Few know this better than Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, Brazil’s president, who is running for his fourth term in the general election in October. He visited Minas eight times in 2025, and chose it as the site to launch a national programme offering subsidised cooking gas to poor households. Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the right’s leading candidate and son of Jair Bolsonaro, a populist right-wing former president, knows it too. He visited the state this month. His team considered offering the vice- presidential candidacy to Romeu Zema, who recently resigned as Minas’s governor in order to run for president. The Economist travelled across Minas to understand what Brazil’s mirror-state reveals about the country’s future. If Flávio falters, Jair Bolsonaro’s political heir will probably be a mineiro, Nikolas Ferreira (pictured), who was elected to Brazil’s lower house in 2022 as one of 53 representatives from the state. The 30-year-old provocateur, the son of an evangelical pastor, won more votes than any other congressman in the country. In videos for his 33m social-media followers he lampoons “gender ideology” and “cultural Marxism”, visits mega-prisons in El Salvador and sells leadership-coaching programmes. Social media are Mr Ferreira’s weapon. In 2022, in the months after the national election, Alexandre de Moraes, a combative Supreme Court justice, temporarily blocked his accounts for spreading lies about voting machines. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, rallied to Mr Ferreira’s defence, calling him “brave”. Last year Mr Ferreira falsely claimed that the government was going to start taxing transactions made on Pix, Brazil’s popular instant- payments system. The video was viewed 300m times, helping to cause the largest fall in Lula’s approval rating this term. The content Mr Ferreira publishes is inflammatory. But his baby-faced demeanour and proclaimed religious convictions broaden his appeal. This has unnerved Mr Bolsonaro’s sons, all of whom are politicians. In April Eduardo Bolsonaro, a former congressman now living in Texas, posted a long denunciation of Mr Ferreira on X, a social-media service owned by Mr Musk, accusing him of “sidelining Flávio”. “The spotlight and fame have done you no good,” Eduardo scolded. “The day that Nikolas breaks away from the Bolsonaros, he’ll be elected president,” muses one of Mr Ferreira’s political rivals. “I reckon the penny has finally dropped for him.”
Mr Ferreira is not the only right-wing mineiro ruffling Bolsonaro feathers. Mr Zema, a liberal technocrat, criticised Flávio recently after recordings were published in which he can be heard asking a corrupt banker for money. Mr Zema called it a “slap in the face for decent Brazilians”. He says the Bolsonaros “should get all the credit for having created, having saved, the Brazilian right”. Then he quickly adds: “But we know that any cult of personality, any dependency on a single person is bad... there is no saviour of the nation.” What cult there is may be shifting. In January Mr Ferreira led 18,000 fans on a 240km “Walk for Freedom” from Paracatu in Minas to Brasília in support of Jair Bolsonaro, who is in jail for attempting a coup in 2022. Despite several people being struck by lightning during the march in torrential rain, his fans continue to adore him. As with the Brazilian right, so with the economy: Minas represents the country’s most pressing issues. The state finances are in ruins, mostly thanks to the cumulative effect of unfunded pension payments. Interest costs leave little space for discretionary spending. Under Mr Zema’s governorship Minas contracted no new debt from the federal government; the state has run primary surpluses since 2021. But the existing debt means that whoever wins the race to succeed him will still have to cut spending hard, a sure vote- loser. “It’s madness to take on this mess,” says João Gabriel Pio, chief
economist of Minas’s industry association. “Whoever takes over won’t have any room for manoeuvre.” The same could be said for the presidency. The IMF reckons that Brazil’s gross public debt will reach 107% of GDP by 2031, thanks in large part to sky-high real interest rates, currently around 10%. Juicy returns mean that wealthy Brazilians prefer to keep their money in savings accounts rather than investing it productively in machinery, R&D or infrastructure. Nowhere is the damage caused by these public-finance constraints more visible than in Minas. Its roads are a mess. Brazil’s transport-industry body ranks a greater share of them as poor quality or worse than in any neighbouring state. It produces 40% of Brazil’s mineral output, including iron ore, tin, graphite and most of the world’s niobium. Troves of rare earths used in everything from wind turbines to weapons sit in the state’s south- west. Yet local economists lament that Minas still exports most of its raw materials rather than processing them to reap more value at home. “We don’t need to be condemned to poverty for ever,” says Marco Crocco of the Federal University of Minas Gerais. “We can’t go from mining lithium to making batteries in one day. But we do need to improve our education and infrastructure, invest in R&D and de-risk private financing.” Mr Pio is blunt: “If we want to seize this opportunity, we have to face our structural problems head-on.”
Even where mining booms, some locals are unhappy. In the Jequitinhonha river valley, an arid shrubland in north-east Minas rich in lithium, they complain that they see little of the wealth dug from the ground. Since Brazil’s largest lithium mine opened in 2023 outside Araçuaí, a town in the valley, there are new shops and more jobs. But rents have shot up, says Danilo Borges, a councillor. His constituents worry that rivers are drying up. They hate the mine dust that now fills their houses. Here Lula wins comfortably. “I voted for Lula and I’ll never regret it,” says Maria Rita da Conceição Santos, a 55-year-old grandmother in Taquaral Seco, a village near Araçuaí. “He’s someone who was poor and knows the value of a poor person. Not the others! Those others are just a sham.” This popularity may secure Lula a fourth presidential term. But that does not carry over to his Workers’ Party (PT). Lula scraped to victory in Minas in 2022, but the PT did badly in municipal elections two years later, taking just 35 of the state’s 853 municipalities. One Lula confidant reflects gloomily on his party’s prospects. “I think the PT will fragment into different parts after Lula is gone—he is the glue that holds the party together.” Lula is 80. The right wing will probably flourish in Minas after he leaves politics, while the PT is likely to struggle. So the coming battles for Brazil’s
heart will probably not be between left and right, but between Mr Ferreira’s brand of populist rage and the technocratic libertarianism espoused by Mr Zema. ■ Correction (June 17th): An earlier version of this article said that Alexandre de Moraes temporarily blocked Nikolas Ferreira’s social-media accounts in the run-up to the election in 2022. In fact, he did so in the months after the election. Sign up to El Boletín, our subscriber-only newsletter on Latin America, to understand the forces shaping a fascinating and complex region. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//the-americas/2026/06/16/travel-brazils-mirror-state-to- see-the-countrys-future
The Colombian diaspora is overwhelmingly right- wing But not in Russia June 18th 2026 Ahorn blares as people enter the church to vote for Colombia’s next president. María (not her real name) chose Abelardo de la Espriella, the right-wing populist known as El Tigre, calling him “the solution for our country”. It was the first time she had voted. Esteban, a graduate student, opted for Iván Cepeda, the left-winger bidding to emulate and succeed the incumbent, Gustavo Petro. He says he wants “equality in one of the most unequal countries in the world”. Maria and Esteban cast ballots at St Paul’s in Marylebone in London. They are two of nearly 590,000 Colombians abroad who did so at 253 polling stations across 67 countries; polls were open for a week before the first-
round vote on May 31st. Colombians can vote only in person, and must present a Colombian ID to do so. In 1962 Colombia became one of the first countries in Latin America to grant political rights to its citizens abroad, when those resident outside the country were given a vote in presidential elections. In 1991 a new constitution expanded the franchise to those abroad for shorter periods, and let non-residents vote in congressional elections. In 2002 the diaspora was given a dedicated seat in Congress. The 5m Colombians abroad are the largest diaspora of any big democracy in South America. Their annual remittances are worth nearly 3% of GDP. Though just a quarter are registered to vote, between 2002 and 2026 the number rose eightfold, from 165,000 to 1.4m. Turnout is up, too. In the first round in 2022, just 31% of voters registered abroad cast a ballot. This year 41% did so. “People feel very strongly” about both candidates and so turn out, says Christopher Sabatini of Chatham House, a think-tank in London. “This is one of those polarising elections.” No candidate got a majority in the first round, prompting a run-off between Mr de la Espriella and Mr Cepeda on June 21st. But the diaspora favoured Mr de la Espriella, handing him 54% of their vote to 28% for Mr Cepeda. Colombians abroad tend to lean rightwards, but there is geographical variety (see map). In the United States Mr de la Espriella got 72% of the vote to Mr Cepeda’s 15%. In Spain, home to Europe’s largest diaspora community, Mr Cepeda got 43% of the vote.