Nine days before Brazilians vote in the first round of a presidential election, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed an order banning fixed-odds sports betting nationwide – a move he framed in the starkest possible terms, comparing the industry to cancer that must be cut out before it kills the patient. The timing invites an obvious question: is this a genuine public health intervention that happens to land before an election, or a calculated electoral maneuver dressed up as one? The answer, based on the available evidence, is probably both – and the two explanations aren’t mutually exclusive.
The provisional executive order takes effect immediately, ending the operation, offering, intermediation, and advertising of fixed-odds betting – the dominant form of online sports betting in Brazil. New deposits into betting accounts are now prohibited, and existing users had until October 5 to withdraw their remaining funds. Because it’s a provisional order rather than standing legislation, it requires congressional approval within 120 days to remain permanently in effect, meaning the ban’s long-term survival depends on a legislature that has not always been friendly to Lula’s efforts to regulate the industry. Alongside the order, Lula’s government has drafted a bill establishing new criminal offenses tied to fixed-odds betting, including promoting such betting and using personal data to solicit gamblers – a sign the administration intends this as the opening move in a broader crackdown rather than a single isolated action.
This isn’t a sudden reversal for Lula; it’s the culmination of an escalating campaign against the industry that stretches back years. In December 2023, he signed Brazil’s first law to regulate and tax betting companies, and months later his administration blocked more than 2,000 betting websites deemed irregular – including some tied to organized criminal groups such as São Paulo’s First Capital Command and Rio de Janeiro’s Red Command. That crackdown was framed at the time as bringing a chaotic, unregulated sector under state control rather than eliminating it outright. Lula’s rhetoric hardened further this year: he called for an outright ban back in April, and used his UN General Assembly platform to accuse the betting industry of “transforming addiction into profit” and “destroying homes” – language that suggests a leader who has moved from believing the industry could be reformed to concluding it needs to be eliminated.
Notably, this escalation hasn’t happened without resistance from within Brazil’s own political system. Lawmakers – including many from rival Flávio Bolsonaro’s Liberal party – struck down a previous Lula order raising taxes on online betting and virtual casinos back in October of last year. That defeat matters context for the current ban: it shows Lula has already tried the more incremental, revenue-focused approach to reining in the industry and watched Congress block it, which may help explain why he’s now reaching for the more drastic tool of an outright ban rather than another attempt at taxation.
The scale of the problem Lula cites is substantial by any measure. A 2025 study by the nonprofit Institute of Studies for Health Policies estimated that gambling and betting cost Brazilian society 38.8 billion reais (roughly £5.6 billion) annually, while also documenting links to increased suicide and depression. Brazil’s central bank estimated last year that Brazilians were spending around 30 billion reais monthly on bets – a figure notably inflated by spending from beneficiaries of Bolsa Família, the federal cash-transfer welfare program, whose access to betting platforms was blocked only last year after the scale of that spending became apparent. That detail is particularly striking: a welfare program designed to lift vulnerable families out of poverty was, until recently, indirectly funding a betting industry extracting money from many of the same households it was meant to help.
The industry’s own scale in Brazil underscores why this fight matters economically as well as socially. Business analysts estimate sports betting revenues alone at more than $4 billion annually, making Brazil one of the largest betting markets in the world – a market that snowballed after online betting was first legalized in 2018 under President Michel Temer and then expanded dramatically under Jair Bolsonaro, Flávio Bolsonaro’s father. That lineage gives this ban an unmistakable political subtext: Lula is dismantling an industry that grew explosively under his political rivals’ watch, timed to land days before facing one of those same rivals’ sons at the ballot box.
Flávio Bolsonaro, Lula’s main rival in the coming election, wasted no time calling the move an “electoral measure” – an accusation that’s difficult to dismiss given the timing, even if it doesn’t necessarily undermine the substance of Lula’s underlying case. Polls suggest the ban enjoys broad public support, and that support appears to have solidified during last year’s World Cup, when betting advertisements became inescapable across Brazilian broadcasts and the number of active bettors surged noticeably – giving Lula a policy that is simultaneously good politics and, by most available public health data, a genuine response to documented social harm. A policy doesn’t have to be cynical simply because its timing is convenient; the accusation and the merit can both be true at once.
The clearest sign of how much money is actually at stake came from Brazil’s biggest football clubs, which sounded alarm bells in the run-up to the announcement after betting companies reportedly warned that sponsorship deals would end immediately if a ban went through. Club officials suggested the move could threaten the survival of Brazilian football itself – a claim that was widely mocked on social media in a country famously obsessive about the sport, where the idea that a betting ban could end football rather than merely cost clubs some sponsorship revenue struck many observers as self-serving hyperbole from an industry with its own financial interests to protect.
The ban’s fate now depends heavily on the same Congress that already rejected Lula’s more modest tax-hike proposal last year. If lawmakers decline to ratify the order within the 120-day window, it lapses – meaning the true test of this policy’s durability will play out well after the election it’s widely seen as timed to influence. For now, though, Lula has succeeded in making betting policy an unavoidable part of the final week of campaigning, forcing his opponent to either defend an industry with genuine, well-documented social costs or accept a policy Lula gets credit for enacting just before voters go to the polls.
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