Lula’s win is a warning for America

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s victory in Brazil over Senator Flávio Bolsonaro is being celebrated by progressives as a historic victory for democracy. On Sunday, the left-wing incumbent won an unprecedented fourth term by defeating Bolsonaro by more than 4 million votes, even though he had lost the first round of voting.“All in all, a good day for progressives and for democracy,” Robert Kuttner wrote in the American Prospect.Kuttner said the vote was evidence that Lula’s progressive policies — cash payments to families who send their kids to public school, a minimum wage hike, and new taxes on wealthy Brazilians — were working. Lula’s economic populism may indeed have helped him politically, but calling his victory a win for democracy is laughable. Though you wouldn’t know it from reading Kuttner’s article, in the immediate aftermath of his win, Lula announced he’d impose an immediate crackdown on social media, which he justified by divine mandate.“I was chosen by God,” the 81-year-old Lula announced to his supporters. “I always found that I had God’s finger on my head.”Lula’s announcement prompted George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley to quip that God, apparently, supports denying civil liberties to his people.Though few Americans may realize it, Brazil already has one of the strictest social media policies in the Western Hemisphere. In 2022, Reuters reported on the government’s crackdown on speech during the heated presidential contest between challenger Lula and incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, the father of Flávio Bolsonaro. The crackdown on “online disinformation” came not from democratically elected lawmakers but from Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court, an election authority that consists of seven judges. Run by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, the TSE imposed fines of $19,000 per hour on online platforms that did not remove content the court deemed “fraudulent.”Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s addresses supporters during a victory rally after winning a fourth term in the presidential runoff on Paulista Avenue in Sao Paulo on Sunday, Oct. 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko) Less than two years later, Brazil’s high court used these regulations to ban X (formerly Twitter), and de Moraes ordered a criminal investigation of its owner, Elon Musk. Only after the company paid millions of dollars in fines was X authorized to resume operating.Some might be tempted to believe that Lula and de Moraes were only protecting the masses from “disinformation.” In fact, it’s Page 1 of the 21st-century authoritarian playbook.A 2009 report titled Undermining Democracy by Freedom House, published in association with Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia, noted that “managing” political messaging was the favored strategy of the world’s most authoritarian regimes, such as Russia and China, which recognized that total control over information was “neither possible nor necessary.”“These regimes have developed methods that allow them to ‘guide’ and ‘manage’ political discourse; selectively suppress or reshape news and information of political consequence; and squelch, coopt, or parasitize the most important business entities,” the report read. “The priority is political control.”Ironically, The New York Times credited Lula’s victory on Sunday to “a seismic social media campaign that convinced Brazilians to reject his rival.” The paper made no mention of Lula’s plan to tighten the government’s grip on social media platforms.For those requiring further evidence that Brazil is not exactly a healthy democracy, seven minutes after Lula was declared the election winner, de Moraes signed an order to seize Bolsonaro’s passport over allegations of corruption.“Is there any other example anywhere in the democratic world where the defeated candidate in a presidential election has their passports seized and is prohibited from leaving the country the day after voting, by order of a judge aligned with the winning candidate?” asked Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Glenn Greenwald. “I’m looking for historical precedents, and so far, I haven’t found any.”Bear in mind, Bolsonaro had not been charged with any crime, let alone convicted of one, something federal police later pointed out. (He has since fled the country, reportedly by way of Argentina and then Ecuador, arriving in the United States.)Attempting to seize the passport of a political opponent who just received 60 million votes and tightening the government’s grip on political speech are hardly signs of a healthy democracy.Yet the American Left appears happy to believe Lula’s assurances that there will be no return to dictatorship, much like it did with Daniel Ortega, the Nicaraguan strongman who this year announced he was ditching democratic elections.As socialism rises in America on the Left and economic populism on the Right, Americans would do well to remember that political freedom and economic freedom are inexorably intertwined.TRUMP SAYS BRAZIL ELECTION LIKELY ‘RIGGED’ AS BOLSONARO DEMANDS LUKA’S VICTORY BE ANNULLEDAs for claims that it is the proper province of government to regulate speech and appoint governing bodies designated to separate truth from falsehood, consider the words of James Madison.“The right of freely examining public characters and measures, and of free communication among the people thereon,” he wrote in the Virginia Report of 1799–1800, against the Alien and Sedition Acts, “has ever been justly deemed the only effectual guardian of every other right.”