Brazilians will head to the polls on Sunday to elect their next president and other key legislators in Brazil’s general election. If neither candidate – Brazil’s current right wing president Jair Bolsonaro or Brazil’s former left wing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – gets 50 percent of the vote in the first round, a runoff election will take place on October 30. Election watchers in Brazil and around the world are concerned Bolsonaro will contest the election results should he lose and January 6th-like violence across the country will ensue. 

 

What is the likelihood Bolsonaro and his supporters will stage a coup-like event in Brazil? And, how has the Brazilian right been inspired or influenced by the events of January 6th in Washington? Is America’s example, for good and bad, really that powerful in Brazil? Foreign Policy’s Catherine Osborn joins the Eurasia Group Foundation’s Mark Hannah to dig into all of this and more as the world awaits the results of the Western hemisphere's second largest democracy’s presidential election. 

 

Catherine Osborn is the writer of Foreign Policy’s weekly Latin America Brief. She is a print and radio journalist based in Rio de Janeiro.

 

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