President Lula has been re-elected, Brazil’s electoral authority has declared.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 80, secured 51.76% of the vote against rival Flávio Bolsonaro’s 48.24% after 99.81% of ballots were counted, an overall margin of 2.2 million votes, according to Brazil’s electoral authority on Sunday. The victory makes Lula the first Brazilian president to overturn a first-round defeat since democracy returned to the nation in 1988.
Polls remained on a knife-edge throughout the counting process, with Bolsonaro slightly ahead for much of the time, reports said. The result defied widespread expectations, as many voters and political commentators had doubted Lula could reverse his fortunes in just three weeks after Bolsonaro beat him in the first round of voting on October 4th.
The final outcome was delayed by just over two hours after Supreme Court Justice Kassio Nunes Marques ruled at the last minute to extend voting by two hours, prompting scenes of chaos in polling stations throughout Brazil. This decision could trigger legal action to overturn the result by Bolsonaro.
Lula watched the count alongside his wife, First Lady Rosangela da Silva, at a Sao Paulo hotel where supporters gathered to celebrate, reports said.
The victory marks a significant moment in Lula’s long political career, which began in the 1970s as a union leader. He was involved in founding the country’s Workers’ Party and ran for president three times before first winning office in 2002. He was re-elected in 2006 and was succeeded in 2010 by his cabinet minister Dilma Rousseff, who won her own re-election in 2014.
Rousseff was impeached in 2014 amid a sweeping corruption probe that also enveloped Lula, who was jailed in 2018. He served 580 days in prison before the Supreme Court annulled his conviction and freed him, The AP reported. He returned to win the presidency by defeating former president Jair Bolsonaro in 2022.
With other major Latin American countries already under Trump-allied conservative governments, including Argentina, Chile and Colombia, Brazil’s result bucks the regional trend of voters ousting left-wing candidates in favor of populist alternatives. Alongside Mexico, Brazil now remains a left-of-center government skeptical of US President Donald Trump’s policies in the region.
With a GDP of $2.6 trillion per year, Brazil stands as Latin America’s largest economy. That it will now remain largely independent of Trump’s policy in the region will be regarded as a blow to his ambitions in Latin America.
Lula’s victory is likely to be his last campaign, capping a political journey that has spanned more than five decades from union halls to the presidency.