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When Steve Bannon described Brazil’s 2022 presidential election as “the most important of all time in South America,” the former Trump adviser had someone as close to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro by his side as his son Eduardo.
Introduced by Bannon at an event in South Dakota last year as Trump’s “third son from the tropics,” Eduardo has become his father’s trusted international emissary and ideologue, building close ties with overseas conservative allies like the Trump family.
As Jair Bolsonaro faces an uphill battle to win a second term in October, in an election seen as a critical test of democracy in Latin America’s largest nation, Eduardo has joined his father in questioning Brazil’s electronic system of voting and casting doubt on the supreme court.
The former two-term president, leftist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, leads almost all polls by a wide margin, but Eduardo believes the race is “even”.
“I don’t trust polls,” he says in his cramped parliamentary office in Brazil.
Nicknamed “03” by his father in reference to his older brothers, Senator Flavio and Councilor from Rio Carlos, Eduardo initially avoided politics. He served in Brazil’s federal police before winning a seat in São Paulo’s Congress in 2014 at the age of 30.
“We spent about $10,000 and they cast me,” he says in a rare interview. “It was really lucky.” Four years later, he set an election record by winning the most votes of any lower house MP, 1.84 million.
Eduardo seems friendly and polite, but his remarks are not always charitable. He spends at least as much time attacking the Supreme Court as he does criticizing his father’s primary rival for the presidency.
Judges are “fighting against” his father by intervening “all the time” in favor of Lula, he says.
With a broader mandate than many global partners, Brazil’s highest legal body can launch its own investigations as well as rule on complaints. Many Brazilians see the court as a pillar of democracy. But for Bolsonaro, his sons and the country’s right wing, it represents an establishment left resisting the president’s conservatism.
“In dictatorships, they close the press, put journalists in prison, exile people, arrest party presidents, arrest politicians,” Eduardo said. “Everything I said happens in Brazil, but it doesn’t [at] the hands of President Bolsonaro, [at] hands of the supreme court.
He quotes Daniel Silveira, a former military policeman The Bolsonarian congressman who became a hard-right cause célèbre. The Supreme Court sentenced Silveira to nearly nine years in prison in April after the politician threatened justice, including Alexandre de Moraes, in online posts. One of them said: “People need to go to the Supreme Court, take de Moraes by the scruff of the neck and throw his little egghead in the bin.”
Eduardo did not condemn Silveira and described the behavior of the supreme court as “disgusting”. De Moraes “says he is the victim, he [makes] the charges and he tried the case. . . so it is a unique system that we have here in Brazil”. His father ordered Silveira’s presidential pardon.
Eduardo’s command of English, acquired during a work exchange program in the US, and his ideological convictions have helped him become a bridge between Bolsonaro and his allies abroad. In 2019, the president tried to appoint his son as Brazil’s ambassador to Washington, but backed out after opposition in Congress.
Eduardo says he admires Trump “a lot” and the feeling seems mutual. On the wall of his office is a framed copy of Eduardo’s Wikipedia entry with a handwritten endorsement from the former US president: “Eduardo, you are great. There will be a big announcement soon about your wonderful father — best wishes, Donald.
“He has a unique gift for channeling America’s conservative movement with a Brazilian twist,” said Gerald Brandt, a US-based financier close to the Bolsonaro family. “He will carry his father’s mantle far and wide.”
Eduardo was in Washington during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters, but declined to comment on the riot, saying it was an “internal issue” for Americans. Since then, he has held additional meetings with Trump family members and allies, including a conference in South Dakota last August that Bannon attended.
Tom Shannon, a former senior State Department official who specializes in Latin America, said he understood that Eduardo “looked very hard at January 6 to understand what went wrong and why Trump was unsuccessful.”
“The real bottom line for them was that Trump was banking on the mob’s success,” Shannon said. “They believe . . . they need institutional support, they need armed forces.
President Bolsonaro’s attacks on electronic voting, repeated at a meeting of ambassadors in July, prompted the Biden administration to express support for Brazil’s electoral system.
“We are fully confident that the next election results in Brazil will reflect the will of the voters,” said a senior State Department official.
The president said computerized voting machines were vulnerable to fraud and called on the military to monitor the parallel vote count.
Eduardo avoids questions about what he and his father would do if the voting system is not changed and Jair loses the election. “I think they will improve [the voting system],” he says. “Everything else is futurist thinking. . . . I don’t know if [our supporters will] go to the street.”
The prospect of violent protests worries the authorities. But Eduardo — whose office is decorated with replica toy firearms and a sign reading “Gun Safety Rule #1: Carry One” — believes gun ownership, which has quadrupled during his father’s tenure , has made Brazil safer. He worries that Lula will stop using firearms.
“Only dictators take people’s guns because they think people are a threat,” he says. “We think differently and would like to empower people to protect themselves and their properties.
For ’03, his father’s defense of such freedoms defined his presidency and built the case for his re-election. “He sacrificed his personal life to bring freedom to Brazilians. . . he is a freedom fighter,” says Eduardo.
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