Javier Milei arrived in São Paulo the night before Flávio Bolsonaro's campaign launch, bypassing Brasília entirely as the Liberal Party made the Rio senator its nominee against President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in October. Multiple outlets have called the appearance an uncommon move for a sitting foreign leader: showing up to headline a rival country's nominating convention for a candidate who was, at the time, still running behind in most surveys.
Why Brasília Was Off the Itinerary
Milei had reportedly hoped to stop first in the capital to see former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is serving a 27-year sentence tied to the January 2023 effort to keep Lula from taking office and who moved into house arrest this past March for health reasons. That stop never happened. Roughly a week before the convention, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes had already cut off nearly all outside contact with the elder Bolsonaro, sparing only medical staff and lawyers, as a consequence of a letter Bolsonaro wrote urging supporters to rally around his son — a letter Flávio then broadcast on social media. De Moraes said its true audience was the public, not family, writing that it was "not of a private nature." When Bolsonaro's legal team separately asked whether Milei could be an exception, de Moraes turned that down too — not by weighing whether a head-of-state visit counted as campaigning, but simply because the blanket order already in place left no exceptions to grant anyone. Court monitors had logged 185 visits to the household between late March and mid-July, a pattern the judge cited as evidence the arrangement had drifted far from its humanitarian purpose.
A Governor's Welcome, a President Left Out
Shut out of the capital, Milei got a different reception in São Paulo. Governor Tarcísio de Freitas hosted him at the Palácio dos Bandeirantes and presented him with the Order of Ipiranga at its Grand Cross rank — the state's top civilian honor — ahead of a private meeting that also included Flávio Bolsonaro. Nothing on the two-day trip touched Lula's federal government, continuing a run in which the two presidents have never met one-on-one outside multilateral gatherings like the G20 or Mercosur.
A Speech Sharper Than It First Appeared
Inside Pacaembú stadium, Milei's remarks went well past a routine campaign boost. Without saying Lula's name outright, he referred to him as "the prisoner" and "the thief," and turned his harshest line on de Moraes over the visit denial, branding the justice "a bald piece of trash." He also led the crowd in a chant that "we will continue offering our testimony everywhere against the lies of socialism," tying October 4 to a run of right-wing wins he sees stretching from Argentina to Peru and Colombia. Bolsonaro called the launch the start of the hardest fight of his life. The event also carried an AI-generated message credited to the jailed Jair Bolsonaro and a recorded greeting from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, plus a video endorsement from Flávio's stepmother, Michelle Bolsonaro, following a recent public falling-out between the two. In a nod to Milei's own 2023 chainsaw symbol, the two men held up a giant pair of scissors on stage.
What might have stayed a war of words instead escalated into a formal diplomatic rupture. Brazil's Foreign Ministry, under Mauro Vieira, recalled its ambassador to Argentina for consultations the following day — a step with no precedent between the two countries, even across periods of military rule in both. Workers' Party president Edinho Silva had already said Brazilian democracy welcomes debate but draws the line at a foreign leader addressing its institutions with contempt, closing his statement with, "we feel sorry for Argentina." Supreme Court President Luiz Edson Fachin added his own rebuke, defending judicial independence and calling Milei's remarks incompatible with normal relations between states. Milei, in a Sunday radio interview, denied interfering in Brazil's election and countered by accusing Lula's government of meddling in Argentina's own 2023 race.
An Older Insult Deserves More Context
Days before the trip, Guilherme Boulos — who runs the presidency's Secretariat General and sits close to Lula — had already gone after Milei on social media, pairing an insult with two specific claims: that Argentina had pushed its workday to twelve hours and moved to legalize organ sales. The organ claim traces to remarks Milei made years before taking office, not to any current policy. The workday claim is less clear-cut than a flat denial suggests — Argentina's labor overhaul, in force since March 2026, does let employers extend the standard eight-hour day to twelve through a new scheduling system, even though nothing in the law makes twelve-hour shifts mandatory for everyone. Both halves of that picture are worth knowing before judging Boulos's claim.
The trip lands at a rough patch for Bolsonaro's campaign, which has spent months absorbing scandal and infighting, including allegations tied to a jailed banker's funding of a film about his father. Recent polling still favors Lula head-to-head: Datafolha has him ahead 48% to 43%, and AtlasIntel shows a similar 48.8% to 42.3% gap. Whether a blunt foreign endorsement moves any of that may matter less than how it plays with voters weighing outside interference. Lula's own Workers' Party holds its nominating convention on August 2, ahead of the October 4 vote.
