As polls show president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva and Flavio Bolsonaro (the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro) neck and neck, next Sunday´s presidential runoff election is a test for Brazil. Mr. Bolsonaro finished the first round with a two-percentage-point lead, and his coalition won a large majority of seats in the Senate and the House of Representatives, as well as the largest number of state governorships, Brazilian democracy faces an existential threat. With democracy at stake, Brazilians must decide whether political allegiances outweigh the lessons of history. What does this pivotal moment mean for Brazilian Jewish community?

Zakhor is the Hebrew word for remember. We know where we come from. We know how it feels to be perceived as strangers, to be seen as the Other. Some of our ancestors came to Brazil fleeing antisemitic persecution and, sometimes, poverty. They sought refuge and opportunities to rebuild their lives.

The Bolsonaro family have repeatedly demonstrated their contempt and hostility toward marginalized groups: women, Black people, Indigenous peoples, and the LGBTQIA+ community. They have also shown contempt for science—which, for example, significantly increased Brazil’s death toll during Covid. Arguably, Bolsonaro´s anti-vax ideology had a broad negative impact to Brazil´s National Immunization Program, otherwise recognized as one of the largest and most successful public immunization programs in the world. 

That same government censored journalists, teachers, and culture more broadly, downgrading the Ministry of Culture to a secretariat under the Ministry of Tourism. It also contributed to deforestation on a scale never seen before. The Bolsonaro family waged a long campaign to undermine the legitimacy of Brazil´s 2022 election, questioning the use of electronic voting machines, a feature that has earned the country international recognition. After losing it to Mr. Lula, Mr. Bolsonaro supporters stormed all three branches of government on January 8, 2023, in a reenactment of the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021. Mr. Bolsonaro several members of his government, including top rank military, are imprisoned for plotting coup. His son Flavio is under investigation for corruption, money laundering and currency evasion over his alleged involvement in securing millions of dollars from Daniel Vorcaro, the banker at the center of the Banco Master scandal, one of Brazil’s largest banking fraud cases, to finance a film about his father.

We must also remember that Jair Bolsonaro has openly praised torturers from the period of Brazil’s civil-military dictatorship. In 2005, then a state legislative, Flavio Bolsonaro awarded a medal to a former police officer who was alleged to have run Rio de Janeiro´s most lethal and secretive phalanx of hired guns. While presenting themselves as patriots, the Bolsonaro family has demonstrated alignment and often subservience to far-right projects proliferating around the world, most notably to Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. Flavio Bolsonaro has declared that, if elected, he´d create a transition team in collaboration with US government. He has also declared that he will move the Brazilian embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.  And in 2025, as the result of articulations by Eduardo Bolsonaro, brother of the presidential candidate, Mr. Trump has sanctioned Brazil´s Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes under the Magnitsky act, and imposed 50% tariffs on Brazilian goods.  The dual measures were justified by Mr. Trump as an answer to what he called persecution of his ally Jair Bolsonaro. For this and other reasons, so many Brazilians fear that Trump and his Administration might try to interfere with October elections.

One can criticize Mr. Lula for many reasons, but over the course of his three terms in office, he has reduced poverty and inequality through an extensive network of social programs that have provided a minimum income for the poorest, expanded public healthcare, and broadened access to public and private universities for students from public schools. And although his current term has faced external and fiscal challenges, his administration has delivered low unemployment, inflation under relative control, and economic growth.

Many Brazilian Jews have expressed growing concern about antisemitism and have attributed its recent rise, at least in part, to Mr. Lula. It is noteworthy that Palestinian terrorist group Hamas has congratulated Lula on election victory and also that his Vice-President Geraldo Alckmin was present at the inauguration of Iran’s new president, and an image of him sitting next to Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas. These facts, and especially the comparison Mr. Lula made between the Shoah and Israel’s genocide in Gaza have sounded the alarm among some Brazilian Jews. Yet, the increase in antisemitism in Brazil coincides with a much broader global escalation that cannot be explained by Lula’s presidency. 

Lula has repeatedly affirmed Israel’s right to exist and to live in security; he supports a two-state solution; he explicitly condemned Hamas’s terrorist attacks on October 7 and demanded the release of the hostages. On the other side, Jair Bolsonaro’s government saw a string of incidents involving the appropriation and trivialization of Nazi symbols and references. In January 2020, Mr. Bolsonaros´s Secretary of Culture paraphrased a 1933 Joseph Goebbels´speech in a TV transmission: “Brazilian art in the next decade will be heroic and national”. The background music was Richard Wagner´s “Lohengrin”, said to be Hitler´s favorite opera. In May 2020, while death tolls by Covid surged and Bolsonaro reiterated his opposition to lockdowns, the official X account of the Government's Communications Secretariat used phrasing that echoed the motto displayed at the entrance to Nazi concentration camps. "Work, unity, and truth will set us free," the post read.

In the 2026 campaign, Flávio Bolsonaro’s party shared in WhatsApp an image of their candidate which showed similarity to the design of Benito Mussolini´s fascist party propaganda from the 1930s. The Bolsonaro family echo the leaders who inspire them: Jean-Marie Le Pen, who owned a Doberman named Adolf and referred to the gas chambers as “a detail in the history of the Second World War”; as well as Elon Musk, who performed the Nazi salute at Donald Trump´s inauguration in 2025.

It is clear that declaring unconditional support for Israel, as the Bolsonaro family and their supporters appear to do, is no guarantee of a safe-conduct against antisemitism. On the contrary: Mr. Bolsonaro´s election could fuel antisemitism in Brazil, as we have seen during his father´s term. 

As Amós Oz used to say, Jewish civilization has been a lasting multi-generational debate about interpretation and counterinterpretation, a civilization of doubt and argument, a people that highly praises free open exchange of ideas. As Jews, we know what happens when a society begins to decide which groups’ rights may be disregarded, how this leads to prejudice and violence. If our history has taught us anything, it is that no amount of integration can protect us from an authoritarian project. 

Mr. Trump´s second Presidency proved to be even more radical than his first one. There´s enough evidence that Mr. Bolsonaro is as radical as his father and has already promised that if elected, he will amnesty him and his supporters.  If he wins the runoff elections, chances are that Brazilian democracy will not prevail and that hatred to Otherness will abound. That is why we recall and repeat the Yiddish motto of resistance: Mir zaynen do! We are here!

Inês Mindlin Lafer is a Brazilian philanthropist and social sector leader whose work reflects a deep commitment to Jewish cultural heritage, community engagement, human rights, and social justice. She is the director of the Betty and Jacob Lafer Institute, a family philanthropic organization supporting initiatives focused on democracy, public policy, human rights, and reducing inequalities in Brazil. She is the founder of Confluentes, an initiative promoting collaboration and collective action; and former chair of GIFE’s board(2021-2025), a leading Brazilian network of philanthropic organizations. Trained as a psychologist, she holds a master’s degree in Public Administration from Fundação Getulio Vargas and has pursued further studies in Psychoanalysis (PUC-SP/COGEAE)  and Human Rights (Law School of São Paulo University – USP). 

Lia Vainer Schucman holds a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of São Paulo (USP) and is a professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina. She has published several articles exploring Jewish identity, antisemitism, collective memory, and the intersections of Judaism, race and belonging. Her engagement with Jewish identity began with her master's research on the construction of Jewish identity in Florianópolis, completed in 2006. Drawing partly on her own family's history of Holocaust survival, she has explored the relationships between Jewish memory, belonging, antisemitism, and antiracist activism.Through newspaper articles, interviews, and collective manifestos, she has advocated for democracy, human rights, and an approach to Jewish identity grounded in social justice. She co-authored opinion pieces in Folha de S.Paulo, including “Solução para a causa palestina não é a eliminação de Israel” (2023) and “Apoiar a causa palestina é lutar contra o antissemitismo” (2024). In 2022, she took part in the conference “Challenges to democracy in Brazil: Racism, antisemitism, and fundamentalism”, promoted by IBI (Instituto Brasil Israel) and held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is a member of the Deliberative council at Casa do Povo, a non-profit cultural association founded in 1946, through the collective efforts of a politically engaged portion of the Jewish community then thought of as “progressive,” hailing from Eastern Europe, most of them resided in the neighborhood of Bom Retiro, in São Paulo. 

Michel Gherman is a Brazilian historian and sociologist specializing in Jewish studies, contemporary antisemitism, Zionism, and political extremism. He serves as a professor in the Department of Sociology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and as coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Center for Jewish Studies (NIEJ/UFRJ). Professionally, Gherman acts as a research fellow associated with the Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism as well as Hebrew University’s Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism. His scholarly publications focus on the intersections of Jewish identity, Holocaust memory, and modern far-right politics; notable works include “O início do Sionismo no Brasil: ambiguidades da História” (2019) and “O Não-Judeu Judeu: A Tentativa de Colonização do Judaísmo pelo Bolsonarismo” (2022).

Ricardo Teperman holds a Ph.D, in Anthropology from the University of São Paulo (USP) and is a publisher at Zahar/Companhia das Letras, where he oversees a diverse nonfiction list spanning history, politics, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and science, working with leading scholars, journalists, intellectuals, and public thinkers. He began his career in publishing in 2011, working as editor at Novos Estudos Cebrap, the academic journal of Brazil´s leading think-tanks Cebrap (Centro Brasileiro de Análise e Planejamento) and at Revista Osesp (São Paulo Symphony Orchestra publications). He has published articles on Jewishness, memory and politics in vehicles such as revista piauí and Nossa voz. In 2018, he took part in the conference “International perspectives on Multiculturalism, Inclusion and Alterity: Brazil, Israel and Palestine”, promoted by IBI (Instituto Brasil Israel) and held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is also member of the Deliberative council at Casa do Povo.