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Lula’s UN address points to two starkly different visions of Brazilian nationalism ahead of crucial election
Lula’s UN address points to two starkly different visions of Brazilian nationalism ahead of crucial election. Originally published by The Conversation.
By Andre Pagliarini, Assistant Professor of History and International Studies, Louisiana State University · 2026-09-22T17:20:21.164Z
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 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/01/us trump rubio meddling brazil election than any election in recent memory. Although President Donald Trump has established a surprising personal rapport https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8r8gxjxz10o 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 https://apnews.com/article/jair bolsonaro sentence coup home bf37e7ee479349cb9c7a00339e984a83 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 https://responsiblestatecraft.org/trump brazil tariffs/ 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 https://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/2026/09/16/lula critica eduardo e flavio bolsonaro de dia mostra a bandeira nacional e de noite vai ficar de quatro para os estados unidos.ghtml 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 https://www.congressoemfoco.com.br/noticia/120202/lula chama familia bolsonaro de traidora da patria por atuar nos eua 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 https://www.reuters.com/3fec1b0a85a0/world/americas/brazils lula would beat bolsonaro by 1 point runoff suggests btgnexus poll 2026 09 21/ 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 https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190274559.013.2 , 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 https://www.ucpress.edu/books/claiming the nation/hardcover ,” 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 https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/20027635.pdf%20and%20https://www.jstor.org/stable/20455000?seq=1 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 https://www.bbc.com/news/world latin america 65307553 as naive or misguided https://www.foreignaffairs.com/brazil/what happened lula . As one commentator put it https://www.project syndicate.org/commentary/why lula consorting with putin and maduro by andres velasco 2023 08 : “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 https://www.reutersconnect.com/item/flavio bolsonaro gathers thousands to denounce moraes dictatorship and criticize lula/dGFnOnJldXRlcnMuY29tLDIwMjY6bmV3c21sX09XRUZWQzU1MDIxMzM0MjE3MDAx and the electoral system https://valorinternational.globo.com/politics/news/2026/07/22/flavio bolsonaro repeats debunked voting claims to ambassadors.ghtml – 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 https://www.infomoney.com.br/politica/flavio diz que buscara anistia para bolsonaro ainda durante governo de transicao/ 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 https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/colunas/monicabergamo/2026/09/abin alerta governo e tse sobre nivel critico de escalada de pressao dos eua contra o brasil nas eleicoes.shtml 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 report indicates that, for the first time in decades, foreign influence has become serious enough to warrant the attention of the institutions charged with protecting Brazil’s political and electoral system. The U.N. was an ideal stage for Lula because it allows Brazil to reassert the principles of its independent foreign policy without signaling a retreat from international engagement. That sovereignty argument has paid political dividends at home. But the campaign has increasingly been pulled back toward another elemental fault line in Brazilian politics: corruption. The crisis surrounding Banco Master https://theconversation.com/banking scandal rocks brazils politics and the countrys presidential election in october 291931 , a failed financial institution whose owner is at the center of a sprawling investigation into fraud, money laundering and political influence, has pushed the issue to the forefront of the campaign.
A Bolsonaro supporter wears a costume with Brazilian and U.S. flag motifs at a Brazilian Independence Day event on Sept. 7, 2026. AP Photo/Andre Penner Ironically, while Lula is not directly implicated in the scandal https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/brazilian top court unseals probe into multibillion dollar bank fraud 2026 09 11/ and Flávio Bolsonaro very much is https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/14/flavio bolsonaro banker film jair bolsonaro , the incumbent seems to be the one paying a political price for one of the largest financial scandals in Brazilian history. The more the campaign turns from sovereignty to corruption, the more vulnerable Lula becomes. Nor is Lula enjoying the traditional polling bump that incumbents have historically received https://www.nexojornal.com.br/story/lula pesquisa atlasintel efeito incumbencia late in the campaign. Despite relatively robust job growth and low inflation over Lula’s third term, the cost of living has been a central campaign issue dogging the president. The economy might be slowing down at exactly the wrong time for Lula’s electoral chances. Security is another top of mind issue that favors the challenger, who has promised an approach https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/brazilian voters latest eye bukele 052451783.html modeled after El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele. The pre election lines in the sand For generations, Brazilian politicians have argued over whether the country’s frustrations are best explained by forces beyond its borders or by failures within them. Washington has hardly been a neutral observer. Throughout much of the 20th century, Washington often quietly https://cebri.org/revista/en/artigo/237/brazil and the united states on a collision course intervened to shape the political choices https://doi.org/10.1111/blar.12518 available to Brazilian governments, most notably in its support https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB118/index.htm for the 1964 coup. What is unique about this election, however, is that the U.S. is taking sides so openly and in real time through hostile policy measures https://www.wola.org/analysis/brazil united states relations election/ designed to put a thumb on the scale of the country’s political debate. Sovereignty, once invoked to debate development, economic dependence and Brazil’s place in the international order, has become an immediate question of de facto political authority. Flávio Bolsonaro does not reject national sovereignty. Instead, he locates threats to that sovereignty primarily inside Brazil, in institutions and political actors he regards as having thwarted his family’s political agenda. Lula very pointedly locates the threat differently, emphasizing the ability to resist a foreign power’s undue exertions of leverage. They represent competing answers to the older question of what is needed for Brazil to remain master of its own destiny. On Oct. 4, Brazilians will determine which understanding of the national interest will guide their nation in an increasingly uncertain global order. The choice is whether Brazil’s sovereignty means charting its own course or accepting one charted, at least in part, somewhere else.
Andre Pagliarini does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.