Lula Wins Reelection In Historic Runoff, Setting Up Tense Political Battle

Brazil’s incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won a historic fourth term Sunday, denying U.S. President Donald Trump greater sway over Latin America’s largest economy.

With over 99% of ballots counted, Lula, a left-wing stalwart, defied expectations with 51.76% of the vote. His rival, right-wing Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, trailed behind with 48.24% despite winning in a first round of voting earlier this month.

As Lula passed the 50% mark, his supporters on Sao Paulo’s Paulista Avenue broke out in celebratory chants of “Olé olé olé olá, Lula.”

“People went to vote because we convinced them it was important to preserve democracy,” Lula said in a victory speech in which he did not spare his opponent. “I never imagined that a person could lie so much. As if there wasn’t a shred of humanity in him.”

"This country doesn’t accept being anybody’s colony," he added.

The result bucks a trend that has seen right-wing candidates in the region triumph in the last seven general elections, bringing the continent closer into Washington’s orbit.

Lula also made history as the first-ever candidate to win a runoff after losing the first round of voting since Brazil’s return to a democracy.

His victory signals the end of a tumultuous campaign marked by corruption scandals, allegations of U.S. interference and voter suppression, as well as a Harry Potter-inspired social media war.

But it is unlikely to resolve domestic tensions or political gridlock, with roughly half the population having voted for Bolsonaro and deep division spilling over into the country’s institutions.

In an extraordinary move on Sunday, Supreme Court Justice Cristiano Zanin extended voting by two hours, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., after Lula’s team accused pro-Bolsonaro mayors of voter suppression. Zanin had previously served as Lula’s personal lawyer.

The Lula campaign said officials in some nine states had reduced or otherwise hindered public transportation routes, making it more difficult for voters to get to the polls. On a video on his social media channels, André Janones, Lula’s head of social media, called it a “coup attempt.”

The last time voting was prolonged beyond the formal deadline was in 1994. Bolsonaro’s campaign chief, Rogério Marinho, denounced the measure as “a judicial coup.”

The last-minute extension added to an already tense election in which the personal and political stakes could hardly have been higher.

It pitted Lula against the son of Jair Bolsonaro, the former far-right president currently under house arrest for directing a coup attempt after the last election that included a plot to kill the PT leader.

The two candidates were also political and ideological opposites, with sharply contrasting views on crime, foreign policy and the importance of safeguarding democratic institutions.

A central Bolsonaro campaign promise was to free his father and impeach Alexandre de Moraes, the Supreme Court judge who convicted him.

Bolsonaro also promised Brazil would join Washington’s Shield of the Americas initiative and crack down on crime, backing the U.S. designation of two Brazilian gangs this year as terrorist organizations.

Though Trump did not explicitly endorse either candidate, he called Bolsonaro’s narrow lead over Lula in a first round of voting earlier this month a “close, but a very, very big victory.”

Last year, the Trump administration imposed tariffs on Brazil, travel bans on government officials and sanctions against Moraes over what it called a political "witch hunt" against the coup-plotting Bolsonaro.

Lula fought back by making national sovereignty a central theme of his campaign.

In an opinion piece published Saturday in one of Brazil’s largest newspapers, Folha, Lula argued “truly patriotic Brazilians” had participated in mass rallies in recent weeks “to defend what is ours: our sovereignty, our rare earth resources, our oil and our Amazon.”

After the disappointing first round earlier this month, in which he lost to Bolsonaro by 2 percentage points, Lula’s campaign mounted an energized social media push and went on a spending spree, including a debt relief measure for small entrepreneurs.

It gave him new momentum, with pro-Lula groups organizing some of the largest political rallies in recent Brazilian history in a groundswell of support.

“Brazil has a long history of U.S. political interference throughout its entire history. And for the first time in a long time, we have a chance to push back against it,” said Hector San Martin, an engineering student at one of the rallies.

“Electing Lula is important, not only for the sake of upholding our Constitution and our rights, but also for the sake of our sovereignty.”

Nonetheless, Bolsonaro’s pledge to upend the status quo has resonated with many in Brazil, amid widespread concern over crime and living costs.

“The first thing we have to do to make Brazil a first-world country is to extinguish the PT and communism from this country,” said Julio García, a 38-year-old who works in finance and voted for Bolsonaro.

A tighter union with the United States, he added, would bring “prosperity.”

The standoff between the two sides played out as much online as it did on the streets.

A Whatsapp group called “Lula’s army” — a nod to “Dumbledore’s Army,” the group of students who fight evil forces in the Harry Potter series — with more than 10 million followers, was suspended twice after the head of Brazil’s electoral court, a Bolsonaro ally, argued it contained misinformation. Both times, his fellow judges overturned the decision.

Separately, Lula’s team earlier this month filed a complaint with the court accusing Meta of suppressing its content while amplifying Bolsonaro’s. Meta has denied campaign meddling and called the problems experienced by Lula’s team “technical incidents.”

But many Brazilians remain unconvinced and see it as fitting within a broader pattern of foreign meddling.

“We have no way of proving that Meta is acting on [the White House’s] instructions, but put two and two together,” said Veronyka Gimenes, director of the digital rights group Código Não Binário, who organized a protest outside Meta’s Sao Paulo office this week.

“Meta has a lot to gain from Flávio Bolsonaro’s election. And so does Trump.”

The election has been watched closely by centrists and left-wing parties ahead of the U.S. midterms and votes in Spain, France and Germany where many are feeling the heat from a media-savvy, far right that is upending established political norms.

“It’s like playing chess with pigeons,”a former top government official close to the Lula campaign said about the race against Bolsonaro’s movement.

Under Lula, Brazil is likely to maintain its distance from the United States, predicted Michael Ahn Paarlberg, former chief Latin America policy adviser to the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2020.

“He’s symbolic as a bulwark against the general trend towards the global shift to the right, certainly in Latin America,” he said.

“But it's also a very different environment than when he first came to power in the Pink Tide and there were other friendly governments,” he said.

He expected Lula to focus more on China, the EU and Africa, as a leader of the global South.

Lula, who has said this will be his last term, turns 81 on Tuesday. He now faces the daunting task of governing after Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party, the PL, secured the biggest bloc in Congress in the first round of voting, giving bolsonarismo unprecedented sway over the legislature.

In a sign of how tense the standoff between the executive and legislative is likely to become, Reginaldo Lopes, a PT lawmaker, told journalists at Lula’s campaign headquarters Sunday that “Congress is an enemy of the people.”