Fernando Bizzarro
Panelist
Assistant Professor, Boston College
Brazil's 2026 Elections: Looking Ahead to October
Date and Time
April 14, 2026
04:30PM - 05:45PM EDT
Location
CGIS South, Room S216
No registration required to attend in person.
In October, 120 million Brazilians will choose a president, members of Congress, and state governors. What is at stake? Will Lula da Silva win a fourth term in the Planalto, or will voters hand power back to Jair Bolsonaro, whose son Flávio is running for president while his father is imprisoned for seeking to overthrow Brazil's democracy? How might congressional races reshape Brazil’s balance of power, including relations with the judiciary? And what roles will corruption scandals, the spread of AI, and the evolving direction of U.S. policy play in the campaign? Bringing together experts from political science and public opinion, this panel will consider the forces shaping Brazil’s 2026 elections and what the results could mean for the country's democracy.
Special thanks to Aaron Watanabe, Ph.D. Student in Government, for his role in organizing this event.
Lucas Gelape
Panelist
Assistant Professor, UFMG
Graziele Silotto
Panelist
Senior Manager, Quaest
Steven Levitsky
Moderator
Director, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies; David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies; Professor of Government, Harvard
Bios
Fernando Bizzarro is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Boston College. His research in comparative politics and political economy explores the nature, causes, and consequences of democracy and political parties, with a substantive focus on Latin America. He received his PhD from Harvard's Department of Government in 2023 and was a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale's Jackson School of International Affairs (2023-2024).
Lucas Gelape is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of São Paulo (USP) and was a visiting fellow at Harvard University during his doctoral studies.
Graziele Silotto is a Senior Insights Manager at Quaest Consultancy and Research, where she leads survey-based research on elections. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of São Paulo and was a visiting researcher at the University of Oxford.
Steven Levitsky is David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government and Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. He is Senior Fellow at the Kettering Foundation and a Senior Democracy Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions, with a focus on Latin America. He is co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die, which was a New York Times Best-Seller and was published in 30 languages, and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. He has written or edited 11 other books, including Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press 2003), Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (with Lucan Way) (Princeton University Press, 2022). He and Lucan Way are currently working on a book on democratic resilience across the world.
Professor Levitsky has written for New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and The New Republic, and he has been a columnist for La Republica (Peru) and Folha de São Paulo (Brazil).