Lula's Fourth Term Puts Brazil's Betting Market on the Clock
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is back in the Palácio do Planalto for a fourth term. He took 51.79% of the second-round vote, and the betting industry he promised to shut down is now working against a hard deadline. Bookmakers have been ordered to close entirely by 25 October. Player account withdrawals must be completed by 5 October. Lula's margin over Flávio Bolsonaro came in at 48.21% to 51.79%, a gap of more than four million ballots. Not since Brazil returned to democracy in 1985 had a candidate lost the first round and still won the second.
The polls got it wrong. So did the prediction markets. Bolsonaro, who leads the Liberal Party and is the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, wants the result annulled. His complaint centres on the Supreme Court's decision to extend polling by two hours at short notice. That challenge is unlikely to go anywhere.
For operators, the sequence of events matters more than the final margin. Nine days before the first round on 4 October, Lula announced he would reverse the 2024 Bets Law. He had approved that legislation in late 2024, and it opened Brazil's regulated online betting market on 1 January 2025. Now he has won the right to set the terms of any comeback.
His instrument is a Provisional Measure, an emergency presidential decree that takes effect within 60 to 120 days. Congress will soon show which political blocs are carrying Lula's interests. It also keeps the power to reject or amend the measure. That's where the industry's remaining leverage sits.
The congressional arithmetic gives the sector some room. This month's elections grew the Liberal Party to 121 deputies in the Chamber of Deputies and 29 senators. Both chambers hold a wider spread of representation than the federal government, and Congress contains more voices friendly to regulation than prohibition than the executive does. Bolsonaro had floated a betting ban himself, though he called Lula's move a pre-election play. He and his party never endorsed online gambling outright. Their argument was that the regime needed drastic reform.
Another route runs through the Supreme Court, where Justice Luiz Fux could strike the measure down. That wouldn't bring back the five licences already revoked, a decision that has pushed some firms to threaten legal action. It would stop the ban and let operators and sympathetic legislators start drafting a new licensing framework. Regulus Partners, the global strategic advisory firm, puts the odds on a Fux intervention low. It expects the Provisional Measure to fail over the long run, but it doesn't expect the 2025-2026 licences to return either. That leaves the sector in limbo. "This scenario is likely to be resolved by more protracted lawfare, in our view," Regulus wrote. "If Lula's allies achieve concrete legal progress in suing the post-licensed sector for player losses, then this will probably bury the industry despite the lack of legal clarity on the ban."
Most industry stakeholders think legal sports betting comes back in some form. Online casinos may be gone for good, given their link to higher addiction and harm levels. The investment picture has shifted as well. Flutter Entertainment, Kaizen Gaming, Super Technologies, Entain and bet365 are among the international firms that spent the past two years investing and hiring locally. A self-described "no friend of gambling" sitting in the Palácio do Planalto raises the risk attached to those commitments.
Lula has been stung on this ground before. In 2025, the first year of the Bets regime, he and then finance minister Fernando Haddad bungled an attempt to double gambling taxes when the Workers' Party couldn't muster enough support in Congress. The party is also mindful of potential compensation claims from football, media and IT if his measures become law. Lula campaigned on the ban as a matter of morality. A fourth term will test whether pragmatism wins out on an issue that puts the PT at odds with parts of Brazil's economy.