Brazil's campaign season officially opens on August 16, and the presidential race is arguably as close as any in the country's democratic history — with a foreign leader who isn't on the ballot shaping the outcome almost as much as either candidate is. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, chasing a fourth term, and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, carrying his imprisoned father's political movement into the October 4 vote, sit anywhere from a single point to nearly nine points apart depending on which pollster you ask. Much of that spread traces back to two years of American tariffs, sanctions, and public pressure that President Donald Trump built around the Bolsonaro family's legal troubles — a campaign that recent polling suggests may be helping the very candidate it was designed to sink.
