RIO DE JANEIRO—Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won reelection by more than 3.5 percentage points in the country’s runoff election on Oct. 25, extending the career of one of the most significant leaders in the democratic world. Lula made history as the first Brazilian presidential candidate to come from behind to win a second-round vote. His victory also bucks a trend in a region where leaders have been bending to U.S. President Donald Trump’s pressure.
“This country does not accept a role as anyone’s backyard,” Lula said in his victory speech. “We speak, as equals, to everyone in the world.”
RIO DE JANEIRO—Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won reelection by more than 3.5 percentage points in the country’s runoff election on Oct. 25, extending the career of one of the most significant leaders in the democratic world. Lula made history as the first Brazilian presidential candidate to come from behind to win a second-round vote. His victory also bucks a trend in a region where leaders have been bending to U.S. President Donald Trump’s pressure.
“This country does not accept a role as anyone’s backyard,” Lula said in his victory speech. “We speak, as equals, to everyone in the world.”
Lula defeated right-wing Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro with 51.8 percent of votes to Flávio’s 48.2 percent, according to official results. The head of Brazil’s election court congratulated Lula on his victory, as did many Latin American and world leaders. However, Flávio—the son of convicted former President Jair Bolsonaro—refused to concede, saying that he would seek to legally challenge the result because a Supreme Court justice extended voting for two hours.
Top Brazilian election judges believe that this challenge is unlikely to be successful since both Flávio’s and Lula’s campaigns requested prolonged voting hours in parts of the country, Brazilian media reported. Lula’s campaign argued that some cities abruptly took public buses off the streets, which could have suppressed turnout, while Flávio’s campaign asked for more time in locations with heavy rain.
As of midday Monday, Trump had not commented on the election’s outcome—raising the question of whether he might reject it, too. Trump has occasionally clashed with Lula since he returned to the White House last year. He has echoed the Bolsonaro family’s criticisms of Brazil’s government and held a photo op with Flávio ahead of the election, though he held back from making an explicit endorsement.
Reuters reported over the weekend that two U.S. State Department officials repeatedly pushed for U.S. policies that would weaken Lula and aid the Bolsonaros politically. A State Department spokesperson responded that “the Brazilian people have the right to choose their leaders through free and fair elections.”
Many of the regional leaders who recognized Lula’s victory are right-wing figures who have cooperated with Trump, including the hard-line presidents of Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. Their choices to speak up before any signal from Trump represent a “large gesture … of relative autonomy as a region in times of the Donroe Doctrine,” Argentine political scientist Esteban Actis wrote on social media.
Argentine President Javier Milei had not commented on the result by midday Monday.
Lula’s victory was the fruit of a surge of last-minute organizing after Flávio won the first round of voting on Oct. 4. Flávio’s campaign then carried itself with an air of expected victory, seeming to believe that fatigue with Lula would assure their candidate the presidency. For much of the past two years, Lula’s disapproval rating has been higher than his approval rating. The top candidates eliminated in the first round were all right-wing, suggesting their votes would likely go to Flávio in the runoff.
Jair Bolsonaro held office from 2019 to 2022, when he lost the last presidential election to Lula. He is currently under house arrest for planning a coup to try to overturn that result. As part of that coup plot, some members of the military planned to assassinate Lula. Flávio promised to pardon his father if elected.
Faced with the vivid possibility of another Bolsonaro presidency, however, progressive Brazilians and some centrists mobilized with a level of grassroots organizing uncharacteristic of recent years. “People were desperate,” said graphic designer Lena Benz, 50, who participated in a large Lula rally in Rio on Oct. 18. “We lived through the COVID-19 pandemic with the Bolsonaro family in power. They are not only extreme, but also incompetent at governing.”
Sunday’s election results show that Lula’s campaign was effective both at increasing turnout and convincing undecided voters. Perceiving that the right was initially far more effective on social media, the campaign empowered digitally savvy surrogates. This was in part a reaction to perceptions on the left and among Brazilian civil society that big tech platforms unfairly favored right-wing content during the election—accusations that triggered a formal complaint against Meta to Brazilian electoral authorities. (Meta denied wrongdoing.)
One leftist congressperson created a WhatsApp channel for online campaigning that amassed 10 million members, equal to around 6 percent of the Brazilian electorate. Groups ranging from K-pop fandoms to soccer club fan associations joined the effort. The channel amplified progressive concerns about Flávio that were relatively undercovered in mainstream media, such as his pledges to cut social spending.
The channel “was absolutely fundamental to Lula overcoming Flávio in the runoff,” said Paula Cardoso Pereira, a digital communications researcher at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro’s MediaLab.
In the end, even some Brazilians who supported Flávio in the first round changed their minds. “I saw an interview where Flávio Bolsonaro said he wanted to change Brazil’s constitution, and it made me think,” said Antonia Rodrigues, a 51-year-old bakery worker who switched her vote to Lula on Sunday. “Lula is in favor of the poor.”
Lula will face steep obstacles to governing. Flávio’s far-right Liberal Party (PL) grew its share of seats in Congress in the Oct. 4 elections. Although the PL would need to ally with centrists to impeach Lula, centrist and right-wing parties formed such an alliance in 2016 to oust President Dilma Rousseff, a member of Lula’s party. At the time, a faltering economy gave the opposition parties more political space to impeach the president. Brazil’s high national debt could signal macroeconomic trouble ahead for Lula, too.
This year’s election may have also ushered in a new level of political weaponization of Brazil’s Supreme Court.
In 2022, right-wing Brazilians and some legal scholars criticized Justice Alexandre de Morães as too heavy handed with social media takedowns of content deemed false or anti-democratic. But court actions that year largely “sought to level the playing field,” whereas this election saw “some justices act much more proactively to try to favor one candidacy,” said Brazilian political scientist Miguel Lago.
Justice Kassio Nunes Marques, for example, tried to shut down the pro-Lula WhatsApp channel, saying it spread false information, though he eventually backed down after criticism from legal experts and fellow justices.
For now, Lula is enjoying his historic victory. In foreign-policy terms, it boosts efforts to maintain Latin America as a region autonomous from outside powers, keep climate cooperation and multilateralism alive, and elevate the value of democracy on a global stage increasingly dominated by might-makes-right logic. Those were some of the qualities about Lula that other world leaders celebrated in their posts of congratulations.
Those messages also carried a subtext: Whatever noise the Trump administration may make, the international community is larger and longer lasting than Trump.