Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro clash over cost of living and Brazil’s betting market in the final stretch before the first round

With just over a week left before Brazil’s first round, the campaigns of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Flávio Bolsonaro have turned the regulated betting market into campaign material. For payment providers and operators, the useful part is simple: the political risk around online gambling in Brazil is still live, and it is now being used as a talking point at the top of the ticket.

1. Campaign messaging has sharpened around three themes: cost of living, the sports betting market, and investigations involving Banco Master and alleged diversion from INSS pensions. The attacks are playing out in campaign ads, on social media, and at rallies.
2. One poll released yesterday again showed a technical tie in a possible second-round matchup, while Flávio Bolsonaro is trying to consolidate support on the right by pushing for tactical voting. Lula, meanwhile, is using executive power to announce measures framed as popular, including a Bolsa Família increase and a ban on bets, with the announcement scheduled for today.
3. According to aides, the Provisional Measure will block online casinos, including jogo do tigrinho, as well as fixed-odds betting on real events such as football matches. The government had initially discussed banning only online casinos, but the final decision was to block all types of online betting.
4. At an event in Rio on Wednesday, Lula said: “This is not a war, it is a decision: I will have the immense pleasure of ending bets.” On the same day, Flávio said that if elected he would ban online casinos, including jogo do tigrinho, but would keep fixed-odds sports betting because it is easier to control.
5. Flávio has also started calling Lula the “father of tigrinho.” In campaign material, he says Lula “legalized online casinos in Brazil” by signing the 2023 law, and argues that the measure brought Tigrinho into the legal betting market, causing “addiction and destruction for millions of families.”

One detail matters for anyone touching Brazil: bets were authorized in 2018 under the Temer administration and operated with no regulation until 2023, when a new law was approved. In other words, the country has already moved once from prohibition-by-default to regulation-by-law, and now betting is back in the middle of an election fight.