Political scientists, pollsters and Lula attribute the comeback to hope and fear
Brazil’s currency plunged and stocks lost almost 20% early Monday as investors reacted to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s unexpected resurgence in Brazil’s presidential runoff and the prospect of another leftist government. Pollsters scrambled to explain how Lula had revived the left in just three weeks in a region where conservatives had taken control of every major country except Mexico.
Three weeks earlier, Lula had lost the first round to Flávio Bolsonaro by a 45%-47% margin and was politically all but written off. Abstention had reached its highest level since 1998, and polls that had historically overestimated Lula’s support showed him narrowly behind. The right had already begun selecting ministers for a new government.
Lula secured a fourth term Sunday with more than 64 million votes, the most ever won by a presidential candidate in Brazil. No candidate in the country’s democratic history had previously lost the first round and gone on to win a runoff. Lula turns 81 on Tuesday and is on course to spend 16 years in office, placing him among the world’s longest-serving elected leaders. The former shoeshine boy born to illiterate parents had surprised even those in his own party.
The vote accounting shows why higher turnout mattered. Lula picked up an additional 10.4 million votes between the first round and the runoff, and nearly three million more Brazilians went to the polls despite torrential rains and flooding in parts of the country Sunday. Voting is compulsory for most citizens, although the fine for not voting is less than a dollar, and around a fifth of the adult population had stayed home in the first round on Oct. 4. Another 1.8 million voters who had cast blank or invalid first-round ballots, often used by Brazilians to express dissatisfaction with the candidates, chose a candidate in the runoff.
Even if every additional voter had backed Lula, more than 5.5 million votes would still be unexplained. The numbers suggest Lula also drew substantial support from voters who had backed lesser-known candidates defeated in the first round, including candidates on the right. Political scientists said it was also possible voters switched from Flávio Bolsonaro to Lula in a country where the electorate is often swayed by pragmatic questions rather than ideology. “The most convincing explanation is that da Silva managed to build a coalition driven more by opposition to Bolsonarismo than by identification with the president himself,” said Leandro Gabiati, a political scientist and director at Dominium Public Affairs.
Political scientists, pollsters and Lula described a mix of hope and fear around the comeback. A grassroots mobilization brought young and elderly voters to the polls, many of whom had stayed home in the first round. In those accounts, campaign messaging heightened concerns among poorer Brazilians that they could lose government benefits under a right-wing government. Much of the mobilization was driven by André Janones, a former bus conductor turned congressman allied with Lula’s Workers’ Party. His social-media operation, viral videos and personal attacks against the Bolsonaros helped energize supporters, while his pro-Lula WhatsApp channel grew from 50,000 followers to nearly 11 million in the three weeks after the first round.
Janones has faced corruption allegations and accusations of threatening to release intimate photographs of his ex-girlfriend, who obtained a protective order against him; he denied the allegations. Lula, who at 80 had only recently acquired his first smartphone, praised Janones as his “general” Sunday night for keeping campaign morale high “morning, afternoon and night.”
Lula also changed tack quickly after the first-round loss. His signature Panama hat and the Workers’ Party’s trademark red gave way to Brazil’s national green and yellow, long associated with the Bolsonaro movement. He reversed his longstanding position on crime and backed a proposal to try 16-year-olds as adults for serious offenses such as murder and rape. “He was not re-elected tonight because he doubled down on leftist ideology,” said Kevin Ivers at StratComms, a political-analysis newsletter. “In the end, Lula scrambled to do or promise things he failed to deliver this term, almost running against himself.”
In Minas Gerais, Janones’s home state, Lula overturned his first-round loss to win the state, a bellwether that has backed the winner of every presidential election since 1989. Lula also won the cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, even as Flávio Bolsonaro carried both states.
Election administration became the focus of the dispute. Torrential rains dumped nearly 5 inches of water on some towns, flooding roads, disrupting public transportation and forcing polling stations to relocate. In Paraná state, authorities deployed boats and tractors to help voters reach the polls. Lula’s allies accused local officials sympathetic to Bolsonaro of deliberately reducing bus services in poorer neighborhoods. In Salvador, authorities found hundreds of buses sitting idle; an electoral judge ordered the arrest of the city’s transportation chief, and the city denied trying to obstruct voting.
Both campaigns sought a two-hour voting extension from Brazil’s electoral court, with Flávio Bolsonaro citing the storms and Lula citing bus shortages. With no ruling forthcoming, Lula’s coalition petitioned the Supreme Court, where the case was randomly assigned to Justice Cristiano Zanin, Lula’s former personal lawyer, who had defended him in his corruption cases. Just after 5 p.m., Zanin extended voting nationwide until 7 p.m., an unprecedented intervention that sowed confusion because many electronic voting machines had already closed and could not reopen.
Constitutional lawyers and the electoral court itself, which was headed by a Bolsonaro-appointed justice, said the decision was lawful and dismissed Flávio Bolsonaro’s claims that the extension somehow favored Lula. Public confidence in Brazil’s highest courts had eroded after years of controversial rulings and allegations of judicial overreach. At a moment when the country needed the judiciary to provide certainty, its intervention instead fueled further political unrest, said Ivar Hartmann, an associate professor at Insper, a São Paulo business school. “The Supreme Court justices themselves have generated this distrust over the years,” Hartmann said. “Democratic institutions need the public’s trust to function. And Brazil’s judiciary has lost that.”
Flávio Bolsonaro, the runoff candidate, and his supporters gave one explanation for the turnaround: fraud. As conspiracy theories spread online, Flávio Bolsonaro refused to concede on Sunday and vowed to seek annulment over the last-minute Supreme Court decision to extend voting by two hours. Flávio Bolsonaro said police had ordered him to surrender his passports Monday over concerns he might flee the country after his election loss. He is under investigation for alleged money laundering and over efforts to secure financing for a film about his father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, from a banker embroiled in a fraud scandal.
World leaders rushed to congratulate Lula. Washington had yet to recognize the result as of Monday, with President Trump telling reporters that the race “looked like another rigged election.”
Lula’s victory left Brazil with an unresolved dispute over the administration of the runoff. The remaining questions centered on the scale of voter switching, whether storm and bus failures affected access, and the public trust of the courts after the late voting extension. Investors had reacted sharply by Monday, while the institutional dispute was still unfolding.