Brazil Calls Its Own Betting Laws Unconstitutional as Shutdown Begins
Key Takeaways
Brazil’s government lawyers asked the Supreme Court on Oct. 2 to void its 2018 and 2023 betting laws.Licensed betting sites go dark Oct. 6 while Justice Luiz Fux weighs industry bids to suspend the ban.Polymarket gives Flávio Bolsonaro 82% odds against Lula in the Oct. 25 runoff after he led the first round.
Government Lawyers Say the ‘Dragon’ Was Untameable
The Attorney General’s Office (AGU), representing the federal government in court, filed its opinion on Oct. 2 in a 2024 challenge to the betting laws brought by the Prosecutor General’s Office, asking the court to strike down the 2018 law that legalized fixed-odds betting and most of the 2023 law that regulated it. In a separate 2024 case, the same office had called the framework constitutional, if at risk of becoming unconstitutional over time. The regulated market proved that “the ‘dragon’ was untameable,” the new opinion concludes.
The filing cites a roughly 140% rise in public health system visits recorded under gambling-disorder codes between January 2018 and December 2025, while acknowledging the figure does not count individual patients and cannot all be attributed to online sports betting. It also points to record household debt and to criminal factions using betting platforms to launder money.
The opinion follows President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s Sept. 25 provisional measure banning online betting nine days before the election. Under the shutdown timeline, players have until 11:59 p.m. Brasília time on Oct. 5 to withdraw balances, after which the Finance Ministry has ordered licensed operators to redirect all traffic to a government page. The central bank has already barred Pix payments for fixed-odds betting, along with bank transfers and boletos. Crypto, which unlicensed sites commonly use, is outside those rules, the trade outlet BNLData noted.
The National Association of Games and Lotteries and the Brazilian Institute for Responsible Gaming asked Justice Fux to rule before the midnight cutoff, arguing that 83 companies paid 2.55 billion reais ($488 million) for five-year licenses that the measure extinguishes on Oct. 25 without refunds. Football club Flamengo, whose shirt sponsorship is worth roughly 268.5 million reais ($51 million) a season, filed its own urgent request, and at least 22 other clubs have gone to the court. On Oct. 2, Fux gave the government 72 hours to respond.
Lula heads into the presidential runoff behind Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, who took just over 56 million votes in Sunday’s first round to Lula’s nearly 54 million, and the two meet again on Oct. 25, the day betting licenses expire. On Polymarket, Bolsonaro’s odds of winning the presidency stood at about 82% on Monday, in a market that has drawn more than $173 million in volume. The platform itself is blocked in Brazil.
Though Bolsonaro called Lula’s measure “populist, hypocritical, and electioneering,” he also said he backs a ban on online casino games but wants to keep sports betting legal.
