Brazil election special: Lula Bounces Back

In the second round of Brazil’s presidential election on 25 October, Lula won a majority of the valid votes and the right to start an unprecedented fourth term as President of Brazil on 5 January 2027. The vote was 51.79% for the Workers’ Party’s Lula (64.26 million votes) and 48.21% for the Liberal Party candidate Flávio Bolsonaro (59.83 million votes). Flávio refused to accept the result and said that he would petition to annul the election. This is because the federal Supreme Court judge Cristiano Zanin, responding to a complaint by the Lula campaign about a lack of public transport in several cities, prolonged the voting for two additional hours. This is the first time since the return to democracy in the 1980s that a presidential candidate who came second in the first round won in the second.

While an annulment of the election is unlikely, the campaign underlined the deep divisions within Brazil. Brazilians disagree about social policy, environmental protection, religion, the Supreme Court, the performance of the Lula administration, the economy, Brazil’s relationship with the rest of the world (including the Trump administration), the state of democracy, and much more (even music!).

The choice Brazilians faced in the election would be familiar to voters in Europe: social democratic continuity versus a move to the hard right. Lula, who has run for president seven times and been president for three terms already (2003-2010 and 2023-2026), offered voters the amelioration of market inequalities with social policies (including the flagship Family Allowance programme), a rising minimum wage, industrial policy promoting the transition to clean energy, environmental protection, increased access to higher education and technical training through student loans and affirmative actions, subsidized public housing, and other programs. Added to this is an international posture that tried to balance relations with the US, the EU, China, and other powers and defend sovereignty vis-à-vis the Trump administration. Flávio Bolsonaro, for his part, offered something akin to US-style capitalism with overtones of MAGA: hard-line policing and a promise to build prisons, large cuts to government spending, alignment with the Trump administration, the defence of conservative social values, and promises of prosperity for the entrepreneurial.

The campaign was clouded by a corruption scandal involving the Master Bank, a fraudulent institution whose former owner is alleged to have suborned countless members of the political establishment, including judges of the federal Supreme Court. Flávio admitted to receiving R$61 million (about £9 million) from the Master Bank’s owner, supposedly to make a film about his father Jair. But the scandal also damaged the Lula administration by tainting the reputation of Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Morães, one of the judges who in September 2025 convicted Jair Bolsonaro (and his accomplices) of trying to carry out a coup at the end of his mandate. De Morães is seen by many as a defender of Lula, so his being discredited delegitimized the Lula administration in the eyes of some voters.

The election this year reproduced the divisions seen in 2018 and 2022: the Workers’ Party candidate getting more support than his rival from the Northeast, the elderly, the poor, Catholics, and women, the Bolsonaro candidate doing better in the South and Centre-West, among evangelical Protestants, men, and the better-off. The Lula campaign became much more vigorous between the first and second rounds. André Janones, a federal deputy from the Rede party, an ally of the Workers’ Party, created a WhatsApp group after the first round called Lula’s Army, which attracted 10 million subscribers by 23 October.

The election throws up many questions. One concerns how Lula will govern given that the credibility of the Supreme Court has been seriously weakened and the Congress is largely in the hands of right-wing parties. Flávio’s Liberal Party alone has 28 seats in the Senate (35% of the total), 121 seats in the lower house (24% of the total), and five governorships (19% of the total). When parties that normally ally with the Liberal Party are added, it is clear that Lula will have to negotiate with right-wing majorities in both houses of Congress. Another question is whether Flávio’s loss will trigger an effort to construct a non-Bolsonarista current on the right, or whether one of the members of the Bolsonaro family in Congress (there are five of them) will try to exercise hegemony over the opposition to Lula. A third question is what President Lula will do early in his term to alleviate business anxiety about the federal government’s fiscal deficit, currently 7.3% of GDP. If the last eight years of Brazilian politics are any guide, the next Lula administration could be a turbulent one.

About the author

Anthony W. Pereira is the Executive Director of the Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University, a visiting professor at the School of Global Affairs at King’s College London, and a senior fellow at Canning House. From 2010 to 2020 he was the founding director of the Brazil Institute at King’s College London. Professor Pereira’s research interests include authoritarianism and democracy, human rights, public security, and international relations. He has a B.A. in Politics from Sussex University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University. Professor Pereira has been a visiting professor in the Department of Political Science at the Federal University of Pernambuco and at the Institute of International Relations at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. His books include Right-Wing Populism in Latin America and Beyond (Routledge, 2023), Modern Brazil: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Ditadura e Repressão [Dictatorship and Repression) (Paz e Terra, 2010). Professor Pereira is a columnist for the Brazilian publication Interesse Nacional.