In Brazil's 2022 election, the two best-performing right-wing candidates for federal deputy from São Paulo — the country's largest and most competitive electoral district — together won nearly 1.7 million votes. Neither will appear on the ballot in 2026. Their simultaneous absence has opened a question their own party, the Liberal Party (PL, the political home of former president Jair Bolsonaro), is now asking publicly: who inherits that electoral space?
A quick note for readers unfamiliar with Brazilian politics: a "deputado federal" is a member of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Brazil's Congress, elected through a state-wide proportional system. São Paulo, Brazil's most populous state, elects 70 of the Chamber's 513 seats — by far the largest single delegation, and the one every major party fights hardest to hold.
Nearly 1.7 million votes off the board
In 2022, Carla Zambelli was the second-most-voted federal deputy candidate in São Paulo, with 946,244 votes, trailing only left-wing candidate Guilherme Boulos. Eduardo Bolsonaro, the former president's son, came in third with 741,701 votes — a steep drop from 2018, when he had been the single most-voted federal deputy candidate in the entire country, with 1.84 million votes.
Combined, the two represent roughly 1.69 million votes that, in theory, need a new home in 2026. Recent Brazilian political reporting shows the PL is already tracking the loss: without its two biggest vote-getters in the country's largest electoral college, the party risks shrinking its São Paulo delegation.
Why Eduardo Bolsonaro won't be running
Eduardo Bolsonaro effectively stopped exercising his mandate in March 2025, when he relocated to the United States. A formal expulsion request filed by the Workers' Party (PT) over an alleged breach of parliamentary conduct was eventually shelved by the Chamber. His seat was lost through a different mechanism instead: in December 2025, the Chamber's Board declared the seat vacant over excessive absences — he had missed more than 80% of that legislative session's votes.
In June 2026, Brazil's Supreme Federal Court (STF) convicted him of obstructing the investigation into the alleged 2022 coup plot tied to his father's attempt to remain in power after losing that year's presidential election. He received a sentence of roughly four years and two months, plus an eight-year period of ineligibility starting after the sentence is served — which keeps him out of Brazilian elections until around 2038. Given that timeline, Eduardo Bolsonaro announced he would not run in 2026 and withdrew his name from the PL's Senate ticket for São Paulo, where he had been listed as first alternate.
Why Carla Zambelli is out too
Zambelli's case took a different path but arrived at the same electoral outcome. The STF's First Panel convicted her, in a case known as Ação Penal 2428, to 10 years in prison, along with loss of her mandate and ineligibility, for orchestrating — with a hacker's help — a breach of Brazil's National Council of Justice systems to forge an arrest warrant against Justice Alexandre de Moraes, one of the STF's most prominent members. Before the sentence could be enforced, she left Brazil and was later arrested in Italy. An Italian court subsequently found procedural flaws in the extradition process and allowed her to await its outcome outside custody — but that ruling doesn't affect the loss of her mandate or the ineligibility already declared by the Brazilian court.
Who's trying to fill the space
With both figures off the 2026 ballot, the PL has launched what Brazilian political outlets have described as a "talent hunt" across São Paulo — an effort to identify candidates capable of retaining at least part of that electorate. The name that comes up most often is Renato Bolsonaro, another nephew of the former president, but political analysts have raised doubts about whether the family name alone will be enough: Renato has little public recognition and has never tested his ability to pull votes in his own right.
That distinction is the one that separates a symbolic heir from an electorally competitive one. Sharing an ideological banner isn't enough — the name that ends up filling this space will likely need some form of political capital already in place: name recognition, a sitting mandate, or visible leadership on an issue that mobilizes the same voters.
Paulo Bilynskyj: an existing voice on part of that agenda
One name that keeps coming up in that conversation is federal deputy Paulo Bilynskyj (PL-São Paulo). He's serving his first term, has been vice-leader of both the PL bloc and the broader opposition in the Chamber, and in 2025 was elected by his peers to chair the Public Security and Organized Crime Committee. A career police detective since 2012, his background puts him squarely on the public-safety agenda — one of the issues that anchored a significant share of Zambelli's and Eduardo Bolsonaro's base in São Paulo.
Unlike a first-time candidate, Bilynskyj enters 2026 as a sitting deputy with a tested record and an institutional position inside the Chamber itself. That doesn't make him the only name in contention, nor guarantee he'll inherit Zambelli's or Eduardo Bolsonaro's voters automatically — their combined electorate is not homogeneous, and part of it, especially the more ideologically driven Bolsonarista voters, could scatter across candidates from other states entirely. But within São Paulo specifically, and on the public-security agenda in particular, he's one of the few names already occupying that space in the Chamber before the campaign has officially begun.
What's still unresolved
Whether the PL leans on tested, sitting lawmakers like Bilynskyj or bets on higher-profile but less institutionally proven candidates like Renato Bolsonaro remains an open question. For voters who saw Zambelli and Eduardo Bolsonaro as their natural representatives in the Chamber, the question heading into 2026 is a simple one: among the names still standing, who continues making that case from inside Congress?
