How does campaign financing work in Brazil?

For the last three Brazilian election cycles, billionaire sugarcane magnate Rubens Ometto has been the country’s biggest campaign donor. 

The controlling shareholder of the Cosan bioethanol conglomerate, he has dished out BRL 8.8 million (USD 1.63 million) of his own fortune this year to fund the electoral bids of candidates and parties across the ideological spectrum — but overwhelmingly of allies of current far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.

The biggest individual beneficiary of Mr. Ometto’s munificence is Tarcísio de Freitas, Mr. Bolsonaro’s former Infrastructure Minister and the president’s candidate for the São Paulo state government. His campaign received a total of BRL 200,000 from the Cosan controller.

Like Mr. Ometto, other agribusiness leaders are responsible for the largest amounts donated to candidates, according to a survey by newspaper O Globo — a phenomenon linked to the rise of proagro Mr. Bolsonaro to the presidency.

However, Mr. Bolsonaro is set to lose the presidential election — potentially even in a first-round landslide on Sunday. And the likely winner, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has gathered more than double the amount of campaign funding as the incumbent.

The fact that large individual donations are not enough to tip the funding scale in Mr. Bolsonaro’s favor is a result of how campaign financing works in Brazil. Money from individual benefactors helps, but it only makes up 7 percent of the whopping BRL...