This weekend the world’s fourth-largest democracy stages a bitterly fought election that pits the last left-wing President in South America against the son of an avowed enemy he defeated four years ago. And who’s pulling strings ? Yes, you guessed it: Donald Trump.

The US President is using every trick in that extraordinary book of his to oust the man in power in Brazil and effectively make the entire region a cradle of his acolytes. So much for democracy in Trump world.

It’s not hard to see why Trump would view President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, aka Lula, as a bogeyman he wants to take out. Lula, 80, the veteran leader of the Workers’ Party, is running for his fourth term. I remember meeting him when he launched his first campaign years ago. His handshake was a political statement in itself because it showed you that he lost a finger working in a car factory line as a teenager. 

“This means I never forget where I come from,” he told me when I spent a day with him and his wife in São Bernardo do Campo, his hometown, in São Paulo province. The city was Brazil’s automobile capital and an industrial powerhouse in the hemisphere. Consider this: São Paulo province has a GDP greater than that of Argentina, the other big player in the region.

True to self, Lula has championed a left-wing agenda that includes everything from building the world’s largest cash welfare programme for the poor, to combating the environmental crisis in the Amazon, to protecting Brazil’s indigenous communities and made himself a leader in the Global South via alliances such as Brics. Now, he puts himself on the front line against Trump.

“What Trump wants is to colonise Brazil, take our riches, steal our future and leave us in the dust,” he declares in his final TV ad ahead of Sunday’s vote. No need for Lula to remind his people that Brazil boasts the world’s second-largest deposit of rare earths – a temptation which Trump and his cohort have made no secret of openly coveting.

Up against Lula now is Flávio Bolsonaro, 45, of the right-wing Liberal Party, son of the right-wing leader Jair Bolsonaro who was defeated by Lula in 2022 and is now serving a 27-year sentence for staging a military coup. Following that defeat, his loyalists ransacked the Congress, Supreme Court and presidential palace, in scenes frighteningly reminiscent of how Trump’s supporters stormed the US Capitol after he lost the election of 2020. Trump has since claimed that his ally Bolsonaro was the subject of a political “witch hunt”, a term he has commonly used to describe legal action against, or unflattering reporting about, himself.

“This election is too close to call,” said Sergio Fausto, a political scientist at the Fernando Henrique Cardoso Foundation in São Paulo. “If Flávio Bolsonaro wins, we will see him imitate Trump: stack the Supreme Court with like-minded justices, crack down on opponents, pick on the enemies of him and his father.” He noted that Bolsonaro also promises to pardon all those arrested and jailed after the coup attempt – straight out of the Trump playbook after the riot at the US capitol.

As for the Bolsonaro campaign agenda, it is not hard to see Trump’s hand at work. Bolsonaro has accused Lula of building “a narco-terrorist state”, recognising that opinion polls show a majority put insecurity top of their priorities and express rapidly diminishing confidence in democracy. Trump has bolstered that agenda by calling two of Brazil’s crime syndicates “foreign terrorist organisations”, then slapping 25 per cent tariffs on Brazil’s exports to the United States – partly in response to the Brazilian Supreme Court’s prosecution of Bolsonaro – hurting Lula’s economy into the bargain.

The US President is openly pursuing his own aggressive interpretation of the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, asserting US hegemony over the Western Hemisphere. Lula’s resistance to Trump’s desires and diktats make him a target in a continent where other countries are succumbing to right-wing, nationalist agendas that resemble the President’s America First ideology.

“What we’re seeing is that democracy can’t necessarily stop the autocrats,” said Marta Lagos, an expert on Latin American elections based in Chile, where a right-wing government took power last year. “Chile, Ecuador under Daniel Noboa, Peru, Argentina under Javier Milei, Colombia, all now Trump allies. This is total populism, Trump on this frontier.”

Latinos have dubbed this spread of the right “The Orange Wave,” as South America, from Venezuela to Tierra del Fuego, turns the colour of Trump’s skin tone, not to mention his hair some days. “But let’s get real,” one of Milei’s advisers told me from Buenos Aires, where they barely conceal their loathing of Lula next door, “Trump may be struggling elsewhere, but in the Americas he is winning. Yes, his Donroe Doctrine is alive and well, US supremacy in our hemisphere.”

Maybe. But let’s hit the pause button. Having reported on three Brazilian elections, I want to emphasise that this dogfight will almost certainly go to a final round in late October, and where the votes of the smaller parties go in a run-off will be crucial. The fact that Brazil’s final decision will come just days before midterm elections in the United States – where Trump’s Republicans are on track for enormous losses – makes the outcome even more delicate.

“In some ways the best defence for Brazil will be Lula winning, however narrowly,” said Manoel do Lago, a political expert in Rio de Janeiro. “Because that can only strengthen the hand of those in the United States who want a sensible, hands-off approach to a democracy like ours.”

Others fear the worst, however. “I can see Trump refusing to accept a Lula government, arguing the elections were rigged, along with Bolsonaro,” said Sergio Fausto in São Paulo. He noted that Trump could be using Brazil’s election to game his own strategy come November, and to question any outcome that goes against him in his own midterms. “We could see a profound crisis here.”

So in Trumpworld, Brazil’s vote is of enormous importance when it comes to America’s crucial elections. “What happens down south will have an impact up north,” remarks Valentina Sader at the Atlantic Council in Washington DC. “Trump is looking abroad for any narrative that might help him at home.” Even if it means messing with the other big democracy in the Western Hemisphere.