Brazil’s leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has won a dramatic re-election victory in the presidential runoff, but his rival Flavio Bolsonaro refused to accept the loss and said he would seek to annul the vote, Dawn and Geo News reported, citing AFP and Reuters.
The result
According to official results, Lula won 51.8 per cent of the votes to 48.2 per cent for Bolsonaro, a margin of about 4.4 million votes. At 80, he turns 81 on Tuesday and will now serve an unprecedented fourth term, after finishing second to Bolsonaro in the first round earlier this month. No candidate who lost the first round in Brazil has gone on to win the second since 1989, the first direct election after the end of military rule. The abstention rate fell from 21 per cent in the first round to 19 per cent.
“People went to vote because we managed to convince them that voting was very important for ensuring democracy in the country,” Lula said in his first comments after the win. Fireworks and vuvuzelas sounded in Rio de Janeiro, and thousands of people in red, the colour of Lula’s Workers’ Party, filled the streets of Sao Paulo.
Bolsonaro rejects the outcome
Flavio Bolsonaro, 45, a senator and the son of former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, spoke briefly in Brasilia, stone-faced. “It is impossible to recognise the results. I am going to request the annulment of these elections,” he said.
His anger centred on a decision by the Supreme Court to extend voting by two hours after some polling stations had already closed. The court acted at the request of Lula, who complained that buses had been pulled from circulation in several cities, stopping people from reaching polling stations. Bolsonaro had also asked for an extension in some regions because of heavy rain, but called the court’s ruling “unacceptable” and a “dirty trick”.
His father Jair Bolsonaro is serving a 27-year prison sentence for trying to carry out a coup after he lost the 2022 election to Lula. Flavio Bolsonaro had said during the campaign that he would seek to free his father and push for the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who led the case.
A divided country
The campaign was bitter, marked by scandals and mudslinging. After his first-round defeat, Lula’s side organised large rallies under the slogan “Never Again Bolsonaro”, recalling the former president’s handling of the Covid pandemic, destruction of the Amazon and cuts to public programmes. Deforestation of the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest, has fallen to its lowest level in four decades under Lula, although climate change barely featured in the campaign.
A fierce social media fight drew in Meta, the owner of WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram. Lula’s campaign accused the company of favouring his opponent through “algorithmic manipulation”, which Meta denied, though it said some of Lula’s campaign ads had been deactivated by mistake because of technical errors. “We are going to have to regulate them,” Lula said of the social media companies after his win.
Voters’ main complaints were the cost of living and crime. “We’re in a deep hole, things are dire. People can barely afford to eat,” said Tereza Cristina Ramos, a 68-year-old retiree in Rio de Janeiro. Lula heads into a fourth term with almost half of the country having voted against him.
The Trump factor
The win halts, for now, a conservative wave that has carried right-wing governments to power in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Peru, with the backing of US President Donald Trump. Lula’s campaign stressed sovereignty against pressure from the United States. “This country will not accept being anyone’s backyard,” he said on Sunday. Congratulations came from Chile’s far-right president, Jose Antonio Kast, and Ecuador’s right-wing president Daniel Noboa, both close Trump allies.
What we know and what we don’t
What we know: the official margin, that voting was extended by two hours and that Flavio Bolsonaro says he will ask to annul the result.
What we don’t know: on what legal grounds he will file, how the courts will respond, and whether his supporters will accept the result. Analysts quoted by AFP before the vote had warned that a Lula victory would leave him facing a hostile Congress, with threats of impeachment.
Why it matters
Brazil is Latin America’s largest country, and the result keeps one of the region’s few leftist governments in power at a time when several neighbours have moved right with Trump’s backing. It also shows that a campaign built on sovereignty and the cost of living can beat that wave. For countries like Pakistan, the outcome is a reminder of how voters elsewhere in the Global South are responding to pressure from Washington. What to watch next: the annulment request, the speed with which Lula builds a working majority in Congress, and relations with Washington.
This article draws on reporting by Dawn, Geo News, AFP and Reuters.
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