Bolsonaro’s Flight Leaves Brazil’s Right With a Family Problem

Late Tuesday afternoon, a group of conservative Brazilian lawmakers gathered at Liberal Party headquarters in Brasilia and frantically tried to answer the question on everybody’s minds: Where on Earth is Flávio Bolsonaro?

The day before, the right-wing senator had released a video saying Federal Police had demanded he surrender his passports immediately after his loss to incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Sunday’s presidential election. He’d since gone silent, amid reports he had fled the country.

Allies sent panicked pleas over WhatsApp to Flávio, the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro. When only a single checkmark appeared next to the messages, indicating they had gone unread, they were crestfallen, according to multiple people familiar with the situation. Others scoured flight-tracking websites and scrambled to make sense of conflicting media reports on Bolsonaro’s whereabouts.

He finally surfaced Wednesday, emerging from a private jet at Miami-Opa Locka Executive Airport at the end of a journey across South America to the US. If the allies who’d worried over his whereabouts were relieved, it wasn’t for long. Bolsonaro’s dramatic exit from the political stage thrust the first family of the Brazilian right into chaos, generating deep uncertainty about who will lead the movement into the future.

Although losing the presidency came as a bitter surprise, Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party amassed newfound might in Congress and the Senate, thanks to election gains by other members of the Bolsonaro clan and its allies in early October. Still, Flávio’s defeat robbed the family of the chance to free Jair, who is under house arrest, serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup after his own loss to Lula in 2022.

Flávio’s brother Eduardo, a former congressman, decamped to the US last year to lobby for help for his father, only to get convicted, in absentia, of improperly interfering in Jair’s trial. With Flávio now gone too, Brazil’s analogue to Donald Trump’s MAGA movement has no North Star.

From the US, Flávio sought to hold onto some measure of control. On Wednesday, he declared himself the victim of electoral fraud and the “true president-elect” in a statement that referred to “The United States of Brazil,” an antiquated name that was changed 60 years ago. Amid a wave of backlash, he deleted the screed from social media and posted another, in which he instead called himself the “leader” of Latin America’s largest nation.

Truth is, Flávio doesn’t command the same devotion as his father, a former Army captain whose middle name, Messias (Portuguese for Messiah), fits with the near-religious conviction he inspires among supporters. Flávio was never seen as presidential material before Jair abruptly anointed him his political heir from a prison cell late last year.

The younger Bolsonaro’s loss to Lula followed a campaign rife with blunders: embarrassing links to a scandal-plagued banker; a public feud with his stepmother, Michelle Bolsonaro; a hubristic approach to the runoff that led him to mock Lula for losing a finger in a factory accident. All of which seemingly vindicated those on the right who never saw him as a viable candidate. His behavior in the aftermath has alienated even some who backed him wholeheartedly.

Some allies have embraced his argument that he’s being subjected to a witch hunt led by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, a longtime foe of the Bolsonaros who oversaw Jair’s coup trial and ordered the surrender of Flávio’s passports after the election. Flávio is the focus of at least two criminal probes into allegations of money laundering, inspiring concerns he was a flight risk, but even many inside Lula’s government saw the judge’s move as bolstering some of Bolsonaro’s claims.

Flávio’s efforts to paint the election result as illegitimate have mostly fallen on deaf ears. The Liberal Party and his campaign manager, Senator Rogério Marinho, have both conceded his defeat.

For some, fleeing has only made things worse. One victorious Senate candidate now regrets having aligned so closely with Flávio during the campaign, according to an aide, who described the incoming lawmaker as furious with how Bolsonaro has acted in recent days. (Like others in this story, the aide requested anonymity to speak candidly about private conversations.) Liberal Party chief Valdemar Costa Neto went to visit Jair at his home in Brasilia on Thursday. Afterward, he told reporters that “nobody approved” Flávio’s social media statement or his decision to flee and said he was focused on moving the country forward.

Even Marinho, who argued Wednesday that Flávio had no choice but to leave, acknowledged that the former candidate had put his role at the head of the movement at risk. “The right has a large number of qualified, capable figures with the legitimacy to put themselves forward,” the senator told reporters in Brasilia.

Flávio has become a punchline for Brazilian mememakers, who’ve dubbed him “Flyvio” and altered the popular conservative slogan “God, Country and Family” to “Goodbye, Country and Family.” His response to the defeat threatens to further toxify the Bolsonaro brand in a country where millions still smart over his father’s tumultuous presidency, a period marked by one of the world’s highest pandemic death tolls, a record of misogynistic and homophobic remarks, and election-related conspiracy theories that spiraled into a failed coup attempt.

Some allies have turned to São Paulo Governor Tarcísio de Freitas, who many investors had wanted to challenge Lula this year, as a potential leader if the right begins to move past the Bolsonaros. Freitas published a video this week saying the Brazilian right has been “given a responsibility by voters,” clearly looking beyond the state he governs.

But Freitas is a technocratic politician who still lacks the full support of the Bolsonaro family. And inside right-wing circles, the Bolsonaro name retains enough power to make any declaration of its decline premature. Jair’s allies spent the past year fighting for his release and the impeachment of judges like the man who oversaw his conviction. Given their congressional gains — the Liberal Party will hold 29 of 81 Senate seats, far more than any other party — they’re likely to continue the push even with Lula in the presidential palace.

The person best positioned to take up the mantle may now be Michelle Bolsonaro, the former first lady who has secured a Senate seat this year, who Flávio and his brothers view as less than a full member of the family, according to multiple allies. Married to Jair since 2007, she’s spent the time since he left office building her own political profile as the head of the Liberal Party’s women’s wing. She left the position in late-June after airing out family drama by calling Flávio “disrespectful” in a lengthy social media video. The antipathy between them has festered for years. During Jair’s presidency, Michelle limited his sons’ visits to the official residence, according to one person who worked with the family. She and Carlos Bolsonaro, another of Flávio’s brothers, who will be her colleague in the Senate, don’t speak.

Michelle’s influence has steadily grown. She added thousands of members to the Liberal Party’s rolls during her time in charge of its outreach to women, and nearly 1,000 female candidates backed by the PL, as it’s known, won seats across Brazil in 2024 municipal elections, according to party figures. She boasts deep ties to Brazil’s booming evangelical population — in 2021, a video of her speaking in tongues went viral — and close links to Costa Neto, the party chief, who mused that she could’ve been part of an “ideal” presidential ticket earlier this year.

Michelle instead ran for Senate and promptly became the most-voted-for candidate for the upper chamber in the history of the Federal District, home to Brasilia. Even before Flávio left, she was the only member of the family with daily access to its patriarch. Her soon-to-be colleagues are waiting to see how she’ll perform as a lawmaker, according to an aide to one incoming senator. But since her stepson fled, the aide added, some have begun describing her as the most important member of the family.

Michelle was notably absent from Flávio’s election-night event in Brasilia. As he struggled with the sting of defeat, she appeared in photos and videos at a celebration for her friend Celina Leão, who won the Federal District’s governorship. On Tuesday afternoon, Costa Neto posted a photo of himself alongside a smiling Michelle and said they’d met to discuss the “future of our party and the challenges we face ahead.”

In her first public comments since Flávio landed in Miami, Michelle referred to her husband as the movement’s leader and said Jair urged unity on the right as it plots its way forward. “We’re living in difficult times,” she said in an Instagram post Friday. “We need to think first, then act.”