President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva came from behind to win Brazil’s run-off election, halting a right-wing wave sweeping Latin America and defying predictions that the 80-year-old political veteran had finally reached the end of his extraordinary career.
The electoral court declared Lula the winner with 51.76 percent of the vote to Flávio Bolsonaro’s 48.24 percent on Sunday, after a messy election day marked by allegations of voter suppression and a last-minute extension of voting hours.
It was a stunning victory, one that will upend markets, eked out in the 11th-hour and that saw voters from Lula’s heartland in Brazil’s poorest region rally to the rescue of the leftist leader who has been the face of the region’s resistance to Trumpism.
For investors who had been banking on Bolsonaro to fix Brazil’s fiscal accounts, Lula’s win is a blow. While Bolsonaro had yet to outline much of his proposals to cut spending, traders had been piling into the country’s markets on the hope he would be more committed to doing so than Lula, who has focused more on boosting growth through consumption than addressing Brazil’s dire fiscal situation. An ETF tracking Brazilian stocks tanked 13 percent in Japan.
His re-election for an unprecedented fourth term extends a political career spanning more than four decades and delivers a humiliating blow to the movement built by former president Jair Bolsonaro, whose eldest son sought to carry the family name and MAGA-tinged brand of populism back to the presidential palace.
Already Brazil’s oldest president, Lula now has four more years to steady Latin America’s biggest economy – and try to ease the political polarisation laid bare by a bitter campaign. That will be a near-impossible task.
At home, the social reality is that Brazil is split between unreconcilable ideologies. Lula’s identity and convictions were forged by his rise as a trade union leader, resistance to Brazil’s dictatorship and criticism of US military interventions overseas. Those of his arch-nemesis are defined by patriarchal conservatism, evangelical zeal and free-wheeling capitalism.
Lula also faces significant economic headwinds ahead, chief among them tackling rising deficits and debt that have kept interest rates high. That has driven anxieties among investors; more pressing for Lula, it has left Brazilian households drowning in debt, with personal loan defaults rising to their highest levels in two decades.
“He may think he has been given a free pass, but he was reelected in an environment of institutional fragility,” said Creomar de Souza, a political analyst and founder and CEO of Brasilia-based Dharma Political Risk and Strategy. “He will need to be able to build a coalition, even as his victory sends a strong message to the radical right, which will have to rethink how it operates.”
Lula ended his second consecutive term in 2010 with an approval rating of 83 percent, the kind of number politicians can only dream of today. Barack Obama, whose presidency overlapped with Lula’s final two years in office, famously called him “the most popular politician on Earth.”
But those days are long gone. Successive versions of Lula, tainted by corruption scandals and a stint in jail, saw the shine come off. Even when he staged his first comeback to ward off a second term of Jair Bolsonaro, the sense was that he had brought an old script for Brazil’s long-festering problems and new ones. Public handouts weren’t the answer for a new, younger generation growing up in a gig economy, or uberization of labour.
His refusal to own a mobile phone, until the last week of the campaign, was a telling sign that Lula, who once had his finger on the pulse of the nation, was now out of touch.
Indeed, he came perilously close to witnessing the end of his storied career. Bolsonaro, the son and political heir of the former president who led Brazil from 2019 to 2022, won the first round of the election on October 4.
Bolsonaro acted like a man who had already won, probably because no-one who came second in the first round had pulled off a run-off reversal since Brazil returned to democracy in 1989. But his confidence was misjudged. If there’s one thing any politician knows about Lula, the great survivor of Brazilian politics, it’s that he doesn’t give up.
The president went on the offensive with a series of measures aimed at easing pressure on household finances. They included an increase in family benefits under the Bolsa Família programme, a ban on online gambling, a sweeping plan to refinance consumer debt with private banks, and even the distribution of weight-loss shots through Brazil’s public-health system.
In the final 15 days of the runoff campaign, Lula focused on those who had stayed home in the first round and stepped up efforts to win over undecided voters.
The depth of his connection with poorer voters, particularly in the populous Northeast region that launched his much-eulogised personal history, was evident. It’s what saved him, the loyalty he still inspires among legions of fans.
“The Northeast is going to save this country again,” Antonio Avelino, 73, predicted a week before the election as he drove his taxi through São Paulo’s city streets.
Still, the scale of the challenges ahead has perhaps never been bigger. He also has no clear political heir in sight and ageing is clearly an issue (he had sworn not to run in this election, before changing his mind).
He’ll need to quickly address investor concerns that his government will restore rigour the country’s finances and stop driving the country into deeper debt.
In Lula’s third term, unemployment fell to near historic lows, reaching 5.4 percent in July, while the economy grew faster than that of the United States and repeatedly exceeded economists’ forecasts.
Lula also delivered above-inflation increases in the minimum wage and changes to the tax system that lowered the burden on lower-middle-income Brazilians while raising it on the wealthiest.
Yet Lula’s approval ratings hit a historic low during his current tenure, a stark reminder that many Brazilians have yet to feel any gain in their wallets amid rising inflation that has fed a cost-of-living crisis.
He has promised a fiscal adjustment without spelling out how he intends to deliver it, while making clear that he won’t sacrifice his social agenda to satisfy pressure from financial markets.
When Lula returned to power in 2023, after serving a prison term on corruption charges that were later quashed, he said that he’d inherited a country “destroyed” by Bolsonaro. He also found a more complex Brazil and a hostile international environment, with a more aggressive US increasingly concerned about China’s expanding presence in the region.
Yet Lula found his own way to deal with Donald Trump. As the US leader stepped up his bullying of Brazil, escalating his tariff threat, Lula held his ground. Quite unexpectedly, the two men amicably crossed paths at the United Nations General Assembly in 2025 and a few months later Trump invited Lula to the White House and praised Lula’s intelligence and found him to be a “good man.”
When Lula first came to power, he was part of a so-called 'Pink Tide' that saw many progressive leaders in the late 1990s and early 2000s gain influence. That trend has been reversed, and while the region suffers from frequent political swings, it’s been Brazil and Mexico that are now the current leftist holdouts.
Sovereignty was a defining theme of Lula’s campaign and he’ll maintain a defiant tone that insists Brazil is too big to fit in anyone’s backyard, a reference to Trump’s attempts to extend US influence across Latin America.
At home, Lula’s priorities include setting rules for the development of Brazil’s critical minerals industry. The country holds the world’s second-largest reserves of rare earths after China, drawing growing interest in recent months from foreign governments and companies seeking a foothold in the sector.
Then there are the other important levers of power in the country, unwieldy lawmakers who punch above their weight, a powerful agro-business lobby and a heavily politicised Supreme Court not shy about getting out of its lane.
Even as Brazil’s campaign intensified, Lula managed to secure congressional approval for a shorter standard workweek. He has now pledged to pursue changes to the judicial systems after the collapse of Banco Master exposed a web of alleged fraud, bribes and institutional ties to senior figures in the Supreme Court.
Pulling off not one, but two comebacks, was almost the easy part. If Lula wants to seal his political legacy as something more than a survivor he’ll need to use this last shot to uproot the ills that for decades have stopped Brazil from reaching its potential.
by Simone Iglesias, Bloomberg
Comments