“Here in South America, we present ourselves as a region of peace,” Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva declared last week as he hosted South African leader Cyril Ramaphosa, adding that “nobody here has an atomic bomb.” Normally the genial Lula might have left it at that, celebrating his country’s peaceful, collaborative foreign policy tradition. This time, however, he ended with a warning: “If we do not prepare ourselves in terms of defense, one day someone will invade us.”

Back in office since 2023 and seeking a fourth (and final) term later this year, the eighty-year-old confronts a world reshaped by Trump-era shocks to the global order. As his foreign policy advisor, Celso Amorim, recently put it, “Whereas two decades ago I would have said that we lived in a world of opportunities, today we live in a world of difficulties.”

The geopolitical uncertainty has upped the ante of what was already set to be a deeply contentious race this October between Lula’s broad coalition of moderates and leftists and the far-right challenger, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the forty-four-year-old son of the imprisoned former president Jair Bolsonaro. Much will be written about the campaign in the months ahead, but a critical story is already unfolding within the Left itself. Decisions made in 2026 — over who runs, which factions align, and how the progressive coalition balances pragmatism with principle — will shape not just this campaign but likely the early post-Lula era.