Brazil's Licensed Betting Industry Asks Re-elected Lula for Talks on Ban

Brazil's licensed betting operators want to reopen talks with the government now that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has won re-election. The National Association of Games and Lotteries (ANJL), which represents fixed-odds betting companies, congratulated him and said it would work with the Executive and Congress "to improve the regulated market and combat illegal betting."

The ban itself is Provisional Measure 1,394, announced last month. The trade outlet iGaming Business reports that it revoked all betting licences as of the Sunday before its article, and that the sector's first aim is to recover those authorisations. A provisional measure takes effect immediately but is not permanent law until Congress acts on it, so the ANJL's position is a request to shape that process, not a reversal already in hand.

The financial stakes are concrete. The article says the sector paid BRL9.95 billion (about $1.8 billion) to public coffers in 2025, and that the Federal Revenue Service had collected BRL11.1 billion from games and bets this year before the ban, against an expected total of roughly BRL15 billion. Those figures come from the trade report and the association's framing; they are not independently audited here.

The question the statement leaves open is which door matters. The ANJL is addressing an executive that has just won an election on a platform the article describes as hostile to the sector, and it presents illegal operators as the core problem. Yet the measure's future depends on Congress, and the article reports no government response. If the government holds its position, the industry's case for legal recovery will be tested against consumer-protection arguments the association has not yet answered in public.

What would change this reading is a clear government signal on whether Provisional Measure 1,394 will be defended, amended or allowed to lapse. Until then, the ANJL's call is a lobbying move by an interested party, and the players it says the ban pushed toward unregulated sites remain the least-consulted part of the debate.