Lula overcame a first-round deficit to win a fourth term
Brazil’s right-wing Liberal Party, the party of the Bolsonaro family, emerged as the largest party in both chambers of Congress, winning 121 of 513 seats in the lower house and securing a 28-seat bloc in the 81-seat Senate. The Wall Street Journal reported that the right swept the congressional elections held alongside the first round and that the result leaves President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva facing an uphill struggle to govern and increasingly dependent on deals with conservative and centrist lawmakers to advance his agenda. Lula won Sunday’s runoff with 51.8% of the vote against Flávio Bolsonaro’s 48.2%, electoral authorities said, with over 99% of the votes counted.
Lula, two days away from turning 81, won an unprecedented fourth term and became the first presidential candidate in Brazil’s modern democratic history to lose the first round of voting but win the runoff. The Wall Street Journal described the outcome as a surprise victory that cemented his place among the world’s longest-serving democratically elected leaders. The outlet reported that Lula had trailed 45% to Bolsonaro’s 47% in the Oct. 4 first round, that the race tightened sharply in the final weeks, and that on the eve of the runoff major polls showed Bolsonaro with a lead within the margin of error, with Datafolha and Quaest both putting him at 51% to Lula’s 49%.
The outcome followed a last-minute push to bring back voters who had sat out the first round. Cheers erupted from apartment windows and car horns blared across São Paulo after musicians, celebrities and campaigners mobilized first-round abstainers to secure da Silva’s victory, The Wall Street Journal reported. The outlet said Sunday’s 19% abstention rate was one of the lowest on record and was essential to delivering the victory, and described the campaign as having begun amid widespread apathy. Heavy rains pounded much of the country as da Silva persuaded millions of Brazilians who had skipped the first round of voting to cast ballots in the second round.
The Wall Street Journal reported that for many Brazilians the election was more than about keeping da Silva in power, and that many of them saw a vote for Lula as a vote to keep the Bolsonaros out and preserve the country’s hard-won democracy. Karina da Silva Pereira, a 50-year-old lawyer in São Paulo, braved torrential rains to vote for Lula. “We must do what we can to protect Brazil’s democracy,” she said, adding that after Jair Bolsonaro’s attempt to seize power by force four years earlier, she felt compelled to vote to keep the family out of power. “It was a risk we couldn’t take.”
The Workers’ Party requested that voting be extended on Sunday after reports that some local governments had reduced the number of buses serving poorer voters, who tend to support the president. Supreme Court Justice Cristiano Zanin granted the request at the last minute, a decision that came a minute after voting was supposed to end; The Wall Street Journal reported that the timing prompted chaos at some polling stations. Bolsonaro’s camp also requested an extension to voting in some part of the country. Zanin, who served as da Silva’s personal defense lawyer during the so-called Car Wash corruption scandal that entangled him, drew fierce criticism of bias over the decision, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Da Silva was born to illiterate farmworkers in Brazil’s impoverished northeast and lost a finger in a metalworking plant before rising through the labor movement to become president in 2003, The Wall Street Journal reported. Starting as a factory worker and trade union leader during what was then a dictatorship, he weathered throat and skin cancers, a corruption scandal that put him behind bars in 2018, and a plot by Jair Bolsonaro’s allies to assassinate him. His victory puts him on course to complete 16 nonconsecutive years in office, matching Angela Merkel’s tenure as German chancellor and exceeding that of any U.S. president, placing him among a small group of modern democracy’s longest-serving elected leaders.
The Wall Street Journal characterized the victory as another chapter in da Silva’s bitter struggle with the Bolsonaro family, whose right-wing movement the outlet described as remarkably resilient. Da Silva narrowly defeated Jair Bolsonaro in 2022, 50.9% of the vote to his rival’s 49.1%. The former president was subsequently convicted and imprisoned for plotting a coup to prevent da Silva from taking office. Rather than fade away, the movement rallied behind his eldest son, turning this year’s election into a rematch by proxy that The Wall Street Journal said forced da Silva into another bruising battle to keep the family out of power.
After his first-round setback, da Silva shifted his campaign away from warnings about U.S. interference in Brazil’s election and toward the economic frustrations of ordinary voters. He promised to increase payments under the Bolsa Família welfare program, championed a shorter working week without a cut in pay, proposed sweeping debt relief for struggling households and floated free public transportation on weekends, seeking to reconnect with poorer voters who had long formed the backbone of his support. He also broke with his party’s traditional position on crime, supporting the prosecution of 16-year-olds as adults for particularly serious crimes, while his campaign portrayed Bolsonaro’s proposed spending cuts as a threat to public services and social benefits.
Even among poorer Brazilians who associate him with corruption, many still see da Silva as their strongest advocate in a deeply unequal nation, The Wall Street Journal reported. The poorest half of Brazil’s population, more than 100 million people, owns less than 3% of household wealth, according to the outlet.
A quarter of a century after first winning the presidency, da Silva is now the last remaining stalwart of South America’s left, which has suffered a string of defeats as the region takes a rightward turn driven by economic and crime concerns, The Wall Street Journal reported. The outlet noted that new leaders from Honduras to Colombia to Chile and beyond have allied themselves with the Trump administration.
The Wall Street Journal projected that da Silva’s victory sets the stage for renewed tensions with Washington. Following a string of victories by conservative candidates from Argentina and Chile to Colombia and Peru in recent years, the outlet said Brazil’s decision to stick with the left denies President Trump a powerful ally in Latin America, one that is a major source of critical minerals needed for everything from electric vehicles to weapons systems. Trump has praised Bolsonaro and clashed repeatedly with da Silva over trade, Brazil’s prosecution of the former president and what the Brazilian leader has called U.S. interference in the election. The dispute escalated into tariffs and a diplomatic row over visas, although the two governments have continued negotiating a trade agreement.