Despite Flávio Bolsonaro losing Brazil’s presidential election last month and fleeing the country, his allies are seeking to consolidate power.
Bolsonaro’s party, the Partido Liberal (PL), secured the biggest Senate presence for any party since 1985 in the concurrent congressional elections in October.
The contest for the Senate presidency – which will be decided in February – represents an early test of their ability to turn electoral gains into political power, and the campaign has already begun.
At the centre of the struggle are Davi Alcolumbre, the incumbent Senate president from the centre-right União Brasil party, and Rogério Marinho, a close ally of former president Jair Bolsonaro.
While Alcolumbre has maintained a pragmatic relationship with Lula’s government, Marinho wants to consolidate the right’s growing influence, including by advancing proposals for an amnesty for Bolsonaro and impeachment proceedings against Supreme Court justices.
The contest will be decided by Brazil’s 81 senators in a secret ballot in Brasília on 1 February 2027, with both camps already campaigning to secure the 41 votes needed for victory.
A November study by ARX Investimentos found that, after the PL achieved the most seats in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, the right-wing and centre-right parties will together hold 292 of the 513 seats in the Chamber and 51 of the Senate’s 81 seats when the new Congress takes office in February.
If the right-wing and centre-right parties all unite behind a single candidate, they could secure more than the necessary 41 votes without needing to negotiate across political divisions.
For Mariana Lacerda Real, a former deputy chair of an environmentalist party in São Paulo who previously worked in Vice-President Geraldo Alckmin’s state administration, the leadership of the Senate is an immediate concern.
Of all the challenges faced by Lula in his new term, the first priority “will be to elect a president of the Senate that will work together with the government”, she told Brazil Reports.
Lacerda added that the makeup of the Senate could cause problems beyond ordinary legislation; Lula’s appointments to the Supreme Federal Court, for example, will need senators’ approval.
Karina Flosi, a 44-year-old mother of three who identifies as centre-right, is skeptical that Lula will be able to achieve much with the new Congress, predicting that it will be “extremely difficult”.
“Lula already struggled enormously to get his agenda through Congress during his previous term. Many proposals were blocked, delayed or significantly watered down, despite constant negotiations and concessions,” she told Brazil Reports.
“And Congress doesn’t even need to vote against his proposals to obstruct his government. They can simply refuse to bring them to a vote. With the PL now even stronger, I see little reason to expect things to get any easier.”
Leif Westersahl Magalhães, a 35-year-old former service designer who previously supported Jair Bolsonaro but voted for Lula in the October elections, takes a more optimistic view. He hopes the balance of power between the government and Congress will encourage the two sides to work together.
“With luck we will have a balanced government,” he told Brazil Reports, expressing confidence in Lula’s “street smarts”, illustrated by his appointment of Vice-President Geraldo Alckmin, whose centre-right background “could make some room for talks with the centre and the centre-right”.
Yet Magalhães also expressed doubt that “the government will be able to swing votes from PL” and said “in my head, most things won’t pass congress. Unless they are highly visible, no big changes will happen.”
For both Flosi and Magalhães, the radicalization of the right represents a significant risk to Lula’s government and the democratic processes of Brazil’s Congress.
Magalhães described the PL as “the evangelist crazy right” and said “one of the problems I see with the right here is that the most reasonable parties are gone.”
In a similar vein, Flosi told Brazil Reports that “as for support (for Lula) from centre-right voters like myself, I doubt it will make much difference. The Brazilian right has become so radicalized that anyone who voted for Lula is automatically labelled a leftist or even a communist, regardless of their actual political beliefs. To the PL and its supporters, voting for Lula makes you the enemy. I don’t see much room for consensus when polarization runs this deep.”
The divisions within the right are already playing out in the race for the Senate presidency. Tereza Cristina, Bolsonaro’s former agriculture minister and a senator for the Progressistas (PP), is also seeking the position, although she and Marinho are reportedly in talks to avoid splitting the conservative vote.
Whether the right can unite behind a single candidate could prove decisive in February’s election.
With conservative and centre-right parties holding a majority of Senate seats, the contest will be an early test of whether Lula can build the alliances needed to govern – or whether the opposition can turn its electoral gains into a more formidable obstacle to his fourth term.
Featured image description: Lula addresses the COP31 climate conference.
Credit: Ricardo Stuckert/Presidency of Brazil via X
The post Eyes turn to Brazil Senate president race as Lula reckons with Congress dominated by right appeared first on Brazil Reports.