Zanini calls a “franchise", with influence across different spheres of Brazilian politics.

Flavio himself has sought to channel his father on the campaign trail. In early September, with less than a month remaining until the first round of voting, Flavio rallied on the streets of Juiz de Fora, an industrial city in the country's southeast.

The location was symbolic: His father survived a near-fatal stabbing in downtown Juiz de Fora during his successful 2018 presidential bid.

Flavio used his visit to retrace his father's route, saying he had returned to “complete the journey” Jair was unable to finish.

The right-wing senator was not always his father's heir apparent.

After Jair Bolsonaro’s 27-year prison sentence, Sao Paulo Governor Tarcisio de Freitas was widely rumoured to be a new standard-bearer for the Brazilian right.

Freitas, after all, had served in Jair's cabinet and had comfortably won a 2022 election to lead Brazil’s richest and most populous state. He had also expressed an interest in making a run for the presidency himself.

But Zanini believes that challenging the Bolsonaro family for Brazil's presidency would have come at a steep cost for Freitas, who ultimately sought re-election as governor instead.

“Cutting ties with the Bolsonaros would have been political suicide for Tarcisio. He would have been labelled a traitor or worse,” said Zanini. “So someone like him had no alternative but to back Flavio.”

Other conservative presidential candidates remain far behind Flavio in the pre-election polls.

Combined, figures such as Ronaldo Caiado, Renan Santos and Romeu Zema are polling with less than 10 percent support ahead of the first round of voting on Sunday.

Still, the race is expected to proceed to a run-off between Lula and Flavio, with neither candidate projected to win an outright majority in the first round.

While Flavio and Lula are clear leaders in the race, a large number of Brazilian voters have expressed strong disapproval of their campaigns.

A September poll from the research firm AtlasIntel and the publication Bloomberg found that 51.6 percent of respondents said they would refuse to vote for Lula, while 50.6 percent said the same for Flavio.

“Neither of the two main candidates are particularly convincing,” Zanini said of the withering rejection rates.

Instead, he noted that, for many of Brazil’s conservative voters, Flavio's main credential is that “he is seen as the guy who can defeat Lula".

Flavio's presidential ambitions, however, have faced a new obstacle in the final weeks of the election.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court unsealed documents revealing that Flavio is under investigation for alleged corruption, money laundering and the illegal transfer of funds abroad.

The case revolves around Flavio's interactions with Daniel Vorcaro, a disgraced former banker accused of perpetrating one of the largest fraud schemes in Brazilian history.

Brazilian media has reported that Flavio negotiated with Vorcaro to obtain millions in funding for a film about his father.

Flavio, however, has denied wrongdoing and denounced the investigation as politically motivated.

Should Flavio overcome the allegations and win the presidency, Lima — the political analyst at Medley Advisors — says his victory would “definitively cement Bolsonarismo as the undisputed leader of the Brazilian right”.

But even a loss might not break the Bolsonaro family's hold on Brazil’s right wing.

“Even if he loses, it will be by a slim margin, and he’d come out of this election strengthened, potentially setting himself up for another run in 2030," said Zanini, the columnist.

“It would be a defeat for Bolsonarismo, sure, but it wouldn’t be a death blow.”