Lula’s Antitrust Non Sequitur: Election Complaints Don’t Make a Competition Case
Brazil’s president has complaints about how digital platforms handled the election he just won. His administration’s proposed remedy? Give the competition regulator more power. The missing step is explaining what one has to do with the other.
The legislative timing is easier to explain. Brazil’s 2026 elections gave President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva a fourth term, which he spend having to contend with an even more right-leaning Congress. Lula has already struggled to advance key legislation, and the bargaining will only get harder when the new Congress takes office in February 2027. His administration has good reason to push its priorities through the outgoing legislature while it can.
Among those priorities is Bill 4,675/2025, which would expand the powers of Brazil’s competition authority, the Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE), to regulate digital platforms. Government officials and the lawmaker overseeing the bill want it passed before year’s end, while the legislative arithmetic still looks favorable. The Chamber of Deputies has now placed it on the voting calendar, with a vote expected Nov. 17.
Lula laid out his grievances in his victory speech:
This was an election in which we had to overcome interference coming from outside the country through digital platforms, which we will have to regulate. It is not possible for us not to recognize that a crime in the digital world must be treated the same as a crime in real life. We cannot have monstrously large companies, making billions and billions, paying no taxes to this country, and trying to steer this country’s electoral outcome.
Those are complaints about online crime, taxation, and alleged foreign interference in elections. None, on its own, establishes that competition has failed—or that competition regulation offers a remedy.
Yet that’s the tool his administration is reaching for. Bill 4,675/2025 would let CADE designate digital platforms as “systemically relevant”—a special regulatory status based on their economic size and influence—and impose obligations on how they do business. Giving CADE more power over digital competition wouldn’t address Lula’s complaints about crime, taxes, or election interference. Those complaints may support a debate about electoral regulation, but they don’t explain why Brazil needs this bill.