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Morning Edition · Friday, September 25, 2026UpdatedPublished at 7:42 AM EDT · New York
Lula's Campaign Accuses Trump of Trying to Colonise Brazil Before the October Vote
Two rounds of American tariffs imposed in July have become the central issue of a presidential election that a new poll now shows as a near dead heat.
Updated at 7:42 AM EDT
A Datafolha poll released Friday narrowed the race to a statistical tie, days after the poll cited this morning showed Lula with an eight-point lead.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's re-election campaign has released a television advertisement accusing President Donald Trump of wanting to colonise Brazil and capture its natural resources by interfering in the October election in favour of his opponent, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro. Lula made the same argument in more diplomatic language at the United Nations on September 22, where he warned against foreign interference and defended Brazilian sovereignty.
Washington imposed two rounds of tariffs on Brazilian goods in July. Lula has refrained from retaliating while trade talks continue and has said Brazil could still invoke its reciprocity law if those talks fail. He has urged other leaders to reject interference in domestic votes. The Trump administration has framed its measures as a response to Brazil's treatment of former president Jair Bolsonaro and to trade practices it considers unfair.
The electoral effect has narrowed sharply in the space of a few days. A Quaest poll for Folha de S.Paulo published earlier in the week put Lula ahead of Flávio Bolsonaro by 45 percent to 37 percent in a second-round matchup. A Datafolha poll released Friday put the same matchup at 47 percent for Lula against 45 percent for Bolsonaro, a gap within the poll's two-point margin of error that Al Jazeera and other outlets described as a technical tie. In a first-round scenario, Datafolha put Lula at 40 percent against 36 percent for Bolsonaro, with the remaining vote split among minor candidates. Brazilian commentators across the political spectrum have noted that the confrontation with Washington gave an unpopular incumbent a nationalist argument he lacked, though the tightening race suggests that argument has not, by itself, secured him a comfortable lead.
Brazil has meanwhile continued to expand agricultural and mineral trade with China and with other members of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), which reduces the leverage any single tariff round can exert.
Veracity: Corroborated
83/100- If true, who benefits
Lula gains a nationalist campaign argument nine days before the first round, and the Bolsonaro campaign gains an opponent it can portray as diverting attention from domestic issues.
- The nuance
The advertisement and its wording are confirmed by the Guardian, but the underlying charge of a plan to seize Brazilian resources is campaign argument rather than documented policy, and the State Department denies interfering in the election.
An open-source-intelligence read of how likely this story is true with its real nuance, not a judgment of any outlet. It assesses the claim, weighing independent and adversarial reporting. How we label confidence.
What this means
Tariffs used as political leverage against a large commodity exporter tend to accelerate the diversification they were meant to punish, because Brazilian soybean, beef, iron ore and coffee exporters can redirect volume to Chinese and other non-American buyers. American importers of Brazilian coffee, beef and orange juice pay the duty in the meantime. The immediate market variables are the Brazilian real and local rates, which will move on the October 4 result and on whether Brasília invokes its reciprocity law. A Lula win would likely mean continued negotiation with no retaliation, while a failure of the talks would raise the possibility of Brazilian counter-tariffs on American goods.
Synthesized from: The Guardian · Al Jazeera · PBS News
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