SÃO PAULO -- With Jair Bolsonaro under house arrest, the future of the country's conservative movement -- and President Trump's hopes for the right to win South America's last major economy under leftist rule -- now rests with his eldest son, Flávio Bolsonaro.
The 45-year-old senator rallied supporters on Rio de Janeiro's Copacabana beach on Sunday as campaigning began for Brazil's Oct. 4 vote, seeking to harness his father's following in an election closely watched in Washington.
The clean-cut lawyer and career politician has sought to emulate Jair Bolsonaro, a fiery former paratrooper who served under Brazil's 1964-85 military dictatorship. The elder Bolsonaro is serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup during the last election.
But his supporters say it is his differences from his father, including his ability to negotiate and form political alliances, that could win over enough centrist voters to close the gap with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Flávio starts the campaign in a statistical tie with da Silva, according to the latest Quaest poll, which puts him at 40% and the leftist leader at 43% in an almost-certain runoff vote on Oct. 25.
From Argentina to Chile, voters across Latin America have swung right, bringing more governments into alignment with Trump. A Flávio victory would add South America's last remaining major left-led country to that conservative bloc, advancing Trump's stated goal of restoring "American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere."
Da Silva last month accused Washington of trying to send diplomats to cast doubt on the country's electronic voting system and lay the groundwork for the Bolsonaros to contest the results if they lose. Trump's State Department has dismissed that accusation as a "baseless lie."
But first Flávio must convince voters to treat him as a stand-in for his father. In Brazil, where personalities often matter more than party labels, powerful leaders have long tried to transfer their popularity to handpicked successors -- with wildly mixed results.
Brazil's leftist president, da Silva, propelled the then little-known technocrat Dilma Rousseff to the presidency in 2010 after constitutional term limits forced him to find a successor. But eight years later, campaigning from prison on a corruption conviction, da Silva failed to rally supporters behind Fernando Haddad, a former São Paulo mayor, allowing Jair Bolsonaro to sweep to power in 2018.
Now, with the roles reversed and Jair Bolsonaro barred from running, Flávio has done everything he can to channel his father.
Aligned with Trump and Argentine President Javier Milei, Flávio shares his father's social conservatism, hard-line approach to crime and hostility toward Brazil's powerful Supreme Court. His platform promises deep spending cuts and privatizations, tougher prisons and penalties for criminals and changes to curb the court's powers, as well as a pledge to free his father.
Flávio's campaign has used artificial intelligence to bring a giant avatar of Jair Bolsonaro to life at campaign events, drawing legal challenges. He made sure cameras followed him to his father's favorite Rio bakery Saturday where he tucked into his father's signature sweet treat of bread slathered with condensed milk.
He will also travel Monday to Juiz de Fora in Minas Gerais state, where his father was stabbed on the campaign trail in 2018 -- a near-fatal attack that turbocharged his support among evangelicals who saw his survival as divine intervention. Police took a man in the city for questioning Saturday after he posted on Facebook that he planned to finish the job, writing "leave it with me" alongside knife emojis.
But Flávio's biggest battle isn't with his father's traditional base. In Bragança Paulista, a conservative agricultural stronghold in São Paulo state that overwhelmingly backed Jair Bolsonaro in the last election, locals joke they would vote for any of Bolsonaro's sons, or even his dog, if it meant keeping da Silva out of power.
"Nobody is changing their vote here, no way," said Giovanni Di Cola, a retired businessman who, like almost one in 10 Brazilians, says he would welcome back military rule if it meant more order and less corruption and crime. "Everything worked back then," he said, recalling Brazil's military regime. "Now nothing works."
Flávio's challenge, rather, is to convince voters in the middle, political scientists say. Victor Granado, a longtime friend of Flávio, is among those hoping the candidate's more conciliatory nature and softer rhetoric than his father's will help broaden his appeal.
"They have very different personalities," said Granado, who went to college with Flávio before founding his own law firm. "Jair Bolsonaro has always had a more direct, spontaneous and, often, more impulsive style. Flávio naturally has a calmer, more conciliatory manner."
But Flávio risks getting the worst of both worlds, political analysts say: inheriting his father's polarizing name while carrying the baggage of a career politician dogged by ethics controversies of his own. Some 54% of voters now say they would never vote for him, according to the latest Quaest poll, roughly matching the rejection rates his father registered in the final days of the 2022 campaign.
Rio prosecutors charged Flávio in 2020 with running a scheme to skim the salaries of legislative aides, a case later closed after key evidence was thrown out. More recently, he was drawn into a multibillion-dollar fraud scandal surrounding failed Banco Master after acknowledging that he sought millions from its owner to finance a movie about his father. Flávio has denied wrongdoing.
Many voters also still associate the Bolsonaro name with attacks on Brazil's voting system and his father's handling of the Covid pandemic, including accusations of delaying the rollout of vaccines, said Leandro Gabiati, a political scientist and director at Dominium Public Affairs.
"That memory of clashes with democratic life, with democratic institutions, brings rejection among moderate voters," said Gabiati.