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President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s win ended a string of conservative victories in Latin America. His opponent, Flávio Bolsonaro, called for the election to be annulled.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil surged to a remarkable re-election on Sunday, according to official preliminary results, but his opponent, Flávio Bolsonaro, said he would not accept the results after a chaotic Election Day.
Mr. Lula’s victory, which ended a string of conservative wins in Latin America cheered on by President Trump, came after a judge ordered polls to remain open an additional two hours — a move requested by both campaigns after transportation delays and bad weather disrupted voting. At a news conference, Mr. Bolsonaro called for the election to be annulled, saying the decision to keep the polls open “changed the rules in the middle of the game.”
“There’s a lot that needs to be cleared up before Brazil simply accepts this foul play that took place in these elections,” he said.
Mr. Lula received 51.8 percent of the vote, versus 48.2 percent for Flávio Bolsonaro, with 99.9 percent of the ballots counted, according to official preliminary results.
The leftist’s 3.6 percent margin of victory was wider than four years ago, and was predicted by few pollsters. Even more stunning was that he achieved the comeback after placing second in the first round of voting earlier this month, a first in Brazilian history.
“I would like to thank the Brazilian people for the generosity they have shown me for a long time,” Mr. Lula said in a victory speech in São Paulo.
Mr. Lula, 80, had framed his candidacy as a vote for democracy and the only way to bar the return of the Bolsonaro family to power. He has frequently and defiantly clashed with Mr. Trump, who attempted to use tariffs and sanctions to keep Mr. Bolsonaro’s father, Jair, out of prison for his attempted coup four years ago.
Mr. Lula’s victory snapped a string of seven straight wins by right-wing leaders in the region over the last 18 months, and suggested that Latin America’s left-wing forces still wield some influence despite the losses.
On Paulista Avenue, a main drag in São Paulo, fireworks crackled, horns blared and supporters cried in disbelief. Vendors sold popcorn and beer, with their stands plastered with Lula stickers.
The candidates offered starkly different visions on issues that included fighting organized crime and revitalizing a sluggish economy. The outcome could reshape Brazil’s trajectory on many divisive issues for years to come because the next president will have the right to fill four open seats on the country’s powerful Supreme Court, which has 11 seats in total.
Extra two hours: Both candidates asked for polls to be kept open. Mr. Bolsonaro said that flooding in a part of the country where he held electoral advantages would unfairly hurt him, while Mr. Lula accused public officials of purposefully slowing down public transportation in areas where he won in an earlier round of voting.
The Bolsonaros: Looming over the contest was an epic political struggle that has roiled and defined Brazilian politics for more than a decade. Mr. Bolsonaro ran in lieu of his father, who could not stand for office because he was convicted of attempting a coup against Mr. Lula after losing the last election in 2022. He was sentenced to 27 years in prison and is serving his time at home because of health reasons.
Leaders across Latin America have congratulated Lula on his victory, including right-wing presidents in Chile, Paraguay and Peru. But the United States has remained notably silent.
Many Brazilians, as well as members of the Lula administration, had feared that Washington would try to interfere in the election. Brazilian sovereignty even became a rallying cry during Lula’s campaign. But Trump never explicitly endorsed a candidate.
On Sunday night, right-wing figures in the United States, including Donald Trump Jr., began casting doubt on the elections results.
Digging into tonight’s numbers, Lula’s comeback is remarkable. After finishing behind in the first round, few pollsters expected him to turn things around. Most assumed that voters whose preferred candidates had been eliminated would break for Flávio Bolsonaro in Sunday’s runoff. But that’s not what happened.
There were about 14 million additional votes up for grabs in the runoff, including those of new voters, supporters of eliminated candidates and people who had cast blank or invalid ballots in the first round.
Lula captured three out of every four of those votes, a stunning turnaround. He gained 10.4 million votes between the first and second rounds, compared with just 3.7 million for Bolsonaro.
Flávio Bolsonaro also accused a Supreme Court justice who previously served as Lula’s lawyer of having “changed the rules in the middle of the game” by extending voting hours. “What happened today was not normal and it was even unacceptable,” he said.
In a news conference, Flávio Bolsonaro refused to recognize Lula’s victory and said he would seek to have the election annulled. He described the court’s decision to extend the voting as a “dirty trick.”
Lula, speaking at a hotel surrounded by his wife, his running mate and his political allies, looked relatively calm. He said the outpouring of rallies in the last week “was a demonstration that this country refuses to be anyone’s backyard.” That appeared to be a reference to the United States, which has been trying to exert new levels of control over Latin America through tariffs, sanctions, election interventions and other means.
Flávio Bolsonaro’s address lasted less than three minutes.
On Paulista Avenue, one of São Paulo’s main thoroughfares, a massive, spontaneous celebration continues to grow. Fireworks began erupting even before the election was called, and they are still crackling overhead. Horns are blaring, adding to the deafening noise. Supporters are crying in disbelief. Vendors are selling popcorn and beer from stands plastered with Lula stickers.
“I would like to thank the Brazilian people for the generosity they have shown me for a long time,” said Lula in a victory speech in São Paulo. “And, in this second round, I want to thank the generosity of the Brazilian youth, who took to the streets to defend democracy.”
Lula’s victory represented the first time in Brazil’s history that a candidate who lost the first round of voting came back to win the second.
Lula received 51.8 percent of the vote, versus 48.2 percent for Flávio Bolsonaro, with 99.9 percent of the ballots counted, according to official preliminary results.
Lula is addressing his supporters from a podium draped in a Brazilian flag. People in the crowd are cheering, clapping and nodding along to his points.
Numerous poll workers nationwide said they received confusing and sometimes contradictory orders from electoral authorities. At a polling site in central São Paulo, one election worker said that by 5 p.m. local time, she and her colleagues heard that the Supreme Court had ordered polling sites to remain open two more hours. However, local authorities ordered them to shut down. The worker, who gave her name only as Bárbara because she feared repercussions, said they eventually got orders to reopen by 6 p.m., but it was too late for many voters.
Lula is re-elected, according to official preliminary results from Brazil’s top electoral court.
Since taking office, President Trump has become something of an electoral kingmaker in Latin America. Right-wing candidates aligned with Washington have won the past seven elections in the region, with Mr. Trump explicitly endorsing the winner in two of them.
Now comes the biggest regional test for the right and for Mr. Trump’s recent record of success: Brazil.
As Brazilians headed to the polls on Sunday, the question looming over Latin America’s largest democracy was whether Mr. Trump would have an influence.
He has not openly championed either Brazilian candidate. But the Trump administration did try in more subtle ways to lift the right-wing challenger, Flávio Bolsonaro, who is running against President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a leftist.
Having watched Mr. Trump wade into other elections and experienced his failed attempt to intervene in the trial of Mr. Bolsonaro’s father, who was ultimately convicted for plotting a coup, Brazil has sought to erect a firewall to try to shield its vote from potential U.S. meddling. (The elder Bolsonaro is currently serving a 27-year sentence at home, given his health.)
The Trump administration has rejected Brazil’s claims that it is seeking to interfere, even though it tried this summer to send a U.S. delegation to investigate Brazil’s electoral integrity.
A raucous rally featuring supporters for Lula gathered on a major avenue in São Paulo. Soon, the military police arrived with shields and rubber bullets.
A security guard at a São Paulo polling station told me to stop filming. Then a Lula supporter stepped in, and the squabble that followed captured the mood of this tense election day.
Adam Ellick, Thayz Guimarães and Isabela Cruz
Several electoral lawyers say today’s vote could be annulled due to confusion over the late decision to extend voting hours. All four lawyers interviewed call the situation unprecedented. “This is an extremely serious, critical situation,” said Priscilla Sodré Pereira, an electoral lawyer. Supreme Court Justice Cristiano Zanin decided, minutes before polls closed, to extend all polling stations by two additional hours. By the time of the announcement, some polling centers had already closed, their voting machines had shut down, and they could not reopen. Fernnado Neisser, an electoral law professor at Fundação Getulio Vargas, a Brazilian research institute, said the election could be annulled if the margin is very narrow and it is shown that polling stations stayed open longer in areas that strongly favor one candidate.
If Lula wins, one reason could be André Janones, a member of Congress from a party allied with the president. His channel on the popular messaging app WhatsApp, Lula’s Army, grew from about 50,000 followers to nearly 11 million. He used the channel to send videos and posts, asking followers to spread them across the internet. The tactic is hardly new, but Flávio Bolsonaro’s side had a distinct online advantage before the first round of the vote. This time, however, the parallel channel “Flávio’s Troop” maxed out at just over two million followers.
Flávio Bolsonaro, the right-wing candidate for president and a strong advocate of environmental deregulation, has backed policies that scientists say could hurt the Amazon rainforest. We mapped how deforestation of the Amazon has changed in Brazil depending on who is in power.
Deforestation of the Amazon surged under President Jair Bolsonaro, then dropped to the lowest level on record under Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. But a win by Mr. Bolsonaro’s son could reverse that. He has promised to make it easier for miners and ranchers to clear trees. And his supporters have warned Indigenous groups that they plan to invade their lands if he wins.
Research shows that, if deforestation continues undeterred, the Amazon could receive dramatically less rainfall and much of the rainforest could gradually start turning into savanna by 2050.
In the run-up to Sunday’s election, the leftist president of Brazil and independent watchdog groups accused Meta and its social media platforms of giving the leader’s right-wing rival favorable treatment.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and groups monitoring social media charged that search results omitted progressive activists, that videos critical of his right-wing challenger Flávio Bolsonaro were taken down without explanation and that posts favoring Mr. Lula reached fewer people.
Mr. Lula’s campaign, which was trying shore up his position before the runoff against Mr. Bolsonaro, filed a complaint with the nation’s electoral court on Oct. 10, demanding fair treatment online.
“The scenario is,” the complaint said, “that of a platform illegally practicing algorithmic selectivity, in the midst of a fierce presidential contest.’’
Meta has firmly rejected claims of political bias, asserting firmly in a response to the court that it “does not operate its systems to harm or favor candidacies.”
But in Brazil, where social media and disinformation have played a central role in recent elections, fears that online debate could again sway a narrow presidential race have touched a nerve.
After some stops and starts, polls are now closed across Brazil. The count is underway.
Lula earlier expressed outrage at reports that public officials had purposefully slowed down public transportation in areas where he won in the first round. “I never complained about an election,” he said. “Win or lose, I settled down and got ready for the next one. But this time, something abominable is happening.” At the same time, Bolsonaro complained about floods and rain that kept some voters in areas where he has an electoral advantage from going to the polls.
There are concerns at the electoral court that the confusion gripping the vote could undermine faith in the electoral system, which Bolsonaro’s movement has targeted. The ballot count was already underway, and some voting stations had already closed, when voting was suddenly extended.
Videos made with artificial intelligence, ranging from the amusing to deceitful, have flooded the Brazilian internet ahead of Sunday’s high-stakes presidential election.
The use of A.I. to craft messages has turned Brazil, Latin America’s largest democracy, into a laboratory of sorts for how the technology can be used in elections. There are parallels in the United States and other nations grappling with A.I.’s political effects.
In Brazil, a nation of 214 million, disinformation has defined elections for nearly a decade. The country has some of the world’s strictest regulations against spreading falsehoods during elections.
But the deluge of A.I. — made by candidates, strategists and ordinary citizens — has become a stark test of the nation’s capacity to police online content, posing a new challenge for the Brazilian authorities trying to protect the integrity of the vote.
“We made the rules, now we’re watching to see what happens,” said Kássio Nunes Marques, chief justice of Brazil’s electoral court, which oversees the vote.
Although voting was extended across the country, it is not yet clear whether anyone who arrived at their polling station after 4 p.m. Eastern time can vote. Some polling stations had already closed by the time the decision came in, causing the confusion. Once an electronic voting machine tallies its votes, electoral officials say it may not be possible to reopen it for more voting.
Justice Cristiano Zanin of Brazil’s Supreme Court has ordered voting hours to be extended across Brazil until 6 p.m. Eastern time. “Given the seriousness of the facts described,” he wrote, “and in view of the clear urgency of the matter, I hereby order that the deadline for voting at all polling stations throughout Brazil be extended by two hours.” Zanin was appointed by Lula.
Depending on whom you ask, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes is either a hero who protected Brazil’s democracy, or a villain who used authoritarian measures to target the far right.
In a series of polarizing decisions, Justice Moraes cracked down on online falsehoods, punished rioters who falsely claimed the last election had been stolen and sentenced the former president, Jair Bolsonaro, on charges of trying to retain power after he lost the last election.
But earlier this year, the justice’s reputation was shattered when he was publicly linked to a banker accused of fraud. According to a leaked police dossier, Justice Moraes had exchanged text messages with the banker, who was seeking help in avoiding arrest and mentioned paying millions to a law firm run by the justice’s wife. The police have never said if Justice Moraes responded to the request or helped the banker in some way.
Still, the revelation has become a major issue in the presidential election being decided on Sunday.
For starters, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a leftist, was saddled with the fallout of the scandal at the Supreme Court that tarnished Justice Moraes, his ally.
But the scandal has also galvanized many right-leaning voters in their support for Jair Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio, who is challenging Mr. Lula for the presidency. Mr. Bolsonaro used the scandal to whip up support in his stump speeches.
“To vote for Lula is to vote for Alexandre de Moraes,” Mr. Bolsonaro recently told a crowd of supporters. “And I’m not going to let that happen.”
“It gave Flávio’s campaign a simple slogan,” said Luciano da Ros, a Brazilian political scientist. “And it united different segments on the right around a powerful common enemy.”
Mr. Lula, eager to shield his campaign, has tried to distance himself from Justice Moraes. “Nobody is above the law,” he said in an interview. He urged an investigation into the justice’s conduct and a broad judicial overhaul.
A number of right-wing leaders have recently swept into power in Latin America, riding a wave of dissatisfaction with incumbent governments and deepening worries about security and a rising cost of living.
Until now, Brazil, the region’s largest nation, had been the exception. The left-wing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, began his third nonconsecutive term in 2023. His predecessor and rival, Jair Bolsonaro, had been convicted of trying to stage a coup to prevent Mr. Lula from taking office and was sentenced to 27 years, which he is currently serving under house arrest for health reasons.
Now Mr. Lula, weighed down by widespread perceptions of rising crime and economic woes, faces a challenge from the former president’s son, Flávio Bolsonaro, a right-wing senator. Mr. Bolsonaro’s formidable performance in the first voting round this month gave him the edge going into a two-way contest.
The outcome will have a profound effect on Brazil and its relations with the United States in particular. Here are some of the major issues at stake.
Mr. Bolsonaro has already said he would add Brazil to the Trump administration’s anti-cartel coalition, called the Shield of the Americas, and work with the United States to fight Brazilian gangs.
He suggested in social media posts last year that he would welcome U.S. military intervention in Brazil, though he denied that in recent interviews, saying the cooperation would be limited to intelligence. But it was Mr. Bolsonaro who successfully lobbied Mr. Trump to designate two Brazilian gangs as terrorist groups.
Mr. Lula has resisted joining the coalition, warning that intertwining too closely with the United States on security matters could threaten the nation’s sovereignty.
The Trump administration imposed tariffs on Brazilian products in an unsuccessful pressure campaign to disrupt the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro. Many of those tariffs were eventually scaled back, and Brazil’s economy has remained largely unharmed by President Trump’s tariff campaign.
Another term for Mr. Lula, however, would increase the risk of more economic conflicts with the United States that might hurt the Brazilian economy. Of course, Mr. Bolsonaro would not be immune to those problems; Mr. Trump has been known to levy tariffs against allies as well as adversaries.
The Trump administration has signaled an interest in importing Brazilian oil to counter disruptions related to the Iran war and the country’s rare-earth minerals to reduce U.S. dependence on China for those resources. Mr. Bolsonaro is expected to align Brazil more closely with the United States than Mr. Lula has on trade issues, but neither leader can afford to anger China, a major trading partner.
The election could also affect Brazil’s ability to negotiate trade with the United States as a bloc with other countries in the region.
“Brazil’s relations with its neighbors have been extremely challenging,” said Carolina Moehlecke, an assistant professor of international relations at Getúlio Vargas Foundation, a research institution. This was especially true of its neighbor, Argentina, she added, whose right-wing president is a close ally of Mr. Trump. Mr. Bolsonaro, she said, might have an easier time cooperating with fellow right-wing leaders in Latin America.
If Mr. Bolsonaro carries the vote, conservationists fear a return to his father’s policies of allowing rapid deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, a trend that was largely reversed under President Lula. The younger Mr. Bolsonaro does not believe that climate change is caused by humans and has defended opening up protected lands to mining and farming.
He has also pledged to stem the nation’s rising debt. If he attempts to accomplish that through cuts to public spending, that could prove politically sensitive, Ms. Moehlecke said, especially when it comes to social welfare policies with broad popularity in Brazil. In the lead-up to Sunday’s elections, Mr. Lula had promised to increase welfare payments.
Mr. Lula has framed the election as a test of the nation’s democracy and portrays the Bolsonaros as a threat to democratic institutions. Ms. Moehlecke said it was likely Mr. Bolsonaro would take the country in a more authoritarian direction, though his rhetoric is generally tamer than his father’s.
But if Mr. Bolsonaro wins, his party’s gains in the legislature could allow him to deliver on some of his most polarizing promises: amnesty for his father, pardons for rioters who stormed Brazil’s halls of power after the last election, and a Senate more willing to try to remove justices who convicted his father.
If Mr. Lula wins, he most likely will face significant checks against his power. Right-wing candidates, including four other members of the Bolsonaro family, have made significant strides in the nation’s legislative races.