Pablo Murad

The truth about Brazil

· 11 min read · #politics · #brazil · #elections · #essays · #censorship · #life

Written on election day, published the day after because the law requires it. Record femicides, record defaults, coffee up 80%, a court that decides what you can say and the two worst corruption scores in our history. The truth about where Brazil is going.

Contents

I wrote this on Sunday, October 25, 2026, while the polls were open and Brazil was choosing between Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro.

You are reading it a day later because Brazilian electoral law doesn't let me publish it on the day. Article 39, paragraph 5, item IV of Lei 9.504/97 makes it a crime to put new content on the internet on election day, with six months to a year of detention (convertible to community service) and a fine of up to R$ 15,961.50. Whatever was published before can stay online. Anything new waits. So this waited.

When I wrote it, I didn't know the result. The publication is late. What I think hasn't changed.

Why this one felt different #

I have watched the Workers' Party govern this country for most of my adult life: Lula from 2003 to 2010, Dilma from 2011 to 2016, Lula again since 2023. That's a long time to fix things. I keep looking for what changed, and what I find are the same scandals with new names, the same people walking away from them, and a bill that keeps growing.

To me, this runoff was a matter of survival. Not in the dramatic sense. In the sense of whether a country can still expect that when someone steals, someone answers for it.

Flávio Bolsonaro isn't the answer I wanted. He is the son of a former president, he looks unprepared for the job, and he is under investigation himself over allegations that he asked the owner of Banco Master for money to fund a film about his father, which he denies. Still, he was the only spark of something different on the ballot. He may turn out badly too. I don't trust anyone in this race, and I'd rather say so than pretend.

That's the mood. Now the numbers.

Women are dying in record numbers #

In 2025, 1,571 women were killed for being women in Brazil, about four a day. It's the highest number ever recorded, and the third record in a row under this government: 1,475 in 2023, 1,504 in 2024, 1,571 in 2025. Attempted femicides rose 5.9%, to 4,189 women who survived. Femicide now accounts for 44.4% of all murders of women, the largest share since the crime was written into law in 2015.

Femicide victims per year

2016 ######################## 929 (Temer)
2017 ########################### 1,075 (Temer)
2018 ############################### 1,229 (Temer)
2019 ################################## 1,330 (Bolsonaro)
2020 ################################## 1,354 (Bolsonaro)
2021 ################################## 1,347 (Bolsonaro)
2022 ##################################### 1,455 (Bolsonaro)
2023 ###################################### 1,475 (Lula)
2024 ###################################### 1,504 (Lula)
2025 ######################################## 1,571 (Lula)

Source: Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública

This is the government that talks the most about protecting women. Three years of speeches, three new records.

The police aren't doing any better. Killings by police went up 5.4% in 2025, to 6,602 people, about 18 a day.

The supermarket #

In the twelve months to April 2025, food and drink rose 7.81%, well above general inflation of 5.53%. Ground coffee rose 80.2%, the biggest increase since the Real was created in 1994. Beef rose 22.24%. Eggs, 16.74%. Milk and dairy, 9.9%. The year before, in 2024, food had already gone up 7.69%.

Price increase in 12 months to April 2025 (IPCA)

Coffee    ######################################## 80.2%
Beef      ########### 22.2%
Eggs      ######## 16.7%
Dairy     ##### 9.9%
All items ### 5.5%

Source: IBGE

This is the man who campaigned in 2022 promising that Brazilians would eat picanha and drink beer again on the weekend. For a lot of families, coffee became the luxury.

More taxes, worse companies #

The federal government collected R$ 2.89 trillion in 2025, a record. It still wanted more. In May 2025 it raised the IOF, the tax on credit, foreign exchange and insurance, by decree. Congress overturned the decree on June 25, a defeat the press called historic. Three weeks later, on July 16, Justice Alexandre de Moraes restored most of it. The IOF alone brought in R$ 86.5 billion in 2025, a record and 20.5% more than the year before after inflation.

So the money goes up. What does it buy? Federal state-owned companies (excluding Petrobras and Eletrobras) ran a R$ 6.3 billion deficit from January to November 2025, the worst in a series that started in 2009. In the same period of 2022 they had a surplus of R$ 4.5 billion. Almost all of the hole is the Correios, the postal service, which had lost about R$ 6.1 billion by September and went looking for a R$ 20 billion loan from banks to stay standing.

Corruption: the scandals change names, the impunity stays #

Transparency International gave Brazil 35 out of 100 in its 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index, 107th of 182 countries. The year before, Brazil scored 34, the worst result in its history. So the two lowest scores ever recorded belong to the last two years.

The report didn't hide why. It listed the INSS fraud and Banco Master as macro-corruption on an unprecedented scale, said impunity remains widespread even for people who confessed, criticized Congress for weakening anti-corruption tools while parliamentary amendments keep growing, and accused the government of governing through that bargaining.

The INSS case is the one that should make anyone angry. Retirees had money taken from their benefits through deductions they never authorized: about R$ 6.3 billion between 2019 and 2024, according to the Federal Police. That window covers both governments, which already says something about how this state works. The congressional inquiry's final report, written by its rapporteur, recommended charging 216 people, including Carlos Lupi, Lula's own Social Security minister. Lula's brother, Frei Chico, led one of the associations that received many of the irregular deductions; the report found no direct participation by him and didn't recommend charges. The government's majority wrote an alternative report that pointed the finger at Jair and Flávio Bolsonaro instead. Then the inquiry ran out of time: the president of Congress refused to extend it, and so did the Supreme Court.

And when one of his own ministers got caught, Lula kept him. The Federal Police indicted Juscelino Filho, his Minister of Communications, in June 2024 for criminal organization, money laundering and passive corruption, over parliamentary amendments diverted from paving works in a town run by his sister. Lula had said he would fire him if prosecutors charged him. He stayed in the job for ten more months, until the Prosecutor General actually filed charges in April 2025 and he resigned.

Banco Master is worse, because it reached everyone. The Central Bank liquidated the bank in November 2025. The law firm of Viviane Barci, wife of Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes, had received R$ 80.2 million from the bank over 22 months. Justice Dias Toffoli stepped away from the investigation in February 2026, after a Federal Police report mentioned his name in data taken from the banker's phone. And, as I said above, Flávio is under investigation in the same case.

So no, I don't think one side is clean. I think one side has been in charge for most of the last twenty-three years and keeps promising that this time will be different.

The court that should be the referee #

A supreme court is supposed to be the one institution that doesn't care who won the election. Ours looks like it does.

Lula appointed Cristiano Zanin, his personal lawyer, to the court in 2023. He then appointed Flávio Dino, his own Minister of Justice. Each was legal. Together, they tell you how this government sees the court: as a place for allies. Add the Master contracts, and Transparency International's line that the court keeps guaranteeing impunity in macro-corruption cases while some of its justices have suspicious ties to companies involved in cases before it.

Want an example of how it works in practice? The IOF. Congress, elected to make laws and set taxes, voted to kill a tax increase. One justice brought it back. The government won, the people who pay lost, and the legislature was left looking decorative.

I don't believe this Supreme Court is impartial anymore. I'd love to be proven wrong.

Speech, with permission #

On August 30, 2024, Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered X taken off the air in the entire country because the company refused to name a legal representative in Brazil. Anyone who kept using it through a VPN faced a fine of R$ 50,000 a day. Millions of people lost a public square for more than a month because of a fight between a judge and a billionaire. Rumble was blocked too.

Then, in June 2025, the court went further. By 8 votes to 3, it rewrote Article 19 of the Marco Civil da Internet, the law that protected platforms from liability for what users post unless a judge ordered a removal. Now a simple notice can be enough, and platforms have a "duty of care" to take down, on their own, content in categories that include "anti-democratic acts." Nobody outside the court gets to say exactly what that means. Congress debated a bill on this for years and never passed it. Eight unelected judges, two of them picked by Lula in his current term, did it instead. The United States opened a trade investigation over the ruling.

A company that fears being sued for every post will delete first and think later. That is what censorship looks like now: nobody burns books, a platform quietly removes whatever might cause trouble, and you never find out it was there.

Friends in the wrong places #

In May 2023, with Nicolás Maduro sitting next to him in Brasília, Lula said Venezuela was the "victim of a narrative of anti-democracy and authoritarianism." The next day, at a summit of South American presidents in the same city, two of them corrected him. Gabriel Boric, of Chile, a man of the left, said it was "not a narrative construction, it's a reality, and it's serious." Luis Lacalle Pou, of Uruguay, said the worst thing to do was cover the sun with a finger.

In February 2024, speaking in Ethiopia about Gaza, Lula said that what was happening there had happened before, "when Hitler decided to kill the Jews." Israel declared him persona non grata until he apologized. He didn't.

Before the 2022 election, he told Time magazine that Volodymyr Zelensky was "as responsible as Putin" for the war in Ukraine. The country that was invaded, as responsible as the one that invaded it.

And in October 2025, in Jakarta, while criticizing the United States for attacking drug boats, he said that drug users are responsible for traffickers, "who are victims of the users too." In a country where gangs run entire neighborhoods. He later called the sentence "badly put."

Meanwhile the relationship with the United States, Brazil's second largest trading partner, fell apart. On July 31, 2025, Washington put a 50% tariff on Brazilian goods, the highest ever applied to Brazil, hitting coffee, beef, cocoa, fruit and sugar. The same day it sanctioned Alexandre de Moraes under the Magnitsky Act. The American justification was the treatment of Bolsonaro and Moraes's rulings against social media accounts, and you can argue about that. What's hard to argue is that a president who spent his campaign promising that "Brazil is back" in the world presided over the worst moment with Washington I can remember. Romeu Zema, the governor of Minas Gerais, put it bluntly: if Lula were a good president, he would have avoided the tariff.

The bill #

Gross public debt, % of GDP (end of year)

2022 #################################### 71.7% (Bolsonaro)
2024 ####################################### 76.3% (Lula)
2025 ######################################## 78.7% (Lula)

Source: Banco Central do Brasil

Gross debt ended 2025 at 78.7% of GDP, the third increase in a row, about seven points higher than when this government took office. With the Selic around 15% for most of the year, the country spent roughly R$ 1.5 trillion on interest in 2025, somewhere between 7.9% and 8.9% of GDP depending on the method. Italy, famous for its debt, spends about 4%. The United States, about 2%.

In a Quaest survey from September, nearly half of Brazilians said the economy had gotten worse over the past year, and only 19% said it had improved. People feel it at the supermarket and in their credit card bill, whatever the government's slide deck says.

Where this road ends #

Put the pieces together. In February 2026, 81.7 million Brazilians were behind on their bills, according to Serasa, the highest number since the survey began, and the record had been broken month after month since January 2025. The government collects more than ever and still borrows more. The country pays about R$ 1.5 trillion a year in interest, money that doesn't build a single school or hospital. State companies bleed. The debt grows every year.

A country where taxes break records, interest breaks records and defaults break records isn't getting richer. It's being drained, one family budget at a time. To me, that's the road to misery: not a sudden collapse, but a slow slide where every year costs more and delivers less, while the people in charge tell you the numbers have never been better.

The vote #

The first round ended with Flávio at 47.03% and Lula at 45.16%, a gap of 2.2 million votes. Abstention reached 21.08%, the highest since 1998. On the eve of the runoff, Reuters reported five polls with Flávio ahead by one to one and a half points, all inside the margin of error. CNN described a campaign dominated by crime, corruption and Trump.

Al Jazeera asked why Flávio beat the polls in the first round. Carlos Pereira, a political scientist at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, pointed to the Banco Master scandal as a late trigger. Andre Pagliarini, at Louisiana State University, described Brazilian voters in a way I keep thinking about: overworked, in debt and unsafe.

That sentence is the whole election to me.

Monday #

By the time you read this, someone won. If it was Lula, I expect four more years of the same: records in the wrong charts, scandals that end in a report nobody votes on, and a court that looks more like a party than a referee. If it was Flávio, I expect to be disappointed in different ways, and I'll write about that too.

I wrote this on Sunday morning because it felt like a question of survival. It's Monday now. I still don't trust anyone.

Sources #