He possesses one of the most famous family names in Latin American politics. But when the Brazilian senator took to the stage at a conservative conference in Grapevine, Texas, last weekend it was only his forename that was on people’s lips.
“Flávio! Flávio! Flávio!” the audience shouted as the 44-year-old politician announced he would run for president in order to fight the “radical environmental and woke” agendas he claims have made Brazil awful again.
“Let me look you in the eyes and tell you: we will win,” the surname-less senator said in halting English, read from a teleprompter machine.
The Flávio in question is Flávio Bolsonaro, the oldest son of the disgraced former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is under house arrest after receiving a 27-year jail sentence for trying to overturn the result of the 2022 election.
As the younger Bolsonaro seeks to catapult his family back to the pinnacle of Brazilian politics in this year’s contest, many believe he is intentionally downplaying his parentage in an attempt to shake off the baggage of a name many associate with anti-democratic tendencies and a coronavirus catastrophe that killed hundreds of thousands of people.
Political analysts have detected a deliberate strategy to reposition the rightwing politician in voters’ minds by casting him as a supposedly moderate “Flávio”, rather than a key member of the Bolsonaro clan.
A campaign jingle played at one recent rally and broadcast on the candidate’s social networks refers to Bolsonaro’s firstborn as simply “Zero Um” (No One) and Flávio, without citing his family name.
Controversially, many Brazilian newspapers have adopted the same style, repeatedly calling the politician only “Flávio” in headlines – something leftwing opponents consider a cynical attempt to camouflage the politician’s hard-right roots.
One social media satirist, the journalist Gilberto Porcidonio, took a poke at the Bolsonarian marketing strategy on Threads, joking:
– Are you going to vote for Flávio?
– Which Flávio?
– The one whose surname they got rid of to make him electable!
Fabiana Moraes, a columnist for Intercept Brasil who wrote recently about Bolsonaro’s disappearing last name, believed the move was designed to help Bolsonaro sidestep the hugely negative views millions of Brazilians still hold of his father.
Moraes saw many reasons for that dislike, including Jair Bolsonaro’s misogyny and the failed coup he plotted after losing 2022’s election to his leftwing rival Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. But perhaps the biggest cause was Jair Bolsonaro’s bungled response to coronavirus, which killed more than 800,000 Brazilians, and his delay in buying vaccines.
“Brazil was exposed to such an unthinkable level of suffering [during Covid] … and I think this still reverberates,” Moraes said.
Flávio Bolsonaro has not entirely abandoned his surname, which many conservatives still revere. Jair Bolsonaro won 58m votes in the 2022 election, losing to Lula by only 2m. Polls suggest the 2026 vote could be similarly close.
“It’s unquestionable that [this surname] is still a real asset – but at the same time it’s also the mirror opposite,” said Moraes, who believed the tactic was aimed at attracting voters who were neither progressives, nor diehard Bolsonaro fans.
Moraes feared Brazil’s version of Wall Street, Faria Lima, and parts of the mainstream media had already bought into Flávio Bolsonaro’s attempt to portray himself as a moderate, by playing down his roots and even using gender-neutral language in contrast to his father’s notorious homophobia.
She was unconvinced by claims newspaper editors were using “Flávio” in their headlines because it was three letters shorter than Bolsonaro. “Jair is much shorter than Flávio and that wasn’t the name that appeared in the headlines [when he was president], was it?” Moraes said.
Supporters of President Lula, whom Flávio Bolsonaro looks set to challenge in October’s vote, have cottoned on to the rightwinger’s rebranding effort. In recent days, they have set about hammering home the candidate’s association with what many see as his family’s toxic name.
“It’s Flávio Bolsonaro, not just Flávio. He must carry the surname of the dirtiest family in Brazil,” the congresswoman Luizianne Lins wrote on X.
In an interview with the news website Metrópoles, the president of Lula’s Workers’ party (PT), Edinho Silva, urged voters to remember what life was like when the father of the politician formerly known as Flávio Bolsonaro held power.
“Flávio Bolsonaro is a representative of the Bolsonaro family … We cannot forget what Brazil was like when it was governed by the Bolsonaro family … [or] what Brazil was like when it was left to fend for itself during the pandemic because of a marketing campaign,” Silva said.
Moraes believed Flávio Bolsonaro’s reinvention was also designed to conceal numerous skeletons in his own closet, including longstanding corruption allegations and well-documented ties to a police officer turned hitman called Adriano Magalhães da Nóbrega, and other members of Rio’s paramilitary underworld.
In 2005, when Flávio Bolsonaro was a state legislator, he awarded Nóbrega a medal while he was in prison, and employed Nóbrega’s wife and mother. Nóbrega, who was killed by police in 2020, was alleged to have run what the Rio newspaper O Globo called the city’s “most lethal and secretive phalanx of hired guns”.
Bolsonaro paid a similar tribute to Ronald Pereira, a police officer and paramilitary recently jailed for 56 years for involvement in the 2018 assassination of the leftwing politician Marielle Franco.
Bolsonaro has repeatedly denied corruption and links to criminal groups but his rivals are expected to exploit such allegations in the six months remaining before the election.
Bolsonaro’s speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) gathering in Texas – in which he questioned Brazil’s voting system and called for foreign pressure to ensure a “free and fair” vote – appears to have undermined his rebranding push.
“Like father, like son … Bolsonarista coup-mongering seems to be genetic,” the conservative Estadão de São Paulo complained in an editorial, although on five occasions the newspaper referred to its subject by his first name.