Flávio Bolsonaro, the 45-year-old son of jailed ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, won Brazil's first-round presidential vote on Sunday and enters the 25 October run-off as favourite against 80-year-old incumbent Lula. On Tuesday he told supporters he would use his party's newly enlarged congressional bloc to change the constitution and "re-democratise this country." The word choice is not accidental. Brazil was re-democratised in the 1980s after a 21-year military dictatorship that Jair Bolsonaro has long praised. Historians at the Federal University of Minas Gerais note that the officers behind the 1964 coup used identical language, calling their seizure of power "an intervention to democratise the country." The institutional arithmetic is what makes this more than rhetoric. Bolsonaro's Liberal party (PL) now holds the senate's largest caucus — 28 of 81 seats — giving the far right enough leverage for radical constitutional changes, including the potential impeachment of supreme court ministers the Bolsonarismo movement considers enemies. Political scientist Miguel Lago described it bluntly: "It's better than a coup d'état … it's almost like a coup d'état with the support of the majority of the population." The external template is explicit. Flávio Bolsonaro recently met El Salvador's security minister Gustavo Villatoro in São Paulo, praising Nayib Bukele's model of using congressional control to rewrite rules — including scrapping presidential term limits — under a state of exception now in its fifth year. Villatoro reportedly "stressed the importance" of using legislative dominance to make "necessary legal changes." Political scientist Celso Rocha de Barros identifies the operating model as Hungary-Bukele hybrid authoritarianism: occupy institutions legally, then become the law itself. The dynastic dimension compounds the risk. Jair Bolsonaro was convicted last September and sentenced to 27 years for attempting to convince military chiefs to help him cling to power after losing the 2022 election to Lula — a conspiracy that culminated in the 8 January 2023 insurrection in Brasília. If Flávio wins, the father is expected to be freed and installed as an influential minister with power to select new heads of the armed forces. The convicted coup-plotter would re-enter government through his son's mandate. Columnist Míriam Leitão, writing in O Globo, laid out the structural advantage Flávio would enjoy that his father lacked: robust caucuses in both chambers, a weakened supreme court, and the backing of the Trump administration. "Political science shows that it's in the second term that an autocrat doubles down on their plan," she wrote. "The risk isn't of the son repeating the father, it's that he surpasses him." Brazil currently ranks 28th on the V-Dem liberal democracy index — two places ahead of the UK and 23 ahead of the US. The question facing voters on 25 October is whether that ranking survives contact with a president who has the legislative numbers, the foreign allies, and the family motivation to hollow out the institutions from within. Asked to clarify his plans on Wednesday, Bolsonaro rejected speculation and offered a line that could mean anything: "Brazil needs to go back to normal, that's all." The pattern is now well-documented globally: autocrats who campaign on democratic language while building the machinery to make elections irrelevant. What distinguishes the Brazilian case is the speed of the institutional capture — a single election cycle delivering the presidency, a congressional supermajority, and a mechanism to free the last failed putschist — all under the banner of "re-democratisation."
