Bolsonaro told the Band debate on 18 October that crime had exploded under Lula, two days after the figures showing violent deaths at a series low were set out against the same claim from his TV Globo interview, and repeated a business-failure claim he has made at least 25 times this year. Eight of his 18 checkable statements about Lula that night were false and two of Lula's 17 were. Police concluded in June that Bolsonaro slandered Lula by tying him to drug trafficking.

Flávio Bolsonaro, the Liberal Party (PL) senator who faces President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the runoff on 25 October, told the Band debate audience on 18 October: "With you, crime exploded in Brazil." Two days earlier he had told TV Globo that Lula's government held the all-time high for crime, and the check of that interview published the same night set out the figures against him: violent deaths fell 8.2 per cent in 2025 to 19.1 per 100,000 people, the lowest rate in the series. At the same debate he said Lula had sent no one to defend Brazil against US tariffs, seven weeks after the more than 30 meetings Lula's government held with US officials were set out against his 28 August version of the claim. Eight of his 18 checkable statements about Lula and his government that night were false, including that Lula released guns to drug traffickers and spent R$7 billion on travel with his wife.

Bolsonaro made most of the same claims in a YouTube broadcast on 1 October, in TV Globo interviews on 28 August and 16 October and at campaign rallies. Allies on his broadcast made claims of their own, and Direita Já, the PL's content platform, sent false material about Lula to at least 900 WhatsApp groups. Each claim below is set against the official data and the checks published by Brazil's fact-checkers Lupa, Aos Fatos and UOL Confere.

Two of Lula's 17 checkable statements at the same debate were false: that growth above 3 per cent returned only after he took office, when GDP grew 4.8 per cent in 2021, and that Jair Bolsonaro left a deficit of 2.8 per cent, when the central government ran a primary surplus of R$54.1 billion in 2022. Lula also said falsely on 27 August that he did not know Roberta Luchsinger, a lobbyist who is a friend of his eldest son. Two of Bolsonaro's 18 debate statements checked out: gross public debt has reached R$11 trillion, and Lula vetoed the end of prisoners' temporary leave before Congress overrode him.

Lula and the factions

Bolsonaro posted an image on X on 3 January 2026 showing Lula beside Nicolás Maduro under the words "Lula será delatado" ("Lula will be informed on"), with a list of crimes that included international drug trafficking, arms trafficking and support for terrorism. The Federal Police (PF) concluded in a report sent to the Supreme Federal Court that the post was calúnia, falsely attributing a crime to Lula, and Justice Alexandre de Moraes gave Bolsonaro 10 days to testify. Bolsonaro's lawyers said the post referred to Maduro's government and that he did not intend to accuse Lula of any crime. The Prosecutor General's Office decides whether to charge him.

The Superior Electoral Court (TSE) voted 5 to 2 in August to order the removal of a Bolsonaro campaign video linking Lula to the PCC and Comando Vermelho, Brazil's two largest criminal factions, finding that it went beyond the limits of political dispute. The court's president, Nunes Marques, and Justice André Mendonça voted to keep it online.

Bolsonaro told a rally in São Paulo on 20 June that Lula's government goes abroad "to lobby for Comando Vermelho and the PCC", and repeated at the Band debate that Lula had gone to the United States to defend criminal organisations. Both claims were false, as was his debate claim that Lula's government regards child abusers as sick people rather than criminals.

Crime and guns

Bolsonaro told TV Globo on 16 October that Lula's government held the all-time high for crime. Violent deaths fell 8.2 per cent in 2025 to 19.1 per 100,000 people, the lowest rate in the series, although deaths at the hands of police rose 5.4 per cent and femicides 4 per cent; the femicide rate, 1.4 per 100,000 in 2025, is the measure at its highest, which researchers attribute partly to better reporting. Bolsonaro repeated the lie at the debate two days later, when he said crime had exploded.

Bolsonaro said Lula "released guns to the traffickers". Lula's government revoked Jair Bolsonaro's decrees easing access to guns in January 2023, and the PF seized 9,373 guns from 2023 to October 2026, 6.5 per cent more than the 8,812 it seized under Jair Bolsonaro. His claim that Lula is letting illegal guns into the country is unsupported.

Bolsonaro said Lula's government puts dangerous criminals on the streets on the grounds that prisons are full; release depends on court decisions, and the law frees nobody for lack of space. He said Lula went to court to bring back prisoners' temporary leave; the challenge, ADI 7663, was filed by the criminal lawyers' association Anacrim. He asked viewers whether they had seen phone robberies fall. They fell from 492,905 in 2022 to 308,723 in 2025, a drop of 37.4 per cent, and Lula signed a law raising penalties for theft and for receiving stolen goods.

Guilherme Derrite, the Progressistas (PP) Senate candidate in São Paulo and a former state public security secretary, said on Bolsonaro's 1 October broadcast that Lula defends phone thieves and had said women were used to being touched "since they were girls". Both were lies he repeated after they had been debunked. Lula had been speaking in Belém on 28 September, where he compared the gynaecological exams women have from childhood with men's resistance to prostate exams.

Hunger and household debt

Bolsonaro told viewers of his 1 October broadcast that Lula had left the Brazilian people hungry, and official data show the opposite. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced on 28 July 2025 that Brazil was off its Hunger Map, with undernourishment below 2.5 per cent of the population for 2022 to 2024. Brazil had first left the map in 2014 and returned in the FAO's assessment of 2018 to 2020, a period that includes the first two years of Jair Bolsonaro's presidency.

The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) counted 6.4 million people in severe food insecurity in 2024, about 3.2 per cent of the population and the lowest level in its survey. Posts this year presented a June 2022 Jornal Nacional report on 33 million hungry Brazilians as current; that figure came from a Penssan network survey published on 8 June 2022, covering late 2021 and early 2022, and uses a different method from the IBGE survey.

On the same broadcast Bolsonaro said Lula had left Brazilians in debt. The default figures support part of the claim: Serasa counted 69.4 million people in default in December 2022 and 83.9 million in August 2026, after 62.5 million in 2018. The share of households carrying debt was 49 per cent in December 2022 and 49.9 per cent in July 2026, Central Bank data show, and defaults have risen steadily since Michel Temer's government.

Public money

Bolsonaro said at the debate and on TV Globo on 16 October that Brazil's debt stands at R$11 trillion. The figure is correct: gross government debt was R$11.1 trillion, 82.9 per cent of GDP, in August 2026, against R$7.2 trillion, 73.5 per cent of GDP, in December 2022, according to the Central Bank and the Federal Court of Accounts.

Bolsonaro exaggerated when he said Lula had spent "another 350 billion" trying to win re-election. Election-year measures total R$354 billion, more than R$55 billion of it in tax waivers and R$34 billion of it outside the budget. The R$7 billion Bolsonaro said Lula and Rosângela "Janja" da Silva spent on trips is the R$7.14 billion that all federal agencies spent on travel from 2023 to 2025.

Bolsonaro told Jornal Nacional on 28 August that Lula's government had created 22,000 commissioned posts. The figure is exaggerated: commissioned posts rose from 46,989 at the end of Jair Bolsonaro's term to 52,780 in June 2026, about 5,700 more, and the 22,000 figure is an estimate of all new federal civil servants. He told TV Globo on 16 October that Lula was spreading terror among civil servants about privatisation, a misleading claim because Bolsonaro and his team had themselves floated privatising Correios, parts of Petrobras and 95 per cent of state companies.

Business failures

Bolsonaro has told the lie that companies are closing in unprecedented numbers at least 25 times this year, including on TV Globo on 16 October and at the Band debate two days later, after the check of his 1 October broadcast had set out Serasa Experian's figures. Serasa counted 1,828 companies filing for bankruptcy in 2015, the highest year in its series, against 846 in 2023, 862 in 2024 and 734 in 2025. Daniella Marques, who ran the state bank Caixa under Jair Bolsonaro and speaks for the campaign on the economy, said in July that bankruptcies and judicial recoveries had reached all-time highs.

Requests for judicial recovery, a procedure for indebted companies to renegotiate and keep trading, have risen since 2023, and a viral chart falsely presented those requests as bankruptcies. Bolsonaro's further claim that Lula's government holds the all-time high for industries moving to Paraguay is unsupported by any survey; 232 Brazilian companies still active at home have been approved for Paraguay's maquila regime since 2007.

The tigrinho

Lula signed a provisional measure on 25 September that blocks new deposits on online betting platforms and shuts them from 6 October. Bolsonaro called Lula "the father of the tigrinho", slang for online casino games, the same day, again on 26 and 27 September and on his 1 October broadcast.

Law 13,756, signed by Michel Temer in December 2018, legalised online betting and left the next government four years to regulate it. Jair Bolsonaro's government drafted a regulatory decree in 2022 and left it unpublished past the 12 December 2022 deadline, and Lula's government regulated the sector through Law 14,790 of 2023 before banning it this September, which makes Bolsonaro's claim misleading.

The US tariffs and Pix

Bolsonaro told Jornal Nacional on 28 August that he was "the only Brazilian public official who went to the United States to defend Brazil" against US tariffs. Lula's government held more than 30 meetings with US officials after the first tariffs were announced on 9 July 2025, the last with US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer on 14 July 2026. Lula met Donald Trump at the UN General Assembly on 23 September 2025, in Malaysia on 26 October 2025 and at the White House on 7 May 2026, and Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira travelled to the United States for talks. Embassy diplomats attended the trade representative's hearing in July as observers, so Bolsonaro's debate claim that Lula sent no one, made seven weeks after the meetings were set out against his 28 August version, was a lie.

On the same programme Bolsonaro said his brother, former federal deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro, "never asked for tariffs on Brazilian companies". Eduardo Bolsonaro and the commentator Paulo Figueiredo said on a podcast that tariffs had been discussed with Trump administration officials, and Eduardo celebrated the tariffs and later defended them as pressure for an amnesty for his father.

Bolsonaro also said Pix, Brazil's instant payment system, carries no fee "because Bolsonaro demanded it". The Central Bank made Pix free for individuals in October 2020 in a rule that makes no mention of the president, and Jair Bolsonaro's government backed a 0.2 per cent tax on digital transactions that year that would have covered Pix. Work on Pix began under Dilma Rousseff in 2014.

Lula's family and the Master case

Bolsonaro said at the debate that Lula's son Fábio Luís Lula da Silva had beaten his wife. The claim is unsupported: police closed the 2024 inquiry without charging him for lack of conclusive evidence, and the viral video showed a different man. Bolsonaro said the PF was not investigating Lula's son; the Supreme Federal Court authorised three such inquiries in July and August 2026.

Bolsonaro said the businessman known as Careca do INSS, at the centre of the social security deductions fraud, was part of Lula's government. He held no government post, and the irregular deductions began under Temer and continued under Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro's claim that only the PT caucus had tried to loosen controls on pension deductions is false: 16 of the 32 amendments came from the PT and the rest from six other parties.

Bolsonaro told TV Globo on 16 October that an audio clip of Daniel Vorcaro, the founder of Banco Master, showed R$30 million paid off the books for a film about Lula, and that the PF had confirmed it. The PF had said Vorcaro gave no such testimony or documents, and the Prosecutor General's Office and Vorcaro's lawyers had questioned the audio, so his statement that the PF confirmed it was a lie. He repeated the audio claim at the debate two days later; it rests on a single magazine report.

The PL's platform

Direita Já describes itself as an initiative of the PL that offers ready-made videos, cards and posts. From 27 September one of its WhatsApp groups sent at least 10 false or misleading items about Lula, each with a request to share, including cut versions of Lula's remarks on street sweepers, religion and preventive exams. The platform runs at least 900 groups with a potential reach of about 810,000 people. The same monitoring found disinformation shared by a platform linked to the campaign of Lula's Workers' Party (PT).

The PT asked the TSE in early August to remove Direita Já content, saying the platform offered up to 50 posts a week repeating material the court had already classified as notoriously untrue. Duda Lima, Bolsonaro's campaign marketer, and Rogério Marinho, its political coordinator, say the PT runs a "fake news factory". The TSE took down Exército do Lula, a pro-Lula WhatsApp channel, on 11 October at the campaign's request, and the court's disinformation unit reported the next day that it had found no false information in it.

Nikolas Ferreira, a PL federal deputy, posted a video on 14 January 2025 attacking a Federal Revenue rule that required banks to report Pix transfers above R$5,000 a month for individuals. He said in it that Pix was not being taxed but left open a future tax, and the video reached 300 million Instagram views by 16 January, a day after the government revoked the rule.

Religion

AI-generated images of Lula and Janja at a ceremony for Exu, a deity of Afro-Brazilian religions, spread on 3 October, the eve of the first round. Forensic analysis of the images found altered face shapes and artificial skin textures. A day earlier, fake Veja and GloboNews covers claiming the couple had consecrated Brazil to Exu went into circulation. After Lula's rally on Avenida Paulista on 11 October, posts presented a video of the 16 August Marcha para Exu on the same avenue as a "ritual of invocation" at the rally.

Fabricated screenshots of a Correio Braziliense story quoted Janja as saying "not even God takes this election from Lula" at a rally in Piauí, and drew at least 130,000 interactions. Janja spoke in Teresina on 9 September and called Lula "the true anointed of God"; the forgery altered the newspaper's real headline and used a photo from Lula's campaign launch on 16 August. A clip in which Lula appears to say the devil was taking him over was cut from a speech in Salvador on 26 August 2021, in which he was describing attacks by Bolsonaro supporters who said he had a pact with the devil.

Food, savings and taxes

Messages from 22 January 2025 said Lula's government would sell out-of-date food to the poor. The proposal came from the supermarket association Abras on 22 January, and the claim distorted an interview by Rui Costa, Lula's chief of staff, who corrected his word "interventions" to "measures" the same evening and said expiry rules for food would not change. By 27 January, 336 unique messages had reached a potential 352,000 people.

Posts since 2023 have said Lula would seize savings accounts, tax the FGTS severance fund at 35 per cent and raise inheritance tax to 40 per cent. Lula proposed on 30 May 2023 a regional savings fund built from development banks such as BNDES and CAF, and Constitutional Amendment 32 of 2001 bars a president from seizing savings by provisional measure. The FGTS board decided on 8 August 2024 to distribute 65 per cent of the fund's 2023 profit, R$15.2 billion, to workers. The tax reform promulgated in December 2023 makes inheritance tax progressive between 2 and 8 per cent; 40 per cent is the top federal estate tax rate in the United States.

The law

Article 323 of the Electoral Code makes it a crime to spread, in campaign propaganda or during the campaign period, facts known to be untrue about parties or candidates that can influence voters, punishable by two months to a year in detention or a fine, increased by a third to a half when the crime is committed online or transmitted live. TSE case law requires proof that the person knew the facts were untrue. Article 138 of the Penal Code, under which the PF framed its report on the 3 January post, defines calúnia as falsely accusing someone of a crime.

Bolsonaro's testimony to the PF and the Prosecutor General's decision on the PF report would settle whether he faces a calúnia charge. Direita Já's dispatch logs and the PL's accounts filed with the TSE would show who chose the 10 items and whether party money pays for the platform, the question the PT's August petition put to the court.