Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s presidential campaign has accused Donald Trump, in a television advert broadcast on Thursday, 24 September 2026, of wanting to “colonise” Brazil in order to capture its natural resources by meddling in October’s presidential election, according to The Guardian; in the one-minute video, a female narrator says that Flávio Bolsonaro is “Trump’s candidate” and that what Trump wants is to “colonise Brazil, take our riches, steal our future and leave us in the dust”; the US State Department has denied meddling and said, in an August statement cited by the paper, that “any insinuation of a ‘ploy’ to undermine a democratic nation’s election is a baseless lie”.