Flávio Bolsonaro

Flávio Bolsonaro is a Brazilian politician who has represented Rio de Janeiro in the Federal Senate since 2019. Before winning his Senate seat in the 2018 election, he served four terms in Rio de Janeiro’s state legislature. His career has been closely tied to that of his father, Jair Bolsonaro, who was elected president in the same election. Flávio is the eldest of Jair Bolsonaro’s sons; his brothers Carlos and Eduardo have also held elected office.

Flávio first won a seat in the Legislative Assembly of Rio de Janeiro in 2002 and was reelected in 2006, 2010 and 2014. While still a state deputy, he ran for mayor of Rio de Janeiro in 2016. He finished fourth in the first round, in an election that ultimately sent Marcelo Crivella to the mayor’s office. Two years later, Flávio ran for one of Rio de Janeiro’s two Senate seats. He won an eight-year term, moving from state politics to Congress as his father moved from Congress to the presidency.

His political prominence has also brought scrutiny of his former legislative office. After the 2018 election, a financial-intelligence report drew attention to transactions involving Fabrício Queiroz, who had worked as Flávio’s aide in the Rio state assembly. Prosecutors investigated whether employees of that office had returned part of their salaries to Queiroz, an alleged arrangement commonly called *rachadinha* in Brazil. Flávio denied wrongdoing. In 2020, Rio de Janeiro prosecutors charged him and Queiroz in connection with the alleged scheme. Subsequent court rulings invalidated important evidence and investigative measures, significantly affecting the case. The allegations and the legal challenges to the investigation became a recurring subject of national coverage during his Senate term.

As a senator, Flávio has been a prominent defender of Jair Bolsonaro and a voice for the political movement associated with him. That role has extended beyond his father’s presidency, which ended in 2022. It places him in a distinctive position within Brazilian politics: he is both an independently elected senator for Rio de Janeiro and a member of a family whose electoral campaigns and legal disputes have attracted sustained national attention. His path from four consecutive state-assembly victories to the Senate shows the long electoral career behind the surname, while the Queiroz investigation remains central to public debate about his time in the state legislature.