By Brendan O'Boyle and Lisandra Paraguassu
BRASILIA, Oct 20 (Reuters) - When Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva addressed the United Nations General Assembly last month, he used one of the world’s biggest diplomatic stages to deliver a message that has come to define what is likely the final presidential campaign of his decades-long career.
"Brazil does not fit into anyone's backyard," he said, in a veiled dig at US President Donald Trump's administration, which he believes is challenging Brazil's sovereignty.
Lula has portrayed Brazil's election as part of a wider battle against undemocratic forces, warning of "foreign interference" in a race that concludes on Sunday in a heated runoff against right-wing Senator Flavio Bolsonaro.
In the candidates' first debate days before the vote, Lula accused the Bolsonaro family, headed by former President Jair Bolsonaro, of being "subordinate to American interests," pointing to May meetings between the Bolsonaros and Trump earlier this year before Trump imposed new tariffs on Brazilian products.
In July, Lula said the new tariffs were the result of a "plot" with the Bolsonaros "driven by electoral objectives."
Last year, the senator's brother Eduardo Bolsonaro, who lives in the US, described Trump's tariffs on Brazilian beef, coffee, fish, footwear and other goods as "bitter medicine" aimed at curbing what he called an out-of-check legal offensive against his father.
“The pressure they applied to get the United States to put tariffs on Brazil, and their appeal for Brazil to suffer some harm," Lula said at the debate. "The brother is over there inciting a coup against Brazil."
The family denied the accusations. The State Department has also denied previous accusations of election interference.
HARD PATH TO VICTORY
The election's first round showed the limits to Lula's message. Over 47% of voters backed Bolsonaro, an outspoken Trump ally, nearly 2 percentage points ahead of Lula.
Lula enters the final days trailing slightly in the polls to Bolsonaro, whose father is serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a failed coup against Lula's electoral win in 2022.
Although Lula enters the election as the underdog, he is confident he can stage a dramatic comeback.
He has done so before. After spending 580 days in prison in 2018 and 2019 on a corruption conviction that was later overturned, he narrowly defeated Jair Bolsonaro in 2022.
"As long as I am alive, the far right will not return to power in this country," he has said on the campaign trail.
ALLIES VIEW HIM AS BULWARK AGAINST US POWER
Lula and his allies continue to fight what they see as international interference to keep him from a fourth term. His campaign accused US tech giant Meta, which owns Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook, of manipulating social media days before the vote.
Meta blamed global technical glitches and denied political bias.
Lula has portrayed his opponent as a stand-in for a broader right-wing movement, sharing images linking him to Trump, Argentina’s President Javier Milei and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
With right-wing parties sweeping recent elections across Latin America, Lula and his allies see Sunday’s runoff as a chance to stem the region's conservative drift.
“Lula is a symbol of the fight against Trump’s imperialism ... of the liberation of Latin America and the world,” Paulo Saboia, a 67-year-old retired IT technician, said at a Lula rally in Sao Paulo.
(Reporting by Brendan O'Boyle and Lisandra Paraguassu in Brasilia; Additional reporting by Isabel Teles in Sao Paulo; Editing by Aurora Ellis)
