Brazil’s former First Lady juggles Christian conservatism, cracks open the far right’s gender contradictions

What Michelle Bolsonaro’s stepping into politics reveals about the evangelical and women's electorate

Originally published on Global Voices

In Brazil, ex-President Jair Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelle Bolsonaro, has become a potential new leader for the right-wing camp in the upcoming presidential elections in October. As their political field reshuffles to find leadership after the imprisonment of the former president for attempting to stage a coup d’état in 2023, Michelle’s ascension to political relevance challenges core patriarchal values within Brazilian society and capitalizes on a growing influential demographic in the political landscape of the country: evangelical and conservative women.

Michelle, 44, met Jair Bolsonaro, 71, in 2007, when he was a federal deputy working in Brasília, and she worked as his secretary. They were married in 2013. Michelle already had a daughter from a previous relationship and had Laura, her only child with Bolsonaro, in 2010. She was a discreet figure who was rarely seen in public at the time. Despite the advice of political consultants, she did not engage in her husband’s first presidential campaign in 2018.

Once he got elected, things shifted. At his inauguration, she broke protocol to give a speech in sign language by his side. During Bolsonaro’s presidential term, she would often travel with his ministers and appear more frequently on camera to promote charity work, leading a government program called Volunteer Homeland (Pátria Voluntária). When the president appointed a new justice to the Supreme Court (STF), the First Lady was filmed praying and celebrating with the chosen judge, André Mendonça, who is also an evangelical pastor. And when they attended Queen Elizabeth’s funeral, her Jackie-O styled dresses made headlines as she promoted the designers on her social media.

Michelle became especially popular among conservative women, often overshadowing her stepsons, children of Bolsonaro’s previous marriages. Flávio, Eduardo, Carlos, and Jair Renan, all politicians, saw their hopes of continuing the political dynasty threatened as Michelle gained in relevance. Today, Michelle has over eight million followers on Instagram. Flávio, the eldest son, a senator and potential presidential candidate, is the only one ahead of her, with 11 million.

Former First Lady Michelle Bolsonaro poses with Bolsonaro's supporters in 2023. Photo: Fabio Rodrigues-Pozzebom/ Agência Brasil/Fair use

By the 2022 presidential election, Michelle was popular enough to attract female voters to her husband’s campaign after his callous and disastrous policies during the COVID-19 pandemic — there were 711,380 deaths in Brazil, the country with the second-highest number of deaths in the world. Women’s votes had been his Achilles heel in the previous run.

“Women who were at the frontlines of the pandemic, caring for their family economically, physically, and materially, became upset with the inhuman way Bolsonaro treated the victims of the pandemic,” said Lívia Reis, researcher and director of a yearly report that monitors the intersection of evangelical women, politics, and their everyday life, published by the Religion Studies Institute (ISER). “The figure of Michelle comes in to humanize the Bolsonaro figure.”

During the pandemic, Bolsonaro repeatedly made fun of COVID-19 victims, spoke against vaccination, and delayed acquiring and distributing vaccines. Experts estimate that these actions could have cost 95,000 lives. Nine days before the second round of the 2022 presidential election, Michelle gave a speech at an evangelical service at the Assembleia de Deus Vitória em Cristo church in Rio de Janeiro, using her own devotion to God to excuse her husband’s actions. The church was founded by Silas Malafaia, an evangelical leader who supported Bolsonaro’s rise to power and married the couple, and who is widely credited as essential to the solidification of bolsonarismo.

“Don’t look at my husband, look at me, for I am a servant of the Lord who kneels to pray and has an understanding of the spiritual world,” Michelle said. “[Bolsonaro] is just as flawed as you and I, because only Jesus was perfect, and even He did not please everyone.”

Jair Bolsonaro is not evangelical, despite using this faith to court evangelical voters. In 2016, while still a Congressman, he was baptized in the Jordan River in Israel by a pastor who was later arrested on corruption charges. According to a 2022 survey by Genial/Quaest, 50 percent of evangelicals believed Bolsonaro was evangelical, while only 16 percent correctly identified him as Roman Catholic.

“[Michelle] enters the political landscape to legitimize Bolsonaro as a man chosen by God for a mission to fight for a better Brazil,” Reis said. “And Michelle is highly admired by evangelical women.”

A demographic in dispute

Michelle’s increasing political visibility has cracked open the contradictions of female leadership in conservative spaces as well as the internal conflicts over gender inequality in evangelical churches.

Evangelicals are the fastest-growing faith in the country. Although a little over half of the Brazilian population identifies as Catholic, according to the 2022 census, the evangelical percentage has grown from 21 percent to 26 percent since 2010. The majority of evangelicals — around 55 percent in the 2022 census — are women, a demographic that politicians can no longer ignore in the electorate.

Women participating in the 18th edition of ‘Marching for Jesus’ in Rio de Janeiro in 2025. Photo: Fernando Frazão/Agência Brasil/Fair use

In early 2019, days after Jair Bolsonaro was sworn in, Gabriela Leite, an activist from the Black Evangelical Movement, noticed that her mother had been captured by far-right ideology. She had voted for Bolsonaro. “She was talking about ideological indoctrination in public schools,” Leite told Global Voices, referring to “Escola Sem Partido,” a right-wing conspiracy theory about teachers indoctrinating children into left-wing ideologies. It was such a hot topic for right-wing politicians that it was turned into law in cities and states. “What she said made no sense because she raised a daughter who went to public school,” Gabriela said, adding that she hoped her mother would know better.

Gabriela, an activist of the Black Evangelical Movement, and her mother, Márcia Leite, a retired school teacher, are both Black working-class evangelical women.

Gabriela and Márcia Leite holding up a Black Evangelical Movement flag, at the 2025 Black Women's March in Brasília. Photo by Eduardo Cavalcanti, used with permission.

Conservative women politicians such as Senator Damares Alves, Bolsonaro’s former human rights minister and an evangelical pastor herself, state deputy Ana Campagnolo, and federal deputy Chris Tonietto have become symbols of female empowerment within conservative subcultures. Since 2023, Michelle has worked as the president of the women’s sector of the Partido Liberal, her husband’s party, recruiting women into the party’s wings.

She has also publicly stepped into the role of caretaker and mother, especially after Bolsonaro’s arrest. She adds political leadership to these roles as a signifier of sacrifice and power. This performative multitasking is persuasive to many evangelical women. “Michelle shows evangelical women that it’s possible to be a housewife, but you can also be powerful and a leader,” Márcia said. “Which is everything a modern woman wants. We want to have a place in society. Michelle shows us that it’s possible.”

According to researcher Jamille Bezerra, who is writing a thesis about religious women politicians and how they mediate gender in their daily work, these political figures connect with Christian women in a way the feminist movement was never able to. They make gender issues visible, while still arguing for conservative approaches to the family.

Women have always been at the center of the evangelical church’s work, according to researchers and evangelical women interviewed for this article. “It’s women who open the doors of the church in the morning, and it’s women who turn the light off when the service is done,” Gabriela said. “Men are the pastors, and that’s all they are.”

Michelle represents them. She recognizes gender inequality, particularly within marriage and the church, as an issue to be addressed, albeit within the limits of conservatism and the Bible.

Women's March in Brazil in 2023 in São Paulo. In English, the sign reads, ‘A woman's place is in politics.’ Photo: Rovena Rosa/Agência Brasil. Fair use

According to a 2025 poll by Datafolha, 42.7 percent of evangelical women have been victims of domestic violence. Many say their pastors have not been sympathetic when they disclose their stories, often blaming them for “not praying enough” and neglecting to instruct them to get help. Senator Alves, though, toured churches in Brasília in 2024, encouraging women to call the police if they are ever subjected to abuse by their partners. Michelle also encouraged women to call the police in cases of violence.

“Senator Alves and Michelle are projecting that different kinds of families are possible in society, but still within the limits of heteronormativity,” Bezerra said. “[Both of them] are distinct from traditional heteronormativity themselves: Alves is not a married woman and has an adopted daughter, while Michelle’s marriage to Bolsonaro is her second marriage.”

These transgressions of traditional evangelical femininity serve to humanize these figures, even as they still defend the traditional patriarchal family structure. In fact, the protection of “the traditional Brazilian family” is how Michelle and other conservative women in politics justify their work outside the home. “They say they are doing it for their kids, for the future, for the nation, things that aren’t exactly new,” Bezerra said. “It’s a typical conservative ideology to bring the protection of the nation to the forefront through the family.”

The double bind of conservative women leaders

Though the men who run the conservative parties have begrudgingly accepted that their power might depend on the inclusion of women within their ranks, this shift has created visible cracks in their fascist movement.

Michelle and her stepsons have publicly clashed about her involvement in party politics. “Many political analysts tell me it’s important to have the female vote, and I don’t disagree,” said Eduardo Bolsonaro, who was removed from his position as state deputy after moving to the United States, about Michelle’s rise to relevance within the Liberal Party, during an interview with Revista Piauí in September 2025. “Michelle only talks about positive issues: church, the female vote. But my question is: doesn’t the party understand that what I do is much more important?” he added, referencing his lobbying in Trump’s White House against Lula da Silva’s government.

Former president Jair Bolsonaro and then-First Lady Michelle Bolsonaro during the launch of a government program during the Covid-19 pandemic in Brasília. Photo credit: Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil.

Michelle has been included in election polls for the presidential election in October, often showing her as the most competitive candidate among the Bolsonaros to face off incumbent left-wing Lula. In September last year, when the discussion around Bolsonaro’s successor was still open, with the former president ineligible for any seats, Michelle positioned herself as a potential candidate. “I will rise like a lioness to defend our conservative values, truth, and justice,” she said to The Telegraph in her first interview since her husband’s conviction, echoing language used by friends and family of Charlie Kirk’s to refer to hiss surviving wife Erika. “If, to fulfil God’s will, it becomes necessary to assume a political candidacy, I will be ready to do whatever He asks of me.”

But in the end, the traditional family order — which Michelle unequivocally defends — won. In December, Flavio, Bolsonaro’s firstborn and a senator, officially announced his candidacy, which was supported by his father’s handwritten letter from prison. While he fights to continue his candidacy amid revelations published by The Intercept Brazil that he solicited money from a jailed banker to finance Bolsonaro’s biopic film, it’s hard to imagine a political camp that believes in women’s subjugation would allow for the rise of a “lioness” like Michelle.

“Bolsonaro’s sons want to use Michelle like Bolsonaro did — as a companion, as a supporter — they’re not prepared for her to be a leader,” said Márcia Leite, adding that she will not be voting for Flavio Bolsonaro in October.

This article was produced under the Feminist Journalist Fellowship as part of a series highlighting the work of our fellows, developed in collaboration with Global Voices and Noor.

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