In 1985, around 7,500 people occupied the Annoni Farm, in Pontão, in the north of Rio Grande do Sul, in the first major mobilization in the history of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST).
The fight for agrarian reform helped transform the region and the State into one of the main strongholds of the Brazilian left, which maintained political hegemony there for decades.
Forty years later, however, the region's political landscape has changed. In this election, for the third time in a row, a candidate with the surname Bolsonaro received the most votes among Rio Grande do Sul voters, and the State elected another PL politician, federal deputy Luciano Zucco, as governor.
Flávio Bolsonaro (PL) even won in Pontão, where the MST's first major occupation took place, at Fazenda Annoni, and where the PT was the dominant party until a few years ago.
BBC News Brasil visited the municipality between the first and second rounds of the election to understand what explains this political shift.
The change, according to residents and analysts interviewed, reflects the population's increased identification with agribusiness and with values such as entrepreneurship and economic freedom, more associated with the right.
Despite the advance of Bolsonarism, the MST remains present in the region and maintains structures considered references by the movement, such as a higher education center and two cooperatives that employ more than a hundred people.
Agriculture in decline
The trajectory of mechanic Aderson Tabaczinski, who voted for Flávio Bolsonaro, helps illustrate the political transformation in Rio Grande do Sul.
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Tabaczinski was born in the Annoni Farm camp, the son of landless farmers. His parents were settled a few years after the occupation, until, at the end of his adolescence, he left the land conquered by his family in search of work. In 2017, Tabaczinski opened a truck and agricultural machinery workshop in Pontão.
On a Wednesday afternoon in October, there was little movement in the workshop, located at the entrance to the city. With around 3 thousand inhabitants, Pontão is a rural municipality, with grain crops and dairy farms that spread around the small urban nucleus.
Tabaczinski was fixing the engine of an old truck, one of the few jobs he could get in those days. "The movement is very weak," he lamented to BBC News Brasil.
The mechanic says that the workshop experienced its best days between 2022 and 2023, when agriculture was going through a good period in the country.
At the time, a bag of soybeans — the main agricultural crop in Brazil and the north of Rio Grande do Sul — sold for R$200, a record. The increase, according to analysts, was due to the war in Ukraine and the Argentine harvest failure, which reduced the global supply of the product.
“When agriculture does well, people here in the city do well too,” says Tabaczinski.
The mechanic says that, in addition to the favorable international scenario, the Jair Bolsonaro (PL) government also helped the sector by reducing taxes on fuel in 2022.
Farmers invested in machines and trucks, and Tabaczinski hired six employees in the workshop to keep up with demand.
Since then, however, activity has cooled off. Today, he only has one employee. The mechanic attributed the drop in movement to droughts and floods that affected Rio Grande do Sul, but also to Lula's stance towards the State.
"He [Lula] stopped helping Rio Grande do Sul as he could have helped," he states.
Credit, Felix Lima/BBC
China and Iran
Economist Fernando Rugitsky, from the University of London, tells BBC News Brasil that difficulties faced by agriculture help explain the growth in voting for Flávio Bolsonaro in regions dependent on this activity.
According to a Quaest survey released after the first round, in the 20% of Brazilian municipalities with the greatest weight in agribusiness, Flávio had a vote 7.1 percentage points higher than that obtained by his father, Jair Bolsonaro (PL), in the first round of 2022.
Citing data from the Center for Advanced Studies in Applied Economics (Cepea), at the Faculty of Agronomy at the University of São Paulo (USP), Rugitsky states that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of agribusiness grew on average 7.7% per year during the Bolsonaro government and 3.2% per year during the Lula administration.
In the soybean chain, the difference was even greater: the sector grew 23.1% per year under the Bolsonaro government and 1.7% per year under the Lula government.
Rugitsky states that the contrast is mainly explained by external factors. One of them was the drop in the price of Brazilian soybeans in recent years, after China increased its purchases of soybeans from the United States, reducing demand for national production.
Another reason was the increase in global fuel prices after the war in Iran. As a result, at the same time that soybeans lost value, it became more expensive to produce, which brought down the sector's profits.
According to Rugitsky, Lula maintained the agricultural policies that were in force under Bolsonaro, "but he is guilty [in regions dependent on agribusiness] for something that was beyond his control, which is still bad luck for the current government."
'I'm from agriculture'
But the cooling of agricultural activity was not, according to the voters interviewed, the only reason for the decrease in votes for the left in the north of Rio Grande do Sul. Another cause cited was the increasingly strong identification, including among residents of cities in the region, with agribusiness.
Much of the services in these cities are linked to what happens inside rural properties. Local commerce is driven by businesses such as agricultural machinery dealers, veterinary clinics, credit unions and truck stores, among other activities that depend on the countryside.
Aderson Tabaczinski, the owner of the truck workshop in Pontão, said he feels "part of agribusiness" even without working directly with the activity. BBC News Brasil heard similar statements from several other urban workers.
This perception, according to those interviewed, causes many of them to align themselves politically with the sector, opting for candidates considered allies of agribusiness and rejecting those seen as opponents.
"We see agriculture being greatly massacred by the left and in the big cities. They say that agribusiness is polluting, agribusiness kills, agribusiness is toxic", Luis Fernando Costa Nunes, councilor in Pontão for PL, tells BBC News Brasil.
At 37 years old, Nunes bears the marks of almost three decades of work in the field on her face. He says that, at the age of 9, he received a hoe from his father and started helping on the farm.
"We had to make our childhood toys ourselves, because we couldn't afford them," he says.
Also a voter of Flávio Bolsonaro, Nunes states that many in the region disapprove of the Lula government for its stance on environmental infractions on farms.
For Nunes, instead of dialoguing with the sector about best practices, the government tries to "teach with the whip and make the producer environmentally conscious by fining him, cornering him".
"This is not positive and causes our agriculture to weaken," he says.
BBC News Brasil interviewed Nunes on the small rural property where he grew up and where, according to him, the family went through great difficulties. There was no electricity and, when it rained, water ran inside the house. “It was a very painful past,” he remembers.
Nunes' father ended up selling the land and, years later, went to work as an employee on a farm in the region. Nunes followed in his father's footsteps and remained on that same farm for 18 years, operating machines and performing general services.
He says that many small farming families in the region experienced similar fates: unable to survive on family properties, they were forced to sell them to work on larger farms or in the city.
According to him, many of these families used to vote for the PT. In the early 2000s, the party came to simultaneously govern Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul and Pontão — a time that became known in the municipality as the "star alignment period", in allusion to the PT symbol.
But he says that many of these families were abandoning the party, frustrated with the absence of "public policies so that they could remain on their lands".
For Nunes, the phenomenon helps explain the electoral shift in Pontão, where Flávio Bolsonaro had 56.9% of the votes in the second round, and Lula, 42.16%. Lula had already lost in the municipality in 2022, but by just 2 percentage points. Until then, in all elections after redemocratization (1985), the municipality had given the majority of votes to PT candidates.
BBC News Brasil sought out interviewees to comment on Flávio Bolsonaro's defeat and his trip to the United States, but they preferred not to comment.
On his Instagram page, councilor Luis Fernando Costa Nunes published, the day after the election, a message highlighting Flávio's victory in Pontão. "We did our part, with work, with truth and with a lot of commitment from everyone," he wrote. He added that "Brazil will go through very difficult times in the coming years, but we will not give up on our country."
The weakening of the PT in Pontão accompanied a broader movement of the party's loss of space in Rio Grande do Sul. In Porto Alegre, the party was in charge of city hall for 16 consecutive years, between 1989 and 2004. It also governed the State between 1999 and 2002, with Olívio Dutra.
In the presidential elections, the PT candidates received the most votes among Gauchos in 1989 and 2002. From 2006 onwards, however, the party no longer had the majority of votes. And, in 2026, Flávio Bolsonaro received 57.84% of the votes in the State in the second round — increasing his father's vote in 2018 by 1.5 percentage points.
Entrepreneurship
In addition to the increase in identification with agribusiness and the drop in agricultural activity, residents said that the separation between the PT and a large part of the region's electorate reflects a transformation in the economy and labor relations.
When listing the reasons why they decided to vote for Flávio Bolsonaro, several voters interviewed cited the candidate's proposals for the economy, including tax cuts.
Many are small business owners and criticized the Lula government for the high interest rates in the country.
Today, the Selic rate — defined by the Central Bank and which serves as a reference for bank loans — is 13.75%. It is the same level it was at when Jair Bolsonaro left power and Lula took over for his third term.
In September 2024, with a gradual fall, it reached 10.5%, the current government's minimum, before rising again to its peak, between June 2025 and March 2026, when interest rates reached 15% per year, the highest value in 20 years. Afterwards, they fell again, but remain at a high level.
"Many people made investments and, with this rise in interest rates, they ended up going bankrupt," says farmer Mauricio Muhl, 33 years old.
Furthermore, Muhl states that many residents want "to reduce bureaucracy so they can work on their own." "People want to have the freedom to sell, grow their product and get on with their lives without so much interference from public authorities. This makes many here support the right," he says.
MST model community
Despite the change in the political scenario, the MST has maintained an important presence in Pontão since the Annoni Farm was expropriated and hundreds of landless families were settled in the municipality.
Today, the movement is linked to two cooperatives that, together, employ around one hundred people in Pontão. One of them is the Cooperativa de Produção Agropecuária Cascata Ltda (Cooptar), founded in 1990 and maintained by 17 families.
In this cooperative, the means of production are collective. The cooperative members have a herd of more than a hundred dairy cows and slaughter more than a thousand pigs per month, in addition to growing grains and vegetables. The families live in a farm village, with a school, cafeteria and community spaces.
Several houses have been renovated in recent years and have modern cars in the garages — a scenario that contrasts with the history of poverty and rural exodus experienced by many farmers in the region.
According to farmer Isaías Vedovatto, a member of Cooptar and one of the MST leaders in Pontão, many young people have remained in the community, attracted by the job prospects and the quality of life there.
"Solidarity works, the environment is beautiful, people like living here", he states.
But why were the results obtained by cooperatives linked to the MST in Pontão not repeated in other rural communities in the region, many of which are also made up of landless families?
Vedovatto recognizes that the movement was unable to take its organizational model to as many families as it intended. He says that the success of cooperatives depended on the ability of families to remain united, even in the face of the great difficulties they faced at the beginning, and to place collective interests above individual ones.
But this model, according to Vedovatto, clashes with the importance that many farmers attribute to private property, inheritance and autonomy to decide on their own production. "There was a dream that most of the settled families could organize themselves like us, but in real life, it wasn't possible," he says.
Regarding criticism from Bolsonarian voters that the PT governments did not do enough to prevent the rural exodus in the region, Vedovatto says he understands the frustration and recognizes that surviving from agriculture is becoming increasingly challenging, amid strong competition and rising production costs.
For him, the PT governments were positive, having created programs to purchase food from small farmers and several higher education institutions in the countryside. But Vedovatto states that these initiatives were limited by the government's attempt to reconcile policies to support family farming with incentives for agribusiness.
In this arrangement, he says, small producers tend to be at a disadvantage: "The government could have done more? It could. But, to do that, you would have to change the model of the country's agrarian society."
*With collaboration from Marina Rossi, from BBC News Brasil in São Paulo.
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