Conservatives won Brazil’s largest congressional bloc, complicating Lula’s governing task
A run of right-wing victories that moved through Latin America election after election came to an end in Brazil on Sunday, where Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won the presidential election. The result broke a string of seven consecutive right-wing presidential victories that began in April 2025 and reached from Honduras to Chile, Bolivia to Colombia, leaving Brazil outside the conservative bloc Washington had been assembling.
From Honduras to Chile, Bolivia to Colombia, voters frustrated by crime, corruption and economic stagnation turned to conservatives who made hard-line promises to restore order, revive growth and align with President Trump. Brazil and Mexico — the first and third geographically largest countries in Latin America — together account for more than half of the region’s total population and economic output, which is what gave the Brazilian result its weight well beyond its borders. Da Silva’s victory leaves Brazil, alongside fellow leftist Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, as major counterweights to Trump’s regional ambitions, complicating the U.S.’s efforts to forge a broad like-minded alliance of countries.
John Feeley, a former U.S. ambassador in Panama, said of the outcome: “With Lula’s victory, [Trump] got a slap in the face.” Michael Shifter, a senior fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue, a policy group in Washington, was more direct. “It’s clearly a blow,” Shifter said. Trump, Shifter said, “was counting on the big prize, which was Brazil. It was the icing on the cake.”
Trump had endorsed conservatives across the region and sought to assert U.S. dominance in the region to check China’s deep economic inroads while battling the drug-trafficking militias that have threatened governance. More than a dozen Latin American and Caribbean nations have joined the Trump administration’s Shield of Americas, a U.S.-led security coalition aimed at combating drug smuggling.
Lula’s victory is not the only setback for the region’s right and its allies in Washington. Recently elected leaders who have sided with the United States are discovering how difficult it is to deliver on their promises. Ecuador’s drug war has generated one of the world’s highest homicide rates under President Daniel Noboa, whose militarized security strategy has failed to stop the violence, and tons of cocaine still flow to the United States and Europe despite Washington’s deployment of soldiers to Ecuador to bolster antidrug operations. In Colombia, where the right-wing Abelardo de la Espriella was elected in June, drug traffickers have sought out new routes even as the United States has blown up speedboats moving drugs.
In Argentina, the free-market overhaul by President Javier Milei — who in 2023 became the first explicitly pro-Trump conservative elected in South America this decade — brought down the triple-digit inflation he inherited from the leftist Peronist movement that had ruled the country. But economists say he has failed to deliver a sharp rebound as Argentina’s economy stagnates and people demand jobs. With Milei’s re-election bid a year away, pollsters say the economic malaise is opening the door to a return of the free-spending Peronists, which would likely fuel more financial upheaval. Lucas Romero, director of Synopsis Consultores, a Buenos Aires consulting firm, said: “Given the state of the economy and Milei’s current level of popularity, his re-election is not guaranteed, and Peronism is competitive today.”
The new right-wing or center-right governments from Chile and Bolivia to Colombia and Peru are already facing declining public support as they confront stubborn economic problems, demands for more effective crime fighting and impatient voters. They are also bracing for a powerful El Niño phenomenon, which could bring heavy rains and flooding and has already disrupted fishing and mining operations. Jorge Quiroga, a conservative former Bolivian leader who finished second in the 2025 election against President Rodrigo Paz, said of his home country in an interview: “After 20 years, we had the opportunity to change things dramatically, and now we are squandering that opportunity.”
Their struggles raise questions about whether the region’s conservative resurgence amounts to a lasting political realignment capable of delivering some of the long-term changes the United States wants. Washington has gone out of its way to boost allies, most notably by providing Milei with a $20 billion financial lifeline ahead of Argentina’s midterm congressional elections last year.
At home, Lula faces an uneven mandate despite his decisive win over Flávio Bolsonaro. Conservatives swept Brazil’s congressional elections earlier this month, and Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party emerged as the largest in both chambers, winning 121 of 513 seats in the lower house and securing a 28-strong bloc in the 81-seat Senate. The incoming government also faces mounting economic challenges, including a widening budget deficit, soaring public debt and some of the world’s highest interest rates, as growth slows.
Reversals of this kind are familiar in Latin America. A generation of leftist leaders led by Lula and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez dominated politics during the 2000s, when a commodities boom facilitated spending on social programs that fueled growth and lifted tens of millions from poverty. The sharp decline in prices for oil and other resources, along with corruption scandals, shattered the so-called Pink Tide of leftists.
Lula’s victory could also reignite tensions with Trump, who questioned the result on Sunday, saying it “looked like another rigged election” without providing evidence. Flávio Bolsonaro, who is facing investigations for alleged financial crimes, fled to Miami on Wednesday, where the Trump administration said it would issue visas to him and his family. Milei, who has long called Lula corrupt and a communist, withheld recognition of his victory. European countries and most Latin American leaders recognized the win.
Trump and Lula had recently established a working relationship after clashing last year, when Washington imposed a 50% tariff on Brazilian goods, among the highest imposed on any country, over the prosecution of Flávio Bolsonaro’s father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, for plotting a coup against Lula.
Political analysts said Flávio Bolsonaro’s embrace of the Latin American right may have hurt him on Sunday. He championed the crime-fighting record of El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, promising five maximum-security prisons in Brazil if elected, and venerated Milei’s brand of fiscal austerity, even brandishing oversize scissors to symbolize spending cuts to come. Bolsonaro later ditched the prop as Lula warned poorer Brazilians about the hardships they could face if they elected his rival. “Poverty in Argentina has reached 40%,” Lula said in a presidential debate. “People are eating donkey meat, and you said you wanted the same model.”
The result breaks the run and sharpens the contrast between Washington and the governments of Brazil and Mexico, which together account for more than half of the region’s population and economic output. It does not settle whether the conservative resurgence that produced those victories can hold: the region’s new right-wing leaders are still in the early days of their rule, and they face the economic strain, crime concerns and voter impatience that preceded the rightward swing in the first place.