Lula’s election lead narrows under US Terrorist label
Washington designated Brazil's two biggest gangs terrorist groups after Flávio Bolsonaro asked for it in the Oval Office, and Lula's poll lead is now shrinking.
Brazilians go to the polls on 4 October having been told by their own president that a foreign government is trying to pick the winner. The US State Department’s terrorist designation of Brazil’s two largest crime factions has become the central fact of that argument, and a poll published this week suggests it is working. President Lula’s run-off lead over Flávio Bolsonaro has narrowed from 12.5 points in June to 8.9 points in the CNT/MDA survey carried out between 5 and 9 August, the sharpest sign yet that a decision made in Washington is reshaping a vote in Brazil.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the designation of Comando Vermelho and Primeiro Comando da Capital as Specially Designated Global Terrorists on 28 May, with the Foreign Terrorist Organization listing taking effect on 5 June. The two factions are real and violent, and nobody in Brasília disputes that. What Lula disputes is who asked for the label, and why it landed in the middle of his re-election campaign.
The answer is on the record. Two days before Rubio’s announcement, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro sat in the Oval Office with Donald Trump and asked him directly to designate the groups. “While Lula came to the White House to lobby for drug traffickers, I came to do exactly the opposite,” he said, contrasting his own visit with a separate trip Lula had made to Washington. It was not a security briefing. It was a campaign pitch, delivered to a foreign president, by the son of a man serving a 27-year prison sentence for trying to overturn the last election Lula won.
That sentence is the reason the Bolsonaro family has spent the past year working Washington rather than the Brazilian electorate. Jair Bolsonaro was convicted by Brazil’s Supreme Court in September 2025, four votes to one, of plotting a coup after his 2022 defeat, including an alleged plan to assassinate the incoming president. It was the first coup conviction in Brazilian history, and it left his family’s political project without its candidate. His son Eduardo relocated to the United States and spent the trial lobbying Washington to sanction the Brazilian officials prosecuting his father, work that earned him his own conviction in June 2026, four years and two months for coercion, and at least eight years barred from office. Days after that sentence, Eduardo called publicly for the US to re-sanction Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who had already been sanctioned once, in July 2025, before the measure was lifted that December.
A US terrorist label enters Brazil’s election
Lula has not pretended the gangs are harmless. “They are terrorists for Brazilians, for the people who live in the urban periphery,” he said after the designation, and his foreign-affairs adviser Celso Amorim called organised crime “an evil that must be fought” and international cooperation on it welcome. What Brazil’s government rejected was the manner of it: a unilateral US listing, sought by a rival domestic politician, that it says treats the country as what Lula called “a banana republic”. Brasília had already turned down a formal US request to classify the gangs as terrorist organisations before Washington went ahead anyway.
The distinction matters because it blocks the easy caricature of this story as a government going soft on crime. It is not. It is a government objecting to Washington outsourcing a domestic law-enforcement judgment to a losing presidential candidate’s son, then handing the win to his brother’s campaign.
The precedent hanging over that objection is not abstract. On 3 January, US forces seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in a raid on Caracas, flew them to the USS Iwo Jima and on to New York on narco-terrorism charges, with Trump saying Washington would “run the country” pending a transition. Brazilian officials citing that operation as a reason for concern are not being paranoid; they are reading the only recent precedent Washington has set for what “extraordinary measures” against a Latin American government can mean.
Who pays for the designation
The terrorism label carries consequences that outlast the campaign. Any Brazilian bank or company with a dollar transaction touching CV or PCC, however indirectly, now faces US sanctions and material-support exposure, and international law firms have spent the summer advising Brazilian clients to overhaul their compliance screening. That sits alongside a second front Washington opened in July: 25% tariffs on Brazilian goods, justified in part by objections to Pix, the free, central-bank-run instant-payments system used by roughly four in five Brazilians, which undercuts Visa and Mastercard. Two pressure points, opened weeks apart, both landing on a government mid-campaign.
The tariffs have not obviously worked in the Bolsonaros’ favour. Al Jazeera reported in July that the trade measures appeared to be strengthening Lula’s position against Flávio, not weakening it, a reminder that Washington’s interventions do not move Brazilian opinion in only one direction. The terrorism designation and the poll movement that followed it are correlated, not proven to be causal; the economy and campaign dynamics plausibly matter too. But the timeline, the person who asked for the listing, and the effect he said he wanted are not in dispute.
None of this was decided by the people who actually live with Comando Vermelho and Primeiro Comando da Capital. The residents of Brazil’s urban peripheries, the ones Lula named when he called the gangs terrorists, get no vote in Washington and no say in a compliance regime drawn up by American lawyers. They will still be there policing the consequences long after the 4 October ballots are counted. Flávio Bolsonaro asked Donald Trump for a favour in the Oval Office, and eight and a half points is what it is currently worth.
