There’s about to be a Bolsonaro living in The Palácio da Alvorada again.

Headed into elections in Brazil on Sunday, the thinking around the presidential contest went as follows.

A runoff was a near certainty, which is to say neither Lula nor Flávio Bolsonaro could hope to win an outright majority in the initial vote, the candidates’ own first-round knockout hopes notwithstanding.

Lula, who’s seeking a fourth overall term, would likely come away from Sunday’s ballot with a three-point lead. Anything less than that would make the runoff a dicey proposition for the world’s foremost leftist standard-bearer given Bolsonaro’s expected to capture most of the (almost de minimis) third-way vote in the runoff later this month.

Well, surprise. Or maybe I should say “surprise,” in scare quotes, to account for the number of times pollsters have underestimated the political right over the last decade: It was Bolsonaro who came out of the first round with a lead, 47% to Lula’s 45%. That’s a five-point swing versus what I’ll call “consensus.” The result suggests Bolsonaro will win the runoff or if that’s too strong we can say, as one EM debt manager put it, it’s “his to lose.”

So what? Who cares? At the risk of making you feel under-informed or otherwise out of step with the world, we all do and we should all be able to explain why.

Most obviously in the macro context, Brazil boasts the largest economy of any emerging market save China and India. Setting aside Mexico, which is nearly comparable GDP wise, it’s the largest economy in Latin America by a country mile. Brazil has a lot of natural resources and it’s a major trading partner of both the US and China.

That latter point speaks to what’s really on the line in this election: Brazil’s a kind of geopolitical swing state. Under Lula, the country’s pursued — and you’ll forgive the cliché — strategic autonomy on more or less every front. Bolsonaro, by contrast, has promised to enthusiastically re-endear the country to Donald Trump, who last year leveraged tariff threats against Lula in a (failed) attempt to stop investigatory proceedings into Flávio’s father, Jair, who lives on house arrest and whose term in office lives in infamy.

That gets us quickly to what else is on the line in this election: Democracy. Flávio’s promised to pardon his father and seek amnesty for the rioters who, in January of 2023, stormed the country’s legislature and government buildings in a bid to overturn the last presidential election. The parallels with the attack on the US Capitol and Trump’s pardons for the Americans who perpetrated it are more than unmistakable: They’re deliberate.

In the same vein, the younger Bolsonaro’s likely to seek redress (read: revenge) for his father’s conviction starting with, if his allies in the senate can cobble together enough support, impeachment proceedings against Supreme Court justices including and especially Alexandre de Moraes, a bête noire of the far-right and an archenemy of Elon Musk’s.

To call Moraes a polarizing figure would be to materially understate the case. He’s a towering figure in Brazil having taken it upon himself to combat the spread of misinformation with, among other things, curbs on social media.

That crusade, however well-meaning, has arguably been counterproductive to the extent it i) fanned the flames by making martyrs of right-wing provocateurs, and ii) set Moraes up to be crucified (figuratively, one hopes) in the event he were to wind up implicated in one of Brazil’s regularly-scheduled national corruption scandals.

Guess what? Moraes was in fact implicated in a corruption scandal when an investigation into Daniel Vorcaro, the former chief of failed lender Banco Master, turned up text messages between the jailed financier and Moraes.

Last month, fellow high court justice André Mendonça, who’s overseeing a $10 billion fraud probe into Banco Master, unsealed correspondence between Moraes and Vorcaro. Never mind that both Mendonça and the younger Bolsonaro — who allegedly solicited Vorcaro for millions to fund a movie about his dad — have likewise had direct contact with the banker.

Mendonça’s hardly impartial. He’s not just a Bolsonaro “ally.” He was the elder Bolsonaro’s attorney general. Now the court’s divided into camps, one loyal to Moraes and one to Mendonça. That’s a disaster for institutional credibility in Brazil.

Following Sunday’s election, Bolsonaro has twice as many senate seats. If his allies can find enough likeminded members of the chamber to constitute a two-thirds voting majority, they could oust Moraes. Suffice to say a nakedly political effort to impeach a Supreme Court justice viewed by the left as a bulwark against right-wing authoritarianism isn’t the sort of thing that’s likely to restore public faith in government.

None of that’s to say “more Lula” is necessarily the better outcome. You could fairly argue we’ve seen enough Lula for several lifetimes by now. He’s been a fixture of Brazilian politics for nearly half a century, and the fact that he’s on the brink of losing an election to the son of a man convicted of attempting a coup at the very least suggests voters are weary.

But I’m not sure we want to open the door in Brazil to a multi-generational Bolsonaro dynasty. Note that Jair Bolsonaro’s wife won a senate seat on Sunday. Flávio’s her stepson.

I realize this doesn’t need recounting for those who follow geopolitics closely, but for the rest of you, remember that Jair wielded power in Brazil much like the would-be dictator that he was. While in office, he retained his reputation as an unapologetic misogynist, racist and everything-phobe. He was brash, he was divisive and, like Trump, he made a point of being on the “wrong” side of nearly every important debate.

The elder Bolsonaro was also unapologetically sentimental about Brazil’s military dictatorship, which ran the country for more than two decades until democracy was restored in 1985. That dictatorship — the one Bolsonaro was so proudly nostalgic for — was famous for torture, and is blamed for murdering at least 200 dissidents and disappearing a couple hundred more.

The White House would, of course, love to see a Bolsonaro back in charge. A win for Flávio in the runoff later this month would further Trump’s aggressive pursuit of hemispheric dominion, undercut Beijing’s influence in Brasília and, given Lula’s age, fell the last of Latin America’s leftist giants once and for all.