In Goiânia, a city not far from the capital Brasília, Flávio Bolsonaro told supporters this week that he alone stood between Brazil and "barbarity." The 45-year-old senator, who finished ahead of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 80, in Sunday's first-round vote, said he would use a newly emboldened far-right bloc in Congress to rewrite the constitution and "re-democratise" the country. For a nation that has already been democratic for nearly four decades, the phrase struck many as odd — and for his critics, deeply ominous. Brazil's democracy was itself rebuilt in the 1980s, after a 21-year military dictatorship that Flávio's father, former president Jair Bolsonaro, has repeatedly praised.

Jair, who served as a soldier under that regime, was sentenced last year to 27 years in prison for plotting a coup after losing the 2022 election to Lula. That conspiracy, according to Brazil's supreme court, involved pressuring military commanders to keep him in power and helped trigger the 8 January 2023 riots in Brasília, when far-right crowds stormed government buildings. Opposition figures were quick to draw the connection. Congresswoman Talíria Petrone wrote on social media that the remarks amounted to "the announcement of a coup," while fellow leftwinger Marcelo Freixo noted that Brazil was last re-democratised in 1988, and that the person who tried to reverse it was Flávio's own father.

Flávio has not explained precisely what changes he envisions, but his father's admiration for authoritarian figures, including Chile's Augusto Pinochet, has fuelled suspicion that the younger Bolsonaro is building political cover for something less democratic, not more. The irony is striking given where Brazil already stands. The V-Dem institute in Sweden currently ranks it 28th in the world on liberal democracy, ahead of both the United Kingdom and the United States.