At first glance, Brazil’s current election looks like a repeat of 2022, when Lula da Silva beat Jair Bolsonaro 50.90% to 49.10%. On 4 October, the former president’s son Flávio Bolsonaro took 47.03% of the vote and Lula 45.16%. Both camps are competing on 'protection', but they define it differently. Lula sees protection as financial support for low-income families. Flávio Bolsonaro offers protection from crime. This clash, more than the dispute over the size of the welfare state, helps explain the first-round result.

Lula’s bet: protection through money

Between November 2025 and June 2026, the Brazilian government added about 690,000 new families to Bolsa Família (net of those who left), a programme providing financial aid to poor families. This followed a 2025 review of the rolls that removed roughly 2.1 million beneficiaries. By June, 19.35 million families received the benefit (an average of R$677.66 each), and the programme cost R$13.1 billion a month. All of this happened against a backdrop of near-record-low unemployment: the jobless rate had fallen to 5.3% in the three months to August, the lowest reading in the PNAD Contínua series.

On 17 September, 17 days before the first round, Lula announced a 15% increase in payments. The minimum benefit rose from R$600 to R$691. The Renda da Cidadania component (a payment for each family member) rose from R$142 to R$164. Payments at the new rates begin on 19 October, in the gap between the two rounds of voting. The measure will cost the budget R$5.8 billion this year and about R$22 billion in 2027. The government denies any electoral motive and says the increase merely makes up for the value payments have lost to inflation.

Payments are no longer the division

Whatever the stated motive, such timing is not new, and it follows a clear logic. As Cesar Zucco Jr has shown, Bolsa Família boosts support for the incumbent. The number of Bolsa Família recipients grew in five of the six election cycles since the programme began. Jair Bolsonaro expanded it in 2022, when it was called Auxílio Brasil, and raised payments from R$400 to R$600 weeks before that election, initially only until December. The rolls grew from 14.5 million families in 2021 to 21.6 million in 2022, with roughly three million families added in the three months immediately before the vote. R$600 became the permanent minimum when Lula relaunched Bolsa Família in 2023.

Welfare beneficiaries remain among Lula's strongest supporters, with 59% planning to back him in the 25 October runoff elections

Flávio Bolsonaro accepts this consensus. He promises to keep the programme as an 'acquired right' and wants beneficiaries who take formal jobs to keep their benefit for longer than current rules allow. He has criticised Lula’s latest increase but says he would keep the new amount. Cash transfers no longer divide left and right. Even so, beneficiaries remain among Lula’s strongest supporters: in a late-September Quaest poll, 59% of them will back him in the runoff, against 27% for Flávio Bolsonaro.

Bolsonaro’s bet: protection from crime

Crime and violence have become the central issues for right-wing politicians. In a September 2026 Quaest poll, 70% of Brazilians said violence had risen sharply over the past two years. Most of them (73%) said crime had become both more frequent and more violent. And 67% of all respondents think that punishments have become more lenient.

Crime and violence are central to Flávio Bolsonaro’s campaign. He proposes 'mano dura' measures that include lowering the age of criminal responsibility and expanding the prison system

In this context, Flávio Bolsonaro’s answer is tougher punishment. He has introduced at least 36 security-related bills in Congress. He supports expanding the prison system and lowering the age of criminal responsibility – a cause he took up in 2019, when he proposed reducing it to 16 in general and to 14 for heinous crimes, torture, drug trafficking, terrorism and criminal organisation. Research on crime in Latin America finds that victims are more likely to support iron-fist (mano dura) measures, and that people who feel unsafe in their neighbourhood are more likely to back punitive candidates – even if they are on the left.

Why Europe should pay attention

Europe’s far right also offers protection, but selectively. This is known as welfare chauvinism: generous benefits for native-born citizens and reduced ones for immigrants. Such parties and politicians build a dualistic welfare state that draws a sharp line between those who 'deserve' support and those who do not. Giorgia Meloni’s government, for example, curtailed Italy’s citizens’ income (the Reddito di cittadinanza) for employable recipients in 2023 and, from 2024, replaced it with the Assegno di inclusione, which is largely limited to households with children, disabled or older members. Data from 17 European countries show that the rise of far-right parties strengthens welfare-chauvinist attitudes. When immigration dominates political debate, these attitudes also become more polarised between supporters of different parties.

In Brazil, the 'outsider' is not the immigrant but the criminal. The state shelters those it deems deserving and punishes the rest

In Brazil, the 'outsider' is not the immigrant but the criminal. The logic, however, is the same. Protection becomes conditional and morally loaded: the state shelters those it deems deserving and punishes the rest. Brazil shows that this logic does not require a debate about immigration. It needs only a sense of insecurity and a party willing to name its source. It also needs a left whose answer on security is less clear than its answer on welfare.

Two promises, one ballot

With a single announcement, Lula can raise welfare payments by 15%. On 25 October, however, he will struggle to convince voters that the state will keep them safe on the streets. Lula is not without a security offer: his government has announced the R$11 billion 'Brasil Contra o Crime Organizado' programme and proposed the PEC da Segurança Pública, a constitutional amendment that would write the Unified Public Security System into the constitution and update federal police competences. But the amendment is stalled in the Senate, and the offer has yet to cut through with voters. In the first round, abstention reached 21.08%, the highest since 1998, so both sides must now win back the trust of tired voters. Whoever wins on 25 October, welfare politics in Brazil is no longer a left-versus-right dispute over the size of public spending. It is about whom the state protects, and from what.

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