Brazil’s election runoff could decide the fate of regulated betting after Lula’s ban

Brazil’s presidential runoff on 25 October now sits on top of an already messy betting policy fight: licensed online gambling was banned in late September by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva through a provisional measure, and the sector is trying to get that decision reversed. For PSPs and operators, the immediate question is whether the political pressure gets worse before Congress and the courts get a say.

1. The first round did not deliver a clean result for either side. Liberal Party leader Flávio Bolsonaro, son of imprisoned former president Jair Bolsonaro, took 47.03% of the vote, while Lula got 45.16%. Because neither crossed 50%, the presidency now goes to a second-round runoff on 25 October.
2. The timing matters because the betting industry is already fighting Lula’s ban. Brazil’s two main gambling trade bodies have asked the Supreme Federal Court to overturn the measure, which came less than two years after the regulated market went live. The ban still has to go to the National Congress, which will decide whether to make it permanent.
3. Ramiro Atucha, CEO and founder of Atucha Strategic Advisory, says the runoff could make it harder to reverse the ban. His view is blunt: public opinion on betting is strongly negative right now, the evangelical vote carries a lot of weight for both candidates, and “nobody wins votes defending bets in Brazil this month.”
4. Congress may end up being the more important battleground than the runoff itself. Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party won 121 of the 513 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, the largest bloc there since 1990. Atucha argues that lawmakers may be more willing than the presidential contenders to think about signed agreements and the legal and economic consequences of the ban.
5. Atucha also notes that the Liberal Party still falls well short of a majority: 121 seats is nowhere near the 257 needed to control the chamber on its own. Even so, a larger congressional bloc can matter when the fight is over whether Brazil keeps a licensed betting market or shuts it down before it has had much time to settle.

For high-risk payment providers, this is not a theoretical policy debate. Brazil’s licensed online gambling market only went live less than two years ago, and a provisional ban can change acceptance strategies, settlement flows, and partner risk appetite very quickly. In practice, the next decision point is not just the runoff; it is whether Congress and the courts treat the regulated sector as something to preserve or something to unwind.