How Lula beat Bolsonaro, broke records and halted the region’s right-wing wave

He became Brazil’s first president to win a fourth term– and he did so days before turning 81, an age when many other leaders decide to leave politics behind.

The Brazilian president’s remarkable comeback against his right-wing rival, Flávio Bolsonaro, also set another record. Since Brazil’s return to democracy in 1985, no president had managed to overturn a first-round defeat. The Workers’ Party candidate added more than 10 million votes in the three weeks between the two rounds of voting, while his rival gained just 3.6 million.

The margin was decisive enough for Lula to secure a larger lead than he did in 2022, when he defeated Jair Bolsonaro, Flávio’s father and president at the time. The comeback also allows Lula to remain the leading figure of the regional left as the right advances across Latin America.

As his father did four years ago, Flávio Bolsonaro refused to recognize the result and announced that he would seek to have the election annulled through the courts. By Monday, however, Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party announced they acknowledged the results, indicating that a formal appeal to the electoral tribunal won’t be filed.

“We recognize the presidential election results,” party head Valdemar Costa Neto said, according to CNN affiliate CNN Brasil. “But we believe the issues ⁠raised need to be properly clarified.”

The senator had challenged Supreme Federal Court Justice Cristiano Zanin’s decision to extend voting by two hours, arguing that the uneven application of the measure had undermined equal voting conditions. “It is impossible to recognize the election results given the circumstances in which these events unfolded,” he said.

In fact, Bolsonaro’s campaign had also requested an extension in some areas, citing difficulties voters faced reaching polling stations because of heavy rain.

Bolsonaro said Monday that Brazilian police asked for his passport and told him he was “barred from leaving the country” after he had visited his father, who is under house arrest. In a video posted on Instagram, Bolsonaro denied that he intended to leave Brazil.

CNN contacted the Brazilian Federal Police to ask about Bolsonaro’s remarks and is awaiting a response.

Bolsonaro’s initial refusal to recognize the result has not dampened celebrations over Lula’s historic achievement. But the right’s majority in the legislature could hinder the smooth functioning of his new administration.

That is the paradox of Lula’s next term: a historic electoral triumph and limited room to govern.

Geography helps explain how Lula overturned his first-round deficit. In Minas Gerais, the state with Brazil’s second-largest electorate, he went from losing by nearly 590,000 votes to winning by about 99,000 — a swing of roughly 690,000 votes in the margin between the two candidates.

The state, which has backed the winner of every direct presidential election since 1989, once again voted in line with the national result. Although Flávio retained his lead in the states of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Lula won their capitals, Brazil’s two largest cities and reversed the first-round result in the city of Rio.

His gains were reinforced by victories in all nine northeastern states and higher voter turnout. Abstention fell from 21.08% in the first round to approximately 19.2% in the runoff, bringing nearly three million more Brazilians to the polls.

That additional participation cannot be attributed entirely to Lula, but it underscores the importance of mobilizing those who had not voted.

The battle was also fought on Brazilians’ phones. After finishing second in the first round, Lula stepped up his digital mobilization efforts to expand his reach and turn support into votes. The challenge was not simply to persuade undecided voters, but to get those who already preferred him to show up at the polls.

The push was accompanied by last-minute measures and proposals aimed at voters’ concrete concerns. Lula signed into law a measure raising the revenue threshold for individual microentrepreneurs, proposed new initiatives to renegotiate consumer debt and advocated ending online betting, whose expansion has contributed to household indebtedness.

On security, he backed lowering the age of criminal responsibility for particularly serious offenses, a traditional right-wing position intended to respond to growing demands for a tougher approach to crime.

Lula’s first challenge after celebrating his victory will be legislative. Right-wing parties will hold 303 of the 513 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, compared with 124 for the left and 86 for the center.

In the Senate, the right will control nearly two-thirds of the seats. That does not make every one of those lawmakers an automatic opponent, but it means Lula will have to build alliances beyond his own base both to advance his proposals and to defend his government’s priorities.

The map of state governments also shows the strength the conservative camp retains. Negotiations with those governors will be another challenge for Lula, who will need cooperation at the state level to implement his policies.

“Once we win the election, we no longer have opponents. I have to govern for 215 million people,” Lula said in his victory speech. He also addressed the challenge of negotiating with a more conservative legislature: “I didn’t choose Congress. The people did. And that is the Congress with which I will vote, work and get things done.”

The most immediate challenge will be to turn economic gains into relief that Brazilians can feel in their daily lives. Perceptions of the economy were among the main sources of erosion in Lula’s support during the campaign.

Addressing that discontent will be harder because of fiscal constraints. Debt, the deficit and high interest rates limit the government’s ability to increase spending and foreshadow disputes over how to fund campaign promises without jeopardizing social programs. With an unfriendly Congress, decisions about who pays and where cuts are made will also test Lula’s ability to negotiate.

Security will be another source of pressure. Lula will have to respond to demands for tougher measures against crime, as the right has made a hard-line approach one of its main political platforms.

He will also face the challenge of preparing a successor for a left whose ability to win presidential elections remains closely tied to his own political stature.

Regional autonomy and isolation

The challenges extend beyond Brazil’s borders. As head of Latin America’s largest economy, with China as its top trading partner, Lula’s government has used Brazil’s economic weight to push back against the Trump Administration’s trade and political demands — a degree of autonomy few of its neighbors can attempt.

US President Donald Trump was a major supporter of Jair Bolsonaro, and asserted without evidence that Lula’s election victory was “rigged.”

Numerous high-profile Brazilian conservatives have deep ties to the MAGA movement. Bolsonaro’s brother Eduardo is currently in exile in the US, and risks arrest if he returns to Brazil due to a conviction in absentia for coercion.

A Bolsonaro victory, by contrast, would have marked a major victory in Washington’s efforts to secure its dominance in the hemisphere and curb Beijing’s reach.

Yet Lula faces a highly challenging regional landscape and risks being largely isolated without left-wing allies such as Alberto Fernández in Argentina, Gabriel Boric in Chile and Gustavo Petro in Colombia in power.

“Lula faces a very different political environment from the one that existed when he first took office, during the ‘Pink Tide,’” said Michael Paarlberg, an associate professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University, referring to the spate of leftist victories in Latin America during the 2000s and 2010s. “Back then, he had several regional allies and could play both sides to Brazil’s advantage,”

Looking toward Trump and the US midterm elections

As he prepares for his fourth term, Lula will have to decide how to approach relations with the United States. “Brazil does not belong in anyone’s backyard,” Lula said at the United Nations in September, in a message directed at Washington.

Yet he has also acted cautiously. When the United States imposed a new round of tariffs on Brazilian goods in the middle of the year, he left open the possibility of retaliatory measures.

“Lula has shown an ability to adapt to Trump. He has balanced occasional harsh criticism with conciliatory gestures,” Paarlberg said. “Lula is not ideologically anti-American, nor does he have difficulty working with right-wing governments,” he added.

Even as Trump called Lula’s victory into question on Monday, the president added that he likes Lula personally.

“I like Lula. I get along with him very well,” Trump said. “I just think it had a very bad look. The election, the way it was tabulated.”

Paarlberg also said the reelected president would closely follow the US midterm elections, especially if the Republican Party loses control of one or both chambers of Congress, potentially bringing greater scrutiny of Trump’s agenda.

In addition to halting the run of victories by the right and candidates backed by Trump, Lula interrupted another trend: an 18-month losing streak for the Latin American left. His surprise victory raises a broader question about whether the rightward shift is a lasting wave or part of a political pendulum.

“Lula’s victory shows that the far right, particularly Bolsonaro’s movement, has a ceiling of support, because many voters consider it too radical,” Paarlberg said. He added that the result also suggests that backing from the White House and its battery of economic measures “are not decisive factors” in an election.

In a Latin America increasingly defined by emerging leaders, Lula remains a old statesman with international reach. Now, he must decide what course he will seek to chart for South America’s largest country over the next four years.

CNN’s Molly English, Max Saltman and Julia Vargas Jones contributed reporting.