Brazil: Political Parties & Elections

Brazil's National Congress is elected through a highly fragmented multiparty system, a product of open-list proportional representation for the Chamber of Deputies that allows dozens of parties to win seats in any given election. Rather than two dominant blocs, Brazilian politics is typically organized around broad left and right coalitions built around a small number of anchor parties, most prominently the leftist Workers' Party (PT) and, more recently, the right-wing Liberal Party (PL).

Brazil's next general election is scheduled for October 4, 2026, with a runoff on October 25 if no presidential candidate wins a majority in the first round; voters will choose the president, all 513 federal deputies, one-third of the 81-member Senate, and state governors. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the PT is seeking an unprecedented fourth term, running against Senator Flávio Bolsonaro of the PL, who entered the race after his father, former president Jair Bolsonaro, was barred from running following his conviction and imprisonment for plotting a coup; as of late August 2026, polling shows the two candidates in a close, at times statistically tied, contest.

Senators are elected to eight-year terms in a first-past-the-post vote, with elections for two-thirds and one-third of the Senate alternating every four years, while deputies serve four-year terms under the D'Hondt proportional method. This combination of a highly proportional lower house and a staggered, majoritarian Senate tends to produce presidents who must build broad, often unstable multiparty coalitions in Congress to govern, a defining feature of Brazil's political system commonly referred to as "coalitional presidentialism."