From the jaws of defeat: how Brazil defied the Donroe Doctrine – by Carlos Martinez
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been re-elected president of Brazil. In the second round of the presidential election on 25 October, he defeated the far-right Flávio Bolsonaro – son of the jailed former president Jair Bolsonaro – by 51.8 percent to 48.2 percent, a margin of over 4 million votes. Three weeks earlier, Bolsonaro had led the first round by 47 percent to 45. Lula thus becomes the first candidate in modern Brazilian history to lose the first round of a presidential election and go on to win the second.
“Brazil is no one’s backyard”, Lula told a jubilant crowd in São Paulo on election night, echoing his address to the United Nations General Assembly a month earlier. The phrase highlights that this election took place on the front line in the global struggle between a declining US-led imperialist order and a rising multipolar world.
Defying the odds
The first round, held on 4 October, dealt a severe blow to the left: Flávio Bolsonaro finished ahead in the presidential vote, and the right and far right made major gains in Congress. Of the 54 Senate seats contested, 34 went to the right or far right, among them Michelle and Carlos Bolsonaro, the former president’s wife and second son. The quasi-fascist Liberal Party became the largest party in the Chamber of Deputies, with 121 seats to the Workers’ Party’s (PT) 70.
Capital delivered its verdict the following morning: the Brazilian real rose 4.2 percent against the dollar and the São Paulo stock exchange jumped almost 8 percent to a record high, as investors bet on a Bolsonaro government that would “mount rapid spending cuts”.
How were the PT and its allies able to produce such a dramatic turnaround in just three weeks? The most important element was mass mobilisation. Trade unions, students, social movements and oppressed communities mobilised on a scale not seen for decades, with rallies, door-knocking and a concerted effort to reach the more than 30 million Brazilians who had abstained in the first round. As the PT campaigner Isabel dos Anjos Leandro put it in an interview between the two rounds: “The third-placed candidate in this year’s election is abstention”.
The government also gave people something concrete to fight for. Ten days before the run-off, the Senate approved, by 75 votes to one, a reform that reduces the 6-day working week to 5 and cuts the maximum working week from 44 hours to 40 with no loss of pay – benefiting some 37 million workers. Lula also announced a ban on online gambling, which was legalised in 2018 and left unregulated under Jair Bolsonaro; gambling addiction has since driven a substantial transfer of wealth from poor to rich.
The choice facing voters became abundantly clear: on the one hand, workers’ rights, sovereignty and democracy; on the other, austerity, Trump and the militias.
The victory was achieved in the face of serious obstacles. In the final days of the campaign, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression reported that “accounts linked to one side of the presidential race were disproportionately curtailed” on platforms owned by Meta, and Brazil’s electoral court ruled that the company would be fined $200,000 a day until it could show it was treating the candidates equally. On polling day itself, public transport was suspended in several cities, and polls were held open for an extra two hours. Bolsonaro, who had promised to respect the result, is now demanding its annulment.
If capital celebrated the first round, it mourned the second. On the morning after Lula’s victory, the São Paulo stock exchange fell 17 percent, triggering an automatic suspension of trading for the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic. It was the steepest fall since the political crisis of 1992, and the real suffered its biggest drop against the dollar in more than 30 years. “Markets were broadly positioned for a Bolsonaro victory,” one Julius Baer analyst explained. What investors object to is Lula’s insistence that any fiscal adjustment must not fall on the poorest households. Brazil’s working class voted for one programme; the financial markets bet on another.
What was at stake
The stakes in this election could hardly have been higher, on several fronts.
For Brazilian democracy: Flávio Bolsonaro had promised to amend the 1988 Constitution (which marked the country’s return to democracy after 21 years of military dictatorship); overhaul the judiciary; and go after the Supreme Court that convicted his father of plotting a coup. With the next president set to nominate several Supreme Court justices, and with a Congress already dominated by the right, a Bolsonaro victory would have meant, in Isabel dos Anjos Leandro’s words, “a reversal of the checks and balances we’ve had since 1988”.
For Brazil’s working class: a Bolsonaro government would have meant austerity, deregulation and an attack on the gains of recent years – from Brazil’s removal from the UN Hunger Map to the expansion of Bolsa Família and the reduction of the six-day working week.
For the planet: under Lula, annual deforestation in the Amazon has decreased by approximately 71 percent; Carbon Brief estimates that at least 20,000 square kilometres of forest are still standing as a result. Flávio Bolsonaro, a climate sceptic, had promised agribusiness and mining a free hand.
Brazil in the crosshairs
Of all the elections in the Americas this year, this was the one whose outcome mattered most to Washington – and the one it has worked systematically to influence.
In July 2025, the Trump administration announced tariffs of up to 50 percent on Brazilian goods, explicitly tying their removal to the release of Jair Bolsonaro, whose conviction Trump branded a “witch hunt”. It imposed Magnitsky sanctions on Alexandre de Moraes, the Supreme Court justice who presided over his trial. In May this year, it designated two Brazilian criminal organisations as “foreign terrorist organisations” – a move that Lula’s foreign policy adviser Celso Amorim warned could provide a pretext for military intervention.
According to the Guardian, the State Department earmarked a $1 million grant for a project titled 'Countering Lawfare and Censorship in Brazil', supporting groups campaigning against the Supreme Court. And serious questions have been raised about foreign money reaching Flávio Bolsonaro’s campaign through Rockbridge, a network created in the orbit of US Vice President JD Vance.
Brazil’s own intelligence agency rated US pressure on the election at a “critical level”.
The Donroe Doctrine
This interference is but the latest application of an openly declared doctrine, dubbed by critics the 'Donroe Doctrine'. The US National Security Strategy published last December promises to “assert and enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine”, and to “reward and encourage the region’s governments, political parties, and movements broadly aligned with our principles and strategy”.
Some analysts interpreted the document as a retreat into Washington’s traditional backyard. The criminal war on Iran, launched in February, put paid to that notion. The real purpose is to consolidate the Americas as a secure rear base for a long campaign against China, Russia, Iran and the peoples of the oppressed countries of the world.
We have already seen what this 'Trump Corollary' looks like in practice. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has been kidnapped, along with First Combatant Cilia Flores, and Washington is seeking to take control of Venezuela’s oil. Cuba faces a genocidal energy siege. In the 18 months before Brazil’s election, seven right-wing or far-right candidates won presidential elections in Latin America, several of them with overt US backing: a $20 billion bailout for Milei in Argentina, with Trump warning that “if he loses, we are not going to be generous”; a pardon for a convicted cocaine trafficker two days before the Honduran vote. Trump himself describes this wave of right-wing and quasi-fascist governments as “lots of people that I got elected”.
Brazil was to be the biggest prize of all. It is the largest economy in Latin America, a founder of BRICS, and one of the few countries in the region to have refused to join Trump’s so-called Shield of the Americas – a coalition of right-wing governments committed to “using lethal military force to destroy cartels and their terrorist networks”. Flávio Bolsonaro had made clear that he would sign up.
China and the international division of labour
The hybrid war against China sits at the heart of the Donroe Doctrine. The National Security Strategy openly commits the US to “deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces… or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere”. Five days after it was published, China issued its own policy paper on Latin America, calling for the region to be a “zone of peace” built on sovereignty and non-interference. Two documents; two profoundly different visions.
China has been Brazil’s largest trading partner since 2009. It buys more than a quarter of Brazil’s exports, and bilateral trade reached a record $171 billion last year. The Chinese manufacturer BYD is now building electric vehicles at Camaçari, in Bahia, on the very site Ford abandoned in 2021. The two countries are cooperating on critical minerals, satellites, fertilisers and artificial intelligence.
Contrast this with Washington’s tariffs, which hit Brazil’s manufactured goods while exempting coffee, beef, orange juice and oil. The US wants Brazil to remain a supplier of raw materials, while China is helping it to build its own industrial capacity. In other words, the US seeks to uphold the imperialist international division of labour, while China seeks to help Brazil escape it.
Flávio Bolsonaro made his own position clear at CPAC in March, offering Brazil – which holds nearly a quarter of the world’s rare earth reserves – as the 'solution' to US dependence on China for critical minerals. His campaign reportedly sent proposals to US trade officials to stop Brazil’s Pix payment system from linking up with non-Western networks. A Bolsonaro government could not simply have cut Brazil off from China – the economic relationship is far too important for that – but it would likely have slowed it, sabotaged BRICS from within, and withdrawn Brazil from the global push for peace, development and multipolarity.
History offers a sobering parallel. In 1961, Vice-President João Goulart became the first senior Latin American official to visit People’s China, meeting Mao Zedong. A month later he became president; three years later he was overthrown in a US-backed coup that ushered in 21 years of military dictatorship.
Palestine and the Trumpist–Zionist bloc
The contrast between the two candidates was particularly sharp in relation to the politics of West Asia. Lula has had the courage to call Israel’s assault on Gaza by its proper name: genocide. He recalled Brazil’s ambassador from Tel Aviv, and condemned the US–Israeli war on Iran as a violation of international law. Flávio Bolsonaro launched his candidacy in Israel, pledged to move Brazil’s embassy to Jerusalem, and was endorsed by Benjamin Netanyahu.
This is part of a broader pattern. Every one of the Trump-aligned leaders in Latin America – Milei in Argentina, Kast in Chile, Noboa in Ecuador, Asfura in Honduras, de la Espriella in Colombia, Bukele in El Salvador, Peña in Paraguay, Paz in Bolivia and Fujimori in Peru – is strongly pro-Israel. A Trumpist–Zionist bloc is being assembled across the continent. The coalition bombing Iran and arming the genocide in Gaza was the same coalition backing Bolsonaro.
Defending the victory
There are, of course, many criticisms that can be made of Lula and the PT. Some of them have merit. But it is important to understand the conditions in which the PT governs. It has never had a majority in Congress; it confronts a media landscape dominated by the right; and Brazil remains a capitalist country, in which the capitalist class remains the ruling class. Within those constraints, the current Lula government has taken Brazil off the UN Hunger Map, restored and expanded Bolsa Família, reduced the six-day working week, protected the Amazon, and refused to subordinate the country’s foreign policy to Washington.
All this in spite of the fact that the PT has faced substantially different material conditions from those of Lula’s first two terms. Between 2003 and 2010, a commodity super-cycle driven in large part by Chinese demand filled the state’s coffers, making it possible to pursue a thoroughgoing redistributive programme without directly confronting the interests of the rich. That space has narrowed sharply.
Meanwhile, although unemployment is at its lowest level since records began, in September nearly half of voters told pollsters the economy had got worse. Part of the explanation, as the Financial Times has noted, is that almost two million Brazilians now work full-time for ride-hailing and delivery apps, typically because they could find no other work.
That points to the tasks ahead. The right will now seek to destabilise the government through the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. Progressive forces will have to stay organised, stay vigilant and stay on the streets – to defend the result, to defend the Constitution, and to push the government forward. And the PT and its allies will have to rebuild their mass base. A party founded in the factories of São Paulo has to adapt to a 21st-century economy: to organise app drivers, delivery riders, informal workers and young people, and to contest the spaces – from social media to the evangelical churches – where a well-funded far right has been building its influence.
The people of Brazil have won a historic victory. This was a choice between a pro-poor, pro-democratic, pro-multipolar government and a far-right, pro-imperialist, anti-democratic one, at a moment when imperialism in crisis is reaching into its political toolbox and, from Kiev to Buenos Aires, pulling out fascism.