Lula's historic comeback is a defeat for Trump

Since Brazil adopted a two-round system in 1989, no one has won the presidency after finishing second in the first round. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva broke that rule on Sunday: he defeated Flávio Bolsonaro with 51.8% of valid votes to 48.2%. His lead — more than four million votes — is roughly double the margin in 2022, when he beat Jair Bolsonaro by just 1.8 percentage points.

Paradoxically, finishing behind Flávio in the first round on October 4 ended up working in Lula’s favor. His first-round campaign was disorganized. The setback jolted his team and his supporters into action. The result was an extraordinary mobilization effort: between rounds, Lula picked up more than 10 million votes, while Flávio added about 3.7 million.

For Bolsonaro’s camp, the first-round win had the opposite effect. Growing overconfident, Flávio’s allies were already publicly discussing ministerial appointments. Many on the right, however, will point the finger at Jair Bolsonaro, who, despite recognizing his son’s limitations, chose him over São Paulo Governor Tarcísio de Freitas. Tarcísio was performing better against Lula in the polls and had the support of the centrão, the centrist and center-right bloc that dominates Congress. Ultimately, keeping power in the family took precedence.

That is why it will be revealing to see how conservative voters react. Since 2018, the Bolsonaro family has exercised an almost undisputed hegemony over Brazil’s right. From now on, more voices will argue that a more moderate candidate with a different surname could have defeated Lula.

As expected, Flávio did not concede defeat and said he will ask to annul the second round, just as his father refused to accept his loss four years ago. Everything suggests, however, that his refusal to accept the result will be far less destabilizing. Unlike Jair Bolsonaro in 2022, Flávio does not control the government. He also did not spend months sowing doubt about the electronic voting machines, a campaign his father used to convince part of his electorate.

His central argument — the two-hour extension of voting hours — is weak, because his own campaign had requested extended hours in several states. A lead of more than four million votes is probably too large for allegations of irregularities to convince many people beyond Bolsonaro’s most loyal supporters.

The result also has regional implications. In the past 20 months, the Latin American left had lost seven presidential elections, and Lula stopped that streak. Within hours, several right-wing presidents in the region congratulated Lula, including José Antonio Kast in Chile, Santiago Peña in Paraguay, Rodrigo Paz in Bolivia and Daniel Noboa in Ecuador. U.S. President Donald Trump, by contrast, did not do so in the first hours after the results.

It is also a setback for Trump’s partisan interventionism. Since his return to the White House, a central aim of his Latin America policy has been to bring ideologically aligned leaders to power, and in Brazil he consistently worked to strengthen the Bolsonaro family. Lula’s re-election also hits Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has made confrontation with the region’s left-wing governments a central plank of his political agenda.

Finally, the comeback has elevated a new figure on the Brazilian left. After Lula’s first-round defeat, Rafael Fonteles, governor of the northeastern state of Piauí, took over the campaign’s communications strategy. Young and moderate, and freshly re-elected with nearly 71% of the vote, he is emerging as a potential leader of Brazil’s post-Lula left.

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