Lula’s UN address points to two starkly different visions of Brazilian nationalism ahead of crucial election

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President of Brazil Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva speaks during the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

When Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva addressed the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 22, 2026, the Brazilian president posed a question to both an international and domestic audience: Who is to decide Brazil’s future?

It is an unusually pressing question this year. Voters in Latin America’s largest nation head to the polls on Oct. 4, marking the culmination of a campaign defined by a greater degree of U.S. interference than any election in recent memory. Although President Donald Trump has established a surprising personal rapport with the left-wing elder statesman, the U.S. administration doesn’t hide its preference for Flávio Bolsonaro. He is the son of the disgraced former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is currently serving a lengthy sentence after being convicted of attempting to overturn the results of the 2022 election.

Lula has responded to U.S. pressure – which has included tariffs, sanction threats and revoked visas – by making sovereignty a central theme of his campaign, arguing that Brazil’s political destiny must be set by Brazilians rather than what he sees as a capricious foreign power.

Lula’s language has been uncompromising and often colorful. At a campaign rally outside the capital, Brasília, on Sept. 16, Lula declared Brazil would not tolerate politicians who “by day display the national flag and at night get on all fours for the United States.”

He has denounced members of the Bolsonaro family as traitors conspiring against the national interest in pursuit of personal gain. Such rhetoric has contributed to Lula’s small but steady lead in most polls.

The underlying argument predates the current confrontation with Washington — and it’s also older than Lula himself, who would be sworn in at the age of 81 should he prevail in the national vote. Nationalism today might be “the master concept of the radical right,” as one scholar of extremism has put it, but it has never belonged exclusively to reactionaries in Brazil.

Dueling notions of the nation

As I document in my new book, “Claiming the Nation,” Brazilian political movements both left and right throughout the 20th century competed to claim the nationalist mantle. In so doing, they argued about who was best positioned to ensure the nation lived up to its extraordinary natural potential while ascribing very different meanings to concepts like sovereignty and the national interest.

One of these political traditions – which can broadly be grouped as progressive nationalist – understood national sovereignty as the capacity to determine Brazil’s economic and political development on its own terms. For its proponents, a country could not be fully independent while its resources and institutions remained excessively dependent on decisions made elsewhere.

Supporters of Flávio Bolsonaro march with an effigy of U.S. President Donald Trump holding a doll depicting Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as a prisoner. AP Photo/Andre Penner

A more conservative opposing strain of nationalism emerged after World War II in response to Brazil’s first era of mass democratic politics and presented Brazil’s failures less as a consequence of foreign dependence than of its own populist political class. This tradition viewed progressive nationalism as using promises of reform and demagogic tirades against scapegoats abroad to distract from their own corruption and irresponsibility.

These two nationalist traditions offered starkly different diagnoses of Brazil’s problems and divergent political prescriptions.

While Lula’s current appeals to sovereignty belong to the progressive tradition, they should not be mistaken for anti-Americanism. Brazil’s progressive nationalists have historically sought greater room for maneuver in the international system precisely because they understood national autonomy to depend on the ability to engage the world without becoming subordinate to any single power.

In that vein, Brazil has cultivated relations across ideological divides while seeking a larger voice in shaping the international order. Its efforts to assert that role, whether by pursuing a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council or offering to mediate seemingly intractable geopolitical disputes, have often been dismissed as naive or misguided. As one commentator put it: “To behave as though Brazil could wield global power comparable to China’s, or even India’s, is pure folly.”

Yet such dismissals overlook the foreign-policy ambitions of a large and complex nation that has historically aspired to an important global role. Sovereignty, in this formulation, is less a demand for withdrawal than a claim to political agency.

The Bolsonaro reaction

Flávio Bolsonaro, by contrast, criticizes Brazilian democratic institutions – particularly the Supreme Court and the electoral system – as obstacles to restoring the country’s political order.

Flávio Bolsonaro rides on a man’s shoulders during his campaign rally at the site where his father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, was injured by a stabbing attack in 2018. AP Photo/Bruna Prado

From this perspective, a closer relationship with the U.S. is perfectly compatible with national renewal. If sovereignty for Lula means defending Brazil’s freedom to chart its own course in the world, for Bolsonaristas it means reclaiming Brazil from the domestic forces he and his supporters blame for its decline.

Flávio Bolsonaro’s main target is the judiciary that prosecuted and ultimately imprisoned his father. His promise to free Jair Bolsonaro is presented not as a rejection of the rule of law but as part of a broader pledge to reform institutions that, in his telling, have exceeded their proper authority.

The irony is that, notwithstanding his nationalist posturing, a Flávio Bolsonaro electoral victory would strengthen the transnational far-right current that many critics see Trump as embodying, extending the reach of a political project deeply hostile to popular sovereignty abroad.

Brasília by way of New York

In his U.N. speech, Lula insisted that powerful countries cannot dictate the political choices of weaker ones. That message comes weeks after a leaked confidential report from Brazil’s national intelligence service described the U.S. pressure campaign as having reached a “critical” level.

Shared with the Justice Ministry and the Superior Electoral Court, Brazil’s supreme body on elections, the…