‘A coin flip’: inside Brazil’s knife-edge election as Flávio Bolsonaro closes in on Lula

Bolsonaro fires up his base in the bellwether state of Minas Gerais – starting at the scene of his father’s stabbing A giant banner of Brazil’s incarcerated former president Jair Bolsonaro fluttered in the morning breeze as his eldest son, Flávio, touched down at an airfield on the fringe of a city that will soon help decide the future of one of the biggest democracies on earth. “Brazil is rudderless. Brazil has no president and Brazil needs a president – and that president is Flávio Bolsonaro,” the far-right senator declared as he waded into the flock of supporters who had gathered to welcome him to Juiz de Fora, one of the largest cities in the battleground state of Minas Gerais.