Brazilian progressive leader and incumbent president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made history last night, defeating far-right Flávio Bolsonaro of the Liberal Party in the second round after coming in second in the first round.

The results were awaited with bated breath after a judge ordered polls to be open for two more hours following complaints from voters who claimed they had been unable to reach polling places due to transportation problems. First the Workers’ Party (PT), and then the Liberal Party (PL), requested the extension, which paused the vote count until 7:00 pm in Brasília, the capital.

With 51.79% of the valid votes, the former union leader, metalworker, and head of the Workers’ Party staged a historic comeback against Bolsonaro, who lost the initial momentum he had in the first round and barely reached 48.21%. This is the first time a candidate who finished second in Brazil’s first round has staged a comeback and won the election in the runoff.

Bolsonaro entered the runoff with a relative – though significant – lead following his victory in the first round of voting on October 4, where he received 47.03% (approximately 56,104,503 votes), while Lula, to the surprise of many, came in second with 45.16% (53,879,538 votes).

In other words, there was a gap of nearly 3 million votes between the two candidates that seemed very difficult for Lula to overcome, especially considering that the remaining votes were split among candidates who were mostly from the right and center-right – a fact that led many to believe that Bolsonaro, the son of former president and currently imprisoned Jair Bolsonaro, would win the runoff.

But Lula, a true legend of Brazilian politics (a labor leader during the dictatorship who won the presidency three times), achieved the unthinkable. Between the first and second rounds of voting, he managed to gain more than 10 million votes compared to the first round – an astronomical figure, considering that Bolsonaro barely managed to gain some 3.7 million votes.

Lula’s victory

After it was clear that Lula’s victory was irreversible, the Brazilian streets were filled with people wearing the traditional red of the Workers’ Party. However, the victory was celebrated by a sort of broad coalition that had formed to overturn the result – one that spanned the political spectrum from classical left-wing parties and movements, to progressive liberals, and even some center-right groups that saw Bolsonaro as a threat to democracy.

In his speech marking his fourth presidential victory, Lula said: “I want to thank the Brazilian people – those who have stood by me for so long – and express my gratitude for the generosity of Brazil’s young people … We are going to change the way this country is governed … we are going to involve the people more. Digital communication will play a very significant role in this administration. I will deliver the best presidential term this country has ever seen.”

“Following our victory, we will have to discuss a new way of governing this country. The people’s participation in this campaign – the students, women, and workers who took to the streets – will compel us to find a new way of governing. This country will never be the same again,” said the reelected president.

Lula also stated that the debates against Bolsonaro and the PL campaign were riddled with lies and “denialism”: “I never thought a person could lie so much in this country, with such brazenness, as if there were not a single shred of humanity within him.”

Finally, he also addressed the problems his campaign faced regarding the dissemination of its messages on social media. The PT repeatedly denounced that the major social media platforms hindered or outright prevented the spread of its political messages, while Bolsonaro’s messages faced no such issues.

Is Meta meddling in Brazil's elections? With Sunday's runoff neck and neck, new reporting raises serious questions.

The pattern is hard to ignore: Lula's campaign was blocked from boosting Instagram posts for nearly 24 hours, his ad account was previously restricted, and… pic.twitter.com/DVjDWJa7Xw

— BreakThrough News (@BTnewsroom) October 23, 2026

Hence, he suggested placing limits on the power of the major corporations behind social media platforms – a stance he has taken on other occasions and which has caused friction with tech giants: “We cannot fail to recognize that a crime in the digital world must be treated the same as a crime in real life. We cannot have monstrous companies of this size – which make billions without paying taxes to our country – trying to alter election results,” Lula said in his victory speech.

Bolsonaro’s reaction

For his part, far-right politician Flávio Bolsonaro said he “rejects” the election results and announced that he will seek to have the election annulled: “We are going to consult with our legal team; we are going to request that these elections be annulled. I will not accept that the rules of the game have been changed in the middle of the game – once again – by Lula’s friends on the Federal Supreme Court.”

Bolsonaro, who delivered his speech to his supporters, was referring to the extension of voting hours. According to his team, the extension was ordered after the polling stations had closed, which, they claimed, violates Brazilian electoral rules – even though the PL itself had also requested the extension.

This is not the first time that Bolsonaro’s supporters have rejected Lula’s victory. In 2022, it was Jair Bolsonaro who refused to acknowledge his defeat. Months later, during Lula’s inauguration, hundreds of Bolsonaro supporters violently stormed several government buildings, after which investigations were launched into an alleged attempted coup d’état. One of those found guilty in the case was Jair Bolsonaro himself, who is currently serving a sentence for that crime.

However, it will be difficult for Bolsonaro’s allegations to gain traction in Brazil’s immediate future. With the exception of Argentina’s far-right politician Milei, South American countries – through their heads of state and foreign ministries – have publicly congratulated Lula on his victory, which amounts to a de facto recognition of his win.

However, the Bolsonaros still have the Trump administration as a last resort, as it has publicly supported the PL candidate, just as it did with his father in the past. This is the first time since Trump began his second term that a candidate he supported in a Latin American country has failed to win, which still raises questions about what Washington’s stance will be regarding Lula’s historic victory – a victory in which, against all odds, he managed to defeat Washington’s candidate and thus halted a wave of far-right victories in Latin America.

The week before October 25 in Brazil was frenetic. It appeared that every one of the over 200 million Brazilians had a political opinion about the presidential election. The country was fundamentally polarized. Polls showed that the vote was going to be tight, with most polls favoring the challenger Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the former president Jair Bolsonaro, and the standard bearer of the far right of a special type. But the incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula and president of Brazil from 2003 to 2011 and then since 2023, would not allow the polls to stop him. He traveled the length and breadth of the country, holding massive and energetic rallies to mobilize people to vote. In the first round, 21% of the voters did not turn out in a process that is otherwise compulsory (and a large section who did vote left the presidential section either unmarked or spoiled). Only 2.2 million ballots separated Bolsonaro (who won 47% in the first round) from Lula of the 158.7 million registered voters. To win between October 4 (first round) and October 25 (second round), Lula had to either attract people who had voted for Bolsonaro or those who had not voted or spoiled their ballots. No other candidate had turned around such a deficit in Brazil’s modern history. But Lula did it.

Streets

In the three weeks between the first and second rounds, Lula and his team motivated millions of people onto the streets in the large cities of Brazil, but also in several smaller, but significant towns. These enormous mobilizations created a sense that Lula would overcome the mathematical disadvantage presented by the voting numbers after the first round. All psephological analyses showed that Bolsonaro would cruise through in the second round, which would have indicated the impossibility for Lula. But the left did not rest on this handicap but went on the offensive.

In the first round, Bolsonaro finished 2.22 million votes ahead, but in the runoff, Lula finished with 4.43 million votes ahead. The margin moved by 6.66 million votes. These votes came from the large cities: the 319 cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, home to 57% of Brazil’s population, delivered 3.89 of the 6.66 million of the turnaround. Lula’s vote grew more in municipalities that are more evangelical, richer, whiter, more schooled, and more urban. This meant that he ate substantially into Bolsonaro’s base, which was something that surprised even the Lula team. The key to the turnaround was the mass mobilizations driven by the social movements, with the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) in the lead.

Advances

Across his three terms, Lula has presided over an extraordinary advance in the social conditions of the Brazilian people. Bolsa Família, increases in the minimum wage, the expansion of public universities, and support for family farming brought food, income, and opportunity into households that the ruling class had long treated as disposable. These achievements changed millions of lives and established that poverty could be confronted through public action. Yet the political formula that made these advances possible has reached its limits. Lula sought to improve the lives of the poor while accommodating the power of finance, agribusiness, and the dominant sections of Brazilian capital. During his first two terms, favorable international conditions created room for this accommodation. But redistribution without a corresponding transformation of economic power left the foundations of inequality intact, allowing the beneficiaries of the old order to retain the means to obstruct change and reverse its gains.

In his third term, fiscal restrictions, expensive credit, and dependence on conservative parliamentary forces have narrowed the space for reform. Social programs remain indispensable, but they cannot by themselves overcome insecure employment, household indebtedness, inadequate public services, or the concentration of land and wealth. The exhaustion lies in a governing strategy whose compromises increasingly obstruct the fulfilment of its promises. Lula’s personal authority cannot indefinitely bridge the distance between popular expectations and the concessions demanded by the powerful. A renewed project will require the organized strength of workers, peasants, and residents of the urban peripheries, the very people who form Lula’s base, with an agenda of agrarian reform, public investment, industrial development, and democratic control over finance. The movements that filled the streets must acquire greater power to shape the government’s direction. Defeating the far right opens that possibility, but securing the social gains of the Lula years will require confronting the structures that continually threaten them.

Defeat of Trump

US President Donald Trump, his vice president JD Vance, and members of the Brazilian diaspora in Miami put an immense amount of effort into defeating Lula. Brazil, which makes up half the landmass of South America, and is the largest economy in Latin America, stands out against the wave of far-right governments that now dominate the Americas. Interference in the Brazilian elections is now an acknowledged fact, with Meta cutting off Lula’s accounts at a crucial stage of the contest and other reports of funding and social media intervention.

Trump had hoped that Bolsonaro would win in Brazil so that he can then strengthen his Shield of the Americas process that began in Miami in March 2026. This process was presented by Trump as an institutional form to coordinate security but also for the suffocation of the popular movements and the left. Lula’s victory has blocked Trump’s path to exercise the Monroe Doctrine. It has also meant that Trump will not be able to so easily access the critical minerals in Brazil or to dominate the new oil find in the basin of the Amazon delta.

Despite the obstacles faced by Lula, his victory has been able to show that the far right is not invincible.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. He is the author of forty books, including Washington Bullets, Red Star Over the Third World, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, and How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa, written with Grieve Chelwa. He is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, the chief correspondent for Globetrotter, and the chief editor of LeftWord Books (New Delhi). He also appeared in the films Shadow World (2016) and Two Meetings (2017).

This article was produced by Globetrotter.