The battle for Brazil’s presidency, set for October, is being fought over two fundamentally different—yet both widely criticized—strategies for controlling the nation's soaring public debt and stabilizing the economy. Incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the leftist Workers’ Party (PT) is staking his re-election bid on maintaining his administration’s current fiscal framework, which relies heavily on new tax adjustments to increase revenue, while leading challenger Senator Flávio Bolsonaro (PL) proposes scrapping the framework entirely for a new rule that ties federal spending directly to the trajectory of the public debt. The urgency of the debate is underscored by Brazil's gross public debt, which climbed to 81.9% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in June, an increase of more than 10 percentage points since President Lula began his current term in January 2023, according to Central Bank data.