SAO PAULO, Sept 24, 2025 (BSS/AFP) - He actively denies it, yet one name keeps surfacing as a potential successor to convicted former president Jair Bolsonaro at the helm of Brazil's right: Sao Paulo Governor Tarcisio de Freitas.

As Bolsonaro, 70, remains occupied with appealing a 27-year sentence for plotting a botched coup, Brazil's considerable conservative electorate is currently headed into presidential elections in 2026 without a champion.

A former minister in Bolsonaro's government, Freitas runs a state that is home to 46 million people, the economic powerhouse of the country with a GDP equivalent to that of Belgium or Sweden.

Polls have shown the former army engineer as the candidate likely to perform best against leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

But Freitas -- a more traditional conservative than the far-right Bolsonaro -- appears uneasy having his name bandied about as a possible successor.

"Jair Bolsonaro is our greatest political leader," Freitas has said.

However, expectations are high that Bolsonaro will appoint a successor.

Other potential candidates are said to be his wife, Michelle, or his son, the senator Flavio Bolsonaro.

A champion of economic efficiency and a tough police force, Freitas is a technocrat who had not run for office until he won the Sao Paulo governorship in 2022.

His advisors describe him as a pragmatic leader, "unafraid of taking action."

"If being pragmatic means finding immediate solutions to people's problems, I agree with that description," Freitas told AFP last week.

- Competent and shrewd -

Polished and poised with an intense gaze and faint facial scars, the 50-year-old governor comes across as approachable in public, but turns forceful at the podium, reeling off streams of memorized statistics.

He is more measured than the firebrand Bolsonaro, yet knows how to match the political moment.

Just before the coup verdict, he delivered a fiery broadside against what he called the Supreme Court's "dictatorship."

Freitas is in favor of a controversial push by Congress to give amnesty to hundreds convicted of coup-related crimes, including Bolsonaro.

He has even said that, if president, he would pardon him.

"Amnesty can help pacify the country. Brazil needs it to move forward," he said.

Freitas, who was born in Rio de Janeiro and moved to Sao Paulo to enter the military academy, retired as a captain aged 33 to enter the civil service.

His first prominent role was as national director of infrastructure and transport in the leftist government of Dilma Rousseff.

Bolsonaro, impressed by his reputation as an efficient technocrat, tapped him as infrastructure minister in 2019, later backing his campaign for governor of Sao Paulo.

"Freitas is competent and quite shrewd," a European diplomat told AFP on condition of anonymity.

"But the Bolsonaro base hasn't disappeared -- as a candidate, he will have to win over the radical wing."

Leonardo Paz, a political scientist at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, added: "The establishment sees him as an effective operator who wouldn't spark the kind of unnecessary controversy Bolsonaro did."

The left meanwhile criticizes Freitas for his support for amnesty and failure to condemn Donald Trump's steep tariffs on Brazil, imposed in retaliation for Bolsonaro's conviction.

- 'I don't care' -

Freitas accuses Lula of putting "ideology ahead of the economy, leaving Brazil exposed to fiscal risk with runaway spending that scared off investors."

"There can be no social justice without fiscal responsibility," he said.

Under his tenure, Sao Paulo has registered the country's sharpest rise in police killings.

Deaths from police interventions jumped 61 percent between 2023 and 2024, according to the Brazilian Public Security Forum. The national average fell by 3 percent.

In 2024, two NGOs accused Freitas of tacitly tolerating police abuses in a submission to the UN Human Rights Council.

The governor's response was blunt: "I don't care."