Vanessa Barbara
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil has won his fourth presidential term, triumphing after a bruising runoff against his right-wing challenger, Flávio Bolsonaro. By any metric, the 80-year-old leader’s comeback is extraordinary, having secured 51.8 percent of the vote against Mr. Bolsonaro’s 48.2 percent — a margin of some 4.4 million votes. But Brazil’s polarized politics rarely allow for a neat resolution. Shortly after the result was called on Sunday, Mr. Bolsonaro announced he would seek to annul the election, refusing to accept his defeat. Even with the votes tallied, Mr. Lula — and the country — may be in for a protracted period of political friction.
After Mr. Lula lost in the election’s first round of voting earlier this month, it became clear that Mr. Bolsonaro — the son of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s disgraced ex-president who is currently under house arrest for a coup attempt in 2022 — might actually win the presidency. For millions of Brazilians, it was a moment of existential dread: How could the country trade a seasoned statesman for a political nepo baby whose name is linked to a long list of scandals, and friendships with fraudulent bankers
The anxieties about the health of our democracy as the second round approached were hardly assuaged by how the vote itself unfolded: Election Day was not exactly smooth. As some polls were already closing, a Supreme Court Mr. Lula’s former personal attorney — extended voting hours after requests from both sides amid torrential rains and major disruptions to public transit schedules. Both camps hurled accusations of election interference on social media late into the evening. The disorder revealed just how fraught the political climate in Brazil has become after nearly a decade of deep polarization.
Regardless, Mr. Lula’s victory represents a win for the forces of democracy not only in Brazil, but around the world. In a region increasingly dominated by illiberal forces, voters responded to the possibility of a Bolsonaro presidency with high turnout in the second round, delivering the election to Mr. Lula and signaling the country’s will to defend its hard-won democracy. Now, with Mr. Bolsonaro threatening to challenge the results, Brazil’s post-election turmoil will be a stress test for the democratic foundations that Brazilians have just defended — and for one of the last leftist leaders in a neighborhood of gathering far-right forces.
A former metalworker and union leader who fought against Brazil’s military dictatorship, Mr. Lula has already embraced the role of standard-bearer for the democratic left at a time when reactionary populism across the globe has grown louder and more aggressive. Take, for instance, his at the United Nations General Assembly in September: There stood an elderly man wearing a tie in the colors of our flag, looking obstinate and sounding hoarse, denouncing the “growing abuses of the superpowers” and arguing that the U.N.’s ability to protect the most vulnerable from injustice and war has never been weaker. The world, he argued, was being called to choose between multilateralism and unilateralism, democracy and extremism, sovereignty and subordination — and it was up to countries like Brazil to help middle and smaller powers chart a path forward.
Mr. Lula is one of the few global leaders who have been willing to go head-to-head with President Trump in his second term, as the American leader sought to influence Brazilian politics through the threat of aggressive tariffs, targeted sanctions and other punitive measures supported by the Bolsonaros. Over the past few years, the Bolsonaro family’s alignment with the Trump administration has alarmed Brazilians who chafe at the possible subordination of Brazilian interests to MAGA ideology and foreign interference. Mr. Lula, by contrast, has made a point of declaring that Brazil “refuses to be anyone’s backyard,” as he it in his victory speech on Sunday night.
Mr. Lula has made a name for himself as a defender of the working poor. Early in his tenure, he helped establish Brazil’s universal health care system and introduced Bolsa Família, the country’s acclaimed conditional cash transfer program that lifted millions out of poverty. More recently, he has mounted a major challenge to powerful business lobbies, throwing his political weight to Brazil’s six-day workweek and to the maximum workweek from 44 to 40 hours. It was little surprise that the working class turned out for him in droves in response to his call to secure his re-election.
Throughout his time in office, he has consistently taken on powerful interests to protect the country’s most vulnerable from corporate excess — fighting agribusiness and mining corporations and helping reduce deforestation in the Amazon by online betting and a levy on high corporate profits and dividends; he has also for stricter regulation of social media platforms to address online harassment, hate speech and misinformation.
Mr. Lula is not without his flaws: Critics frequently point to his age, his willingness to compromise with economic and political elites and his party’s persistent struggle to build a broader bench and cultivate a clear successor, among other things. Between 2018 and 2019, he spent 580 days in prison after being convicted of corruption charges involving a seaside apartment in Guarujá — allegations that shadow him even after those convictions were annulled.
But Brazilian voters saw that the alternative to Mr. Lula was more than a conservative shift. Flávio Bolsonaro ran a campaign calibrated to appeal to the darkest impulses of the Brazilian right, pairing an open courtship of the Trump administration with aggressive tough-on-crime promises and the exploitation of cultural grievances. Far more dangerous, though, is Mr. Bolsonaro’s institutional agenda: He said outright that he would use the presidency to his father for his 2022 coup attempt — acknowledging it could lead to an institutional standoff between branches of government involving the “use of force” — and constitutional maneuvers to extend presidential terms, measures that legal scholars have warned would constitute a frontal assault on Brazil’s democratic regime.
Mr. Lula’s victory is well worth celebrating. It delivered a blunt rebuke to the Bolsonaro dynasty and stalled its revanchist project, at least for now. It’s not over yet. On Monday, millions of Brazilians were holding their breath as they waited for the Bolsonaro camp’s next move — and to see whether their democratic institutions would uphold the results of Sunday’s election.
No one should mistake Mr. Lula’s comeback for a decisive defeat of the right in Brazil. Starting next year, the right will hold majorities in , as well as state governorships. Mr. Lula’s win was only the beginning of his fight; now comes the far harder task of governing a nation that has never been more divided.