Brazil’s Bolsonaros Are Back

WSJ What’s News

This episode covers a major rightward shift in Brazilian politics as Flávio Bolsonaro leads incumbent Lula da Silva in the first round of elections, signaling potential regional realignment with

Key takeaways

• Flávio Bolsonaro finished first in Brazil's presidential runoff race, with his entire family recently winning congressional or Senate seats, highlighting a sweeping conservative wave.
• Three distinct security failures allowed an Omani pilot banned for extremist browsing to bypass FlyDubai hiring checks and fly into Israel despite diplomatic restrictions.

Main topics

• Brazilian presidential election & right-wing surge
• FlyDubai pilot security failures & aviation safety

Notable quotes

Failure number one is he was training, you know, to be a pilot in Oman. The authorities discovered he was browsing extremist websites... And yet that wasn't shared when he got hired at FlyDubai a few years later.

Conclusion

The episode underscores how interconnected geopolitical shifts, regula

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) AWS reInvent is just weeks away, and leaders who have successfully scaled AI governance across their organizations will be there. Get in the room with them. Register now at aws.com forward slash reInvent. you Speaker 3 (0:17) The son of Brazil's imprisoned former president tees up a potential comeback for the Bolsonaros. Plus, we'll look at the multiple security failures that allowed a fly-to-buy pilot to nearly bring down an Israeli-bound plane last week. Speaker 4 (0:32) Why did he never appear in any regional database when he was banned from flying? Because it's considered a risk. Speaker 3 (0:38) And the euro slips as Spain heads for snap elections amid nationwide affordability protests. It's Monday, October 5th. I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal, and here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today. Speaker 3 (1:01) Get ready to hear the names Bolsonaro and Lula again in the coming weeks. Brazil held a first round of elections yesterday, with Flavio Bolsonaro, the eldest son of imprisoned former President Jair Bolsonaro, netting the most votes. Trailing him, 80-year-old incumbent Luis Inacio Lula da Silva. Both will now head to an October 25th runoff. Our Brazil correspondent, Samantha Pearson, says that surprise result and major victories by conservatives in congressional and state elections yesterday show the strength of right-wing sentiment in Brazil that no major pre-election polls had captured. Speaker 2 (1:39) Conservatives scored victories across the country. Jair Bolsonaro himself is barred from running. He was convicted of plotting a coup after the 2022 election and is under house arrest, serving a 27-year prison sentence. But his political movement is quite literally breeding. His son Carlos was elected to the Senate on Sunday. His youngest son, 28-year-old Jair Hernan, he also won a seat in the lower house. Bolsonaro's wife, Michele, was also elected to the Senate and his brother, Renato, won a seat in the lower house too. Now, the race is not over. There are three weeks of campaigning left. A lot could happen, but history is not on Lula's side here. So every time that Brazil has had a presidential runoff, the candidate who came first in the first round has gone on to win the election. So Lula faces a very difficult fight from here. And a loss now for Lula would be devastating for him, the end of his political career, but it would also be devastating for the left more generally, given that his Workers' Party still has no obvious successor. Speaker 3 (2:44) And Samantha added that the White House is likely to be watching the presidential runoff with great interest. Speaker 2 (2:50) Trump has not officially endorsed a candidate, but he has close ties to the Bolsonaro family. They're aligned on issues such as public security, on other world issues. South America as a whole has shifted sharply to the right over recent years, with conservative candidates winning a string of presidential elections in Argentina, Colombia, Peru. But Brazil is Latin America's biggest country, its biggest economy. So if the right wins here on October the 25th, it would perhaps be the most significant victory yet in the region's rightward shift. and bring its biggest remaining holdout much closer into alignment with President Trump. Speaker 3 (3:30) The U.S. has removed