A Runoff Election That Will Be Felt Way Beyond Brazil’s Borders

Earlier this month, Flávio Bolsonaro—the Trump-allied son of jailed former Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro and a climate change denier—took the largest vote share in the first round of the presidential election. But he fell short of an outright win, meaning he’ll face the leftist incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in a second round on October 25, 2026.

Since the first-round results, I’ve seen it all: AI-generated memes, fights between friends, millions taking the streets, and Brazilian journalism struggling to keep up with the misinformation spread by Flávio Bolsonaro on one of the country’s biggest television networks.

I felt people’s disappointment with the media. In the presidential debate, there were no tools to separate fact from fiction, like live fact-checking. The outdated format largely followed the original version in 1989, when Brazilians voted for their president for the first time since the end of the country’s brutal military dictatorship.

Decisions made in Brazil shape our collective future. About 60% of the Amazon rainforest is in Brazil. The forest stores an estimated 150 billion to 200 billion tons of carbon. If released, this will make the extreme—sometimes fatal—weather events we’ve experienced recently much more likely.

Experts predict that Bolsonaro would follow in his father’s footsteps and aim to dismantle environmental regulations, signaling to his powerful agribusiness support base that the Amazon is open for business.

Lula, meanwhile, has a mixed record on Amazon conservation. Recent official figures put the rate of deforestation in the first half of 2026 at its lowest in a decade. Yet, his administration has continued to open up new parts of the forest to oil and gas drilling, as well as offshore plots that affect the mouth of the iconic river and Indigenous people living upstream.

Tropical forest reporting supported by the Pulitzer Center has brought to light vital information to better understand the scale of critical threats to the Amazon rainforest, and the actors and organizations responsible.

With the fate of the Amazon hanging in the balance, Brazilians face a critical choice this Sunday, and the results will be felt way beyond Brazil's borders.

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Fernanda Buffa
 Editor, Environmental Investigations