Explaining Brazil

Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate in Tuesday’s US midterms. They secured their largest House majority in nearly 20 years and flipped Senate seats in states that hadn’t voted their way in decades. After two years of tariffs, sanctio...

Flávio Bolsonaro refused to accept his defeat in Brazil’s presidential runoff and left the country within 24 hours of a Supreme Court order to surrender his passports. He landed in Miami with a humanitarian stay permit, raising questions about the role...

Brazil votes on Sunday, and the presidential runoff is now too close to call. A week and a half ago, Flávio Bolsonaro was the clear favorite. Since then, street mobilization and an unprecedented grassroots campaign have helped Lula close the gap. In ou...

Lula finished Brazil's first round almost 2 points behind Flávio Bolsonaro, his weakest first-round result since 1998. Gustavo Ribeiro and historian James Green (Brown University) look at what went wrong for the president and what the October 25 runoff...

Brazilians vote on Sunday, October 4, and President Lula is asking for a fourth term on the strength of his economic record. Growth averaged 3% a year, unemployment is at a record low, and real wages are rising. His approval still sits barely above 40%...

Brazil votes on Sunday, and the final week of the campaign has turned on religion. A rumor that a Flávio Bolsonaro government would strip Our Lady of Aparecida of her title as Brazil's patron saint has spread through Catholic circles. The Bolsonaro cam...

Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro are statistically tied less than two weeks before Brazil's first round, and a flood of contradictory polls is feeding claims that pollsters are rigging the race. Rafael Nishimura, director of sampling operations at the Univers...

For years, Brazil's Supreme Court picked fights with Congress and the presidency. This month it turned on itself. On September 15, the full court sat for more than seven hours to answer a question it has dodged for 130 years, and walked away without an...

Brazil's Supreme Court is facing what may be the worst crisis in its history. Justice André Mendonça unsealed the Banco Master investigation, exposing messages between the bank's former CEO and Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Now two factions of the court...

Two polls released Monday shook the political establishment. Augusto Cury, of the small Avante party, took third place in both: 11% in Nexus's survey, 7.8% in Atlas Intel's. The numbers force rivals and analysts to take Cury seriously for the first tim...