Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva achieved a remarkable comeback in the elections on Sunday, securing re-election after initially trailing in the first round. His victory extends the tenure of a government that has attracted unprecedented investment from China.
According to the Superior Electoral Court, Lula garnered 51.79 per cent of the valid votes, while right-wing Senator Flavio Bolsonaro received 48.21 per cent, with 99.99 per cent votes counted. Historically, no candidate who fell behind in the first round has won a run-off since Brazil implemented this electoral system in 1989.
Addressing reporters and allies at a hotel in Sao Paulo, Lula said: “This election was one in which we had to defeat interference coming from outside, through digital platforms, and we are going to have to regulate them”.
He also vowed to lead an energy and artificial intelligence (AI) revolution in South America’s biggest economy.
But the outcome could still be contested after a Supreme Court justice ordered polls to stay open for two more hours, minutes after voting officially ended at 5pm. No court had extended voting in Brazil before.
The order came from Justice Cristiano Zanin, who was Lula’s lawyer before joining the court in 2023. He acted on a complaint from Lula’s campaign that cities in Bahia state run by allies of Flavio Bolsonaro had kept buses in depots, preventing poorer voters from reaching the polls.
Flavio Bolsonaro’s lawyers had separately asked the electoral court to extend voting in 17 flooded municipalities in three states.
Many stations had already shut their machines when Zanin’s order arrived, and the system does not allow a closed machine to be reopened. The electoral court then told regional courts that only stations still open should continue receiving voters until 7pm, and Zanin narrowed his order accordingly.
Flavio Bolsonaro refused to acknowledge defeat in a speech to reporters at his campaign headquarters in Brasilia on Sunday night, about 90 minutes after the result was confirmed.
“It is impossible to recognise the results of the elections in the context in which these things happened. We are going to use our legal team; we are going to ask for these elections to be annulled,” he said.
Some voters were sent home at 5pm while others cast ballots until 7pm, and either campaign could cite that to seek an annulment. Any such request would go to the electoral court, chaired by Kassio Nunes Marques, who was appointed by former president Jair Bolsonaro, the senator’s father.
The result keeps Latin America’s largest economy – and Beijing’s biggest destination for Chinese capital – out of the group of Trump-aligned governments that now includes Argentina, Chile and Colombia, frustrating Washington’s bid to curb Beijing’s presence in the hemisphere.
Talks with the US over tariffs and critical minerals will resume with a government that has offered American companies access to its rare earths but without preferential treatment.
While Washington offered no immediate comment, leaders across Latin America swiftly congratulated Lula, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen hailed his victory as a win for democracy.
Lula, who at 80 is Brazil’s oldest-ever sitting president, will begin his fourth term in January, more than two decades after he first took office.
He governed from 2003 to 2010 and returned in 2023 after narrowly beating Jair Bolsonaro, who is now serving a 27-year prison sentence for plotting to overturn that defeat.
Flavio Bolsonaro built a campaign around ties to the Trump administration, which received him in the Oval Office in May.
For most of this year, Lula had looked like the favourite, and pollster Quaest gave him a seven-point lead over the senator in a run-off in January.
Six of the seven pollsters that published surveys on the eve of the first round still had him ahead, yet he finished 2.2 million votes behind.
Most run-off polls showed Flavio Bolsonaro narrowly ahead or tied within the margin of error. Lula’s team tried to deepen voters’ resistance to his rival and to bring first-round abstainers back to the polls.
Lula’s political attacks focused on Jair Bolsonaro’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and on Flavio Bolsonaro’s dealings with Daniel Vorcaro, a banker who is now in jail.
The senator had asked that banker for US$24 million to fund a biopic of his father, months before the central bank shut down the financial institution for suspected fraud.
Flavio Bolsonaro responded by raising a police investigation into Lula’s son Fabio Luis.
A Supreme Court justice authorised the inquiry in July to examine whether he lobbied officials for a company linked to a scheme that allegedly skimmed money from pensioners’ benefits, and Lula said in a televised debate this month that the fraud had begun under Jair Bolsonaro’s government.
Ties with Beijing
Lula travelled to Beijing in April 2023 on a trip his government described as an effort to restart ties that had cooled under Jair Bolsonaro.
In Shanghai, he toured Huawei Technologies’ research centre and called for an alternative to the US dollar in trade between the two countries.
Xi Jinping returned the visit with a state trip to Brasilia in November 2024, during which the two governments signed 37 agreements and elevated their relationship to a “community with a shared future”.
Lula was back in Beijing in May last year for a summit with Latin American leaders and came home with 27 billion reais (US$4.7 billion) in investment pledges from companies such as Great Wall Motor and Meituan.
Chinese companies put more money into Brazil than into any other country last year, with a record US$6.1 billion spread across 52 projects, according to the Brazil-China Business Council.
China takes over the chair of Brics next year, and Lula’s government programme promises closer ties with the bloc of emerging economies. Flavio Bolsonaro has said he might pull Brazil out of the grouping, which Washington has worked to undermine.
