More than 100 million Brazilians, nearly half the country's population, could qualify for a debt renegotiation program if Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former president Jair Bolsonaro and a candidate for the PL party, wins Brazil's 2026 presidential election. The promise came from Daniella Marques, the campaign's economic adviser and a former president of Caixa Econômica Federal, Brazil's state-run bank, in an interview with the Folha de S.Paulo videocast C-Level.
According to Marques, Brazilian households currently spend about 40% of their monthly income just to service debt. In practice, that means two out of every five reais a family earns is gone before it even covers rent, groceries or gas.
Quick explainer: a fiscal rule, known in Brazil as a "regra fiscal," is the set of laws that caps how much a government can spend each year, so public debt does not grow faster than the economy. Brazil adopted a spending cap in 2016, the rule was loosened toward the end of Jair Bolsonaro's presidency, and it was replaced in 2023, under Lula, by the current fiscal framework.
Marques said Flávio has committed to proposing a transition constitutional amendment, known in Brazil as a PEC, that would bring the executive, legislative and judicial branches together to restrain spending equivalent to 1.5% of gross domestic product. She did not explain how that reduction would be divided among ministries and programs, and her tone sharpened when pressed on how the proposal would actually work.
"Congress will be the one to work out the details, that is what will come out of there and define it. I'm not a fortune teller," she said, using a Brazilian expression that references a well-known television psychic.
On the debt trajectory, Marques compared the two administrations: Jair Bolsonaro's government took office with debt at 75.27% of GDP and left it at 71.67%, she said, while under the Workers' Party it reached nearly 82% by June 2026. That growth, she argued, has outpaced the economy itself, like a credit card bill that climbs faster every month than the paycheck meant to cover it.
Marques also said Brazil now has the world's highest real interest rate, which she linked to a wave of corporate bankruptcy filings: more than 6,000 companies entered judicial or extrajudicial recovery or bankruptcy this half of the year, compared with fewer than 1,500 during the pandemic, when much of the economy was shut down. She rejected comparisons to Desenrola, the debt renegotiation program run by the Lula government, calling it something that "does not work."
As of this report, the interview had been published only by Folha de S.Paulo, and the proposals detailed by Marques had not yet been confirmed by other independent outlets.