President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will stand for re-election in Brazil on Sunday. At 80, the former steelworker hopes to capitalise on his popularity and economic successes to win a fourth term in office but is neck-and-neck in the polls with far-right rival Flavio Bolsonaro.
Page A3From§Eachthe matinee edition — 2 October 2026
Bolsonaro's dead father endorses him by video two days before the vote his own backers are hedging in Paraguay
As it ran on the front
Sunday Brazil votes, and the polling has Lula and Flavio Bolsonaro close enough that nobody with a straight face will call it before the count. That alone is a story.
Jair Bolsonaro isn't on the ballot. So somebody built him a digital stand-in to tell voters what Flavio's own biography doesn't have the runway to say for itself. France 24's own reporting on the AI flood in this race also flags an AI-generated "working-class female voter" running down Lula — meaning the son isn't just borrowing his father's face, he's borrowing a synthetic electorate to go with it.…
…(cont) Lula, for his part, spent September governing like a man who's noticed the polls too. On the 10th he signed a decree cutting fuel taxes, timed — per the Morning Star — to a stretch when the U.S.-Iran war was already pushing pump prices up. Two weeks later, with the vote just over a week out, he signed a second order banning fixed-odds betting outright, framed as a fix for families drowning in debt. Two signatures, two constituencies, both landing in the stretch before Sunday. Call it governing or call it campaigning; the signatures are real either way.
Not after a loss. Before the vote. A deepfake can tell Brazilians their next president is really the old one back from the political dead. It apparently can't tell the people closest to the campaign that they're going to win. They're hedging the race in a foreign country's residency office while the avatar promises everyone else there's nothing to hedge. That gap — between what the ads say and what the insiders are doing with their own money — is the whole election in one line.
“You know a con is working when the people selling it start quietly exiting through the side door. The avatar's telling you to trust the brand; the guy who built the campaign is filing residency paperwork in Paraguay like the brand's a leaking boat. Lula's out here signing fuel and gambling decrees trying to buy a few points before Sunday, and meanwhile the other side's running a dead man's face as a character witness — that's not a platform, that's a hedge fund with a candidate attached.”
“Look, an AI avatar is just modern retail politics — every campaign uses digital tools now, it's innovation, not deception, and frankly if Lula's over there cutting fuel taxes with an election a month out that's the real manipulation here. The Paraguay stuff? That's — people diversify, that's just prudent financial planning, it's not a tell. Did I just call a hedge against your own candidate "prudent"? Forget I said that.”
The receipts
During Jair Bolsonaro’s term as president, he faced a liberal establishment that acted as a bulwark against his worst excesses. If his son Flávio beats Lula in the presidential election, he will lead a government less hostile to the far right.
As the Brazilian presidential election draws closer, Lula is in a very tight contest with Flávio Bolsonaro, son and heir of the Bolsonaro dynasty. The election is a struggle between Brazil’s democratic forces and the return to power of a reactionary bloc.
Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Friday signed an order banning fixed-odds betting just over a week ahead of the first round of the presidential election, in a move he said was designed to tackle the pervasive problem of families falling into debt.
With just two days to go before the first round of Brazil's presidential election, artificial intelligence is taking centre stage, whether it's a deepfake avatar of former president Jair Bolsonaro to support his son's candidacy, or an AI-generated working-class female voter criticising President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. According to…
He was still relatively unknown in Brazil just a few months ago. The 45-year-old senator is now neck and neck with incumbent President Lula in the polls for the upcoming presidential election. Flavio Bolsonaro's victory would add Brazil to the long list of Latin American countries that have shifted to the right or far right in recent…
· Brazil’s Lula signs measures to cut fuel taxes and subsidise fuel from the morgue, 10 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.