In the months leading up to Brazil’s 2022 presidential election, polls showed Jair Bolsonaro behind Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva by up to 30 percentage points among women. Concerned, his campaign unfurled its ace up its sleeve: Michelle Bolsonaro, the president’s young and photogenic wife, a devout evangelical who until then had a limited public profile.
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In July of that year, drawing heavily on Christian themes, she delivered a moving speech in Rio de Janeiro that brought Bolsonaro, standing behind her, to tears.
“His campaign rescued patriotism, he answered the call,” Michelle Bolsonaro said of her husband. “He is one of God’s chosen ones – he added –, he has a clean and pure heart, and he is handsome, huh? But he is mine”.
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The speech was a success, and Michelle Bolsonaro was credited with helping her husband come within surprising distance in the second round of the election (he lost by less than two percentage points).
That success on the campaign trail has also sparked speculation about his own political future. Jair Bolsonaro faces more than a dozen court challenges, which he and several allies have acknowledged may leave him ineligible to run for president again in 2026. Though Michelle Bolsonaro has also faced previous allegations of wrongdoing, including questions about whether she was involved in an attempted of misappropriating a gift from the king of Saudi Arabia of millions worth of jewelry and other luxury items, some say she is a future natural leader of Brazil’s conservative movement.
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She can help enormously… by giving the Brazilian right a feminine force equal to that of the left
There is a lot of competition for the throne. Some come from his own family: three of Bolsonaro’s children are elected officials with a large following on social media. Brazil’s three largest states are also ruled by conservatives, including São Paulo Governor Tarcísio de Freitas, who has already won the enthusiastic endorsement of some business leaders as a future presidential candidate. But Michelle Bolsonaro seems to enjoy the support of ordinary Brazilians, many of whom remember her husband’s emphasis on “defending the family” favorably and see her as a potentially less divisive figure. A recent opinion column in a major Brazilian newspaper carried the provocative headline: ‘Bolsonaro, Michelle’s first gentleman’.
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Sóstenes Cavalcante, a federal deputy for Rio de Janeiro, a member of Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party and one of the leaders of the evangelical caucus in Congress, said that if the former first lady decided to run for office and had the support of her family, she would she would be a “very strong candidate” for any position.
“She can help enormously…by giving the Brazilian right a female force equal to that of the left,” she told AQ.
a humble background
Brazilian press reports describe Michelle Bolsonaro’s childhood in a small house in Ceilândia Norte, on the poor outskirts of Brasilia. Her grandmother, now in frail health and living in Sol Nascente, Brazil’s largest favela, was caught by police selling drugs in central Brasilia in 1997, when Michelle was 15.
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Michelle Bolsonaro has not spoken in much detail about her past. Neither her grandmother nor her mother were invited to Bolsonaro’s inauguration. She became active in evangelical church life and found work as a secretary in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies. Across the aisle she met Jair Bolsonaro, almost 30 years her senior, still a little-known congressman from Rio in 2007. He invited her to work in his office and they were married in a civil ceremony that same year, their third marriage. Jair. Michelle also has a daughter from a previous relationship.
The full religious ceremony took place in 2013 and, significantly, was presided over by Silas Malafaia, the powerful evangelical leader of the Assembleia de Deus church. While Michelle is an evangelical, Jair was and remains a Catholic, despite close connections to evangelicals that analysts say his wife played an important role in helping to build.
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“Michelle was responsible for introducing Bolsonaro to the evangelical leadership,” Guilherme Casarões, a professor at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas who has done in-depth research on the Brazilian right, told AQ. “Until 2015, (Bolsonaro’s) military identity was much stronger than his Christian identity.”
If Michelle often shunned the public stage during her husband’s presidency, she was reported to have exerted influence behind the scenes, including on major government appointments, such as the election of Damares Alves as Minister for Women, Family and Human Rights, as well as of the Presbyterian pastor André Mendonça as one of Bolsonaro’s picks for the Supreme Court. Alves, now a senator, became one of the most prominent evangelicals in the Bolsonaro administration.
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But there was also talk of the participation of Michelle Bolsonaro in internal confrontations within the Bolsonaro clan. After the election, many noticed that Michelle and Jair Bolsonaro had unfollowed each other on Instagram, where Michelle has 6 million loyal followers. Jair Bolsonaro’s social media presence was understood to be led by his son Carlos, whose relationship with Michelle Bolsonaro was said to be strained at times during the campaign.
Observers emphasized the powerful political potential that emanates from Michelle Bolsonaro’s status as an identifiable woman of evangelical faith who represents a more traditional notion of gender roles than that presented by the left.
“She is a true evangelical figure,” said Lívia Reis, a researcher at the Instituto de Estudos da Religião. “She comes from humble origins and has a super-problem family… but she nevertheless became the first lady of Brazil.”
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Detractors often see some aspects of Michelle Bolsonaro’s personal past as a contradiction to the traditional family values of the Brazilian right. But for Reis, her evangelical followers don’t necessarily see it that way.
“When you convert to the Gospel, you give birth to a new person, you break with the person you were before,” Reis said.
About Saudi jewelry
Michelle Bolsonaro currently serves as the president of PL Mulher, the women’s wing of the party under whose candidacy Bolsonaro ran in 2022.
From that position, he can help the Brazilian right to craft a platform and message that are less objectionable to female voters in Brazil. Jair Bolsonaro’s position on expanding access to firearms was rejected by 82% of Brazilian women. Michelle Bolsonaro could be more likely to focus on conservative views on gender, sexuality and abortion, issues where polls indicate the electorate is most supportive.
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She comes from humble origins and has a super-problem family… but nevertheless she became the first lady of Brazil
There are obstacles. Michelle Bolsonaro still faces questions about the nature of the deposits made to her bank account by a former adviser to Bolsonaro’s son Flávio, first revealed in 2020. And it has become embroiled in an ongoing scandal over a series of gifts from the King of Saudi Arabia. A package valued at $3.25 million, including a diamond necklace, ended up in customs after agents found it in the luggage of an aide to the then mining minister. Bolsonaro’s envoys made several attempts to recover the assets before the end of Bolsonaro’s term, one captured on video.
Michelle Bolsonaro has denied wrongdoing. In the face of the scandal, she posted an unusually ironic response on Instagram: “You mean ‘I have all this’ and I didn’t know? My God!”.
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His political polish may still need some work. She said at an event on May 6 that she wanted to end a 30% quota for women running for Congress, but she quickly backed down from her statement after an uproar.
Opposition to any future political plans may also come from your husband. Jair Bolsonaro downplayed his wife’s political ambitions in late March, saying she “didn’t have the experience” to run for executive office, but he wanted to continue “collaborating” in politics. But more recently he suggested that both he and Michelle could run for Senate seats in 2026..
One thing is clear: Michelle Bolsonaro has prospects in Brazilian politics. The unanswered question is whether she will try to make use of them.
NICK BURNS
Americas Quarterly
Editor and social media manager at Americas Quarterly.
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