Yesterday, on October 25th, 2026, President Lula da Silva trounced Senator Flávio Bolsonaro (son of the disgraced ex-President currently sitting in prison for treason) in the runoff election. In the first round, Lula lost the plurality vote with 45% of the vote compared to Bolsonaro’s 47%, with 53 million voting for Lula and 56 million for Bolsonaro. In the second round, Lula managed to turn it around, winning an absolute majority of 51.79% votes compared to Bolsonaro’s 48.21%. Bolsonaro got 3 million more votes than round one, with a total of 56 million votes, but Lula again blew him out of the water by increasing his vote total by over 10 million, ending up with around 64 million voters.
How did he do it? In the immediate aftermath of round 1, many supposedly learned people eagerly wrote Lula and his whole movement off, and many conceded themselves to a Bolsonarist government. That assumption was not only wrong but flipped entirely on its head.
It will take time for pollsters and focus groups to sift through the data and comb through the nuggets of truth that help clarify the exact points that helped Lula triumph. But we can take some very educated guesses on Lula’s successes, based on the actions he took and the political question facing the voters of Brazil. Through that lens, we can conclude that had those learned people been paying attention, Lula’s victory was practically guaranteed.
Of course, Bolsonaro and his movement have already promised to work with the Trump administration to overthrow the democratic will of the Brazilian people, and to illegally and criminally install Bolsonaro as President of Brazil, much like Delcy Rodriguez was installed as President of Venezuela. These efforts must be agitated against and resisted, but at least for today, we can pause and reflect on how the victory was achieved to begin with.
Before we dive into the answers of how Lula won round two, the very obvious question crops up: how did he lose the first round to begin with? It’s quite simple: after nearly two decades, an entire generation of political control, the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT aka in English, the Labor Party) is washed. This is partly due to the ineffectualness of their own elected members, partly due to just holding power for so long, partly due to the worsening global energy and inflation crises; but just in sum, as a political ideology and movement, they have little in the way of answers for Brazil’s many crises beyond a maintenance of the status quo ante.
They don’t suffer from a lack of ideas or motivation, to be clear, but a lack of political power. For instance, Brazil has a system of public, universal healthcare. Hospitals, especially rural ones, are often underfunded, leading to huge hospital wait times. The solution is to fund the healthcare system more, but Brazil has enough of a middle class, all with private insurance, to elect members to Congress to oppose any expansion of or fixing of the welfare system.
So continually in Brazil, the problem is nothing ever gets better, and things either stay the same or worsen slightly. That’s how Lula lost in round 1: representing the status quo, against a bevy of other options (not just Bolsonaro ran against Lula in round 1), PT coalitional voters simply did not vote for him. But in round 2, the question became flipped. Now it became a question of the status quo versus an imposition of a US-aligned regime, threatening to burn down the entire Amazonas, to sell Brazil in full to American oligarchs, and to genocide the Indigenous population exactly like the USA did to our own (Bolsonaro admitted as much). Between a decision of the status quo and national destruction, the masses chose the status quo, and Lula ended up winning handedly.
That being said, let’s dive into the specifics, to better understand Lula’s victory.
Lula: The Anti-Biden
Lula is not Joe Biden. He didn’t say we beat Medicare, didn’t thank Earth Rider for the Great Lakes, did not have the non-extant Brazilian empire actively support genocide in Gaza. When asked about high inflation and prices, he doesn’t, in response, shuttle off to Europe to boost up AUKUS or whatever inane diplomatic initiative he cooked up.
Despite being 80 years old, he jogs and moves with the energy of a 40 year old. He’s perhaps one of the most physically active people at his age, placing a high premium on retaining his mobility and sanity in his old age. And, it’s paid off: he appears far younger than his actual age indicates.
In other words, he’s not shuffling around everywhere he walks, falling half-asleep, appearing completely incapable of moving independently.
During the two debates where Bolsonaro squared off against Lula, Lula was not only fired up and fighting back, but visibly angry, constantly deriding Bolsonaro as a NEPO baby who didn’t know what he was doing or talking about. In the first debate, Bolsonaro insinuated Lula would attempt to steal the election by letting felons vote; Lula clipped back that Bolsonaro’s own felon dad would rather vote for Lula than his failson.
It did not get better for Bolsonaro in the second debate. At one point, Bolsonaro derisively referred to Lula as “Lula 9-Fingers”, calling him out for only possessing nine fingers. Lula immediately demanded an apology, not just for himself, but for millions of workers; as it turns out, Lula lost his finger in an industrial accident—an accident which led him to joining a union, organizing for safety and labor rights, toppling the military dictatorship (which Bolsonaro’s dad was a captain in), and ultimately becoming President. It was a moment that encapsulated everything about why people loved Lula to begin with, and reminded them why they fought to topple the regime that stillbirthed the Bolsonaro golpistas.
Lula: The Anti-Bolsonaro
Senator Flávio Bolsonaro was a uniquely bad candidate, who made world-historically bad promises. People who would otherwise have loved to trounce the would-be socialist Lula were turned off by Bolsonaro’s patent desire to sell Brazil, in full, to oligarchs within the United States. Here’s just a quick-fire list of all insane things Bolsonaro promised to do:
Free his traitor and golpista father Jair Bolsonaro from prison
Impeach and arrest the judge that convicted his father
Turn the Supreme Court from an independent investigative and judicial body into a fake rubber stamp for his own desires
Join Trump’s Shield of the Americas, designating certain criminal gangs as terrorist organizations, thus enabling US air and naval strikes to occur against alleged gang activities
Arrest Lula and every other elected Leftist still alive
Letting US institutions run the Presidential transition
Creating concentration camps and letting the US export their criminals to those camps
Burning down the Amazon rainforest
Genociding the Indigenous population “exactly as America did”
Defunding the entire welfare system, including the system of universal healthcare and housing
Brazil has a shortage of committed socialists, and especially a shortage of people who want to meekly continue the status quo, but they certainly do not lack in people who are nationalists. And by attacking Brazil’s national pride, by in effect promising to destroy all that makes Brazil Brasil (all that was missing from his campaign promises was to ban soccer and Carnival), Bolsonaro effectively sealed his own doom.
Lula: THE Lula
Lula has no modern equivalent in American politics, except as an amalgamation of several lead players. He’s like if Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, Shawn Fain, and MLK Jr were congealed into one rough singular entity; a combination of personas so disparate it cannot be replicated save by chance.
If you live in Brazil, you know Lula. Everyone knows Lula; they don’t call him President da Silva or Silva or anything else, not even Presidente Lula—he is just Lula to over a hundred million people, even his haters.
In the 1980s, he built the Labor Party from the ground-up, coming from the metallurgical union to unite several other unions together. This was during a time of military dictatorship, when the people did not have the right to directly elect representatives, when the military had the final say about anything political in the country. This he achieved in 1984, securing Brazil’s democratic transition away from the twenty-year military dictatorship.
Over the next 20 years, Lula and his Party were in constant opposition, railing against the centrist and conservative factions which led the newly democratic Brazil. Running for President several times, he finally succeeded in 2003, where he and his party shepherded the nation through 4.1% average GDP growth (for a total of 32.62% growth), 23.05% increase in per capita income, and a decrease of inflation from 12.53% to 5.9%.
He also was behind the creation of Bolsa Familia, one of the largest poverty-reduction measures in the Western world, which succeeded in reducing the poverty rate by 27.7% in Lula’s first term alone, which worked by transferring cash directly to Brazilian families. He also created a system of public housing, Minha Casa Minha Vida ("My House, My Life"), through which the government financed the building of seven million housing units for low income families since 2009.
Modern Brazil would thus look very different without Lula. He is precisely the opposite of an unknown quantity; and thus, when the time came for voters to choose in round 2, they picked that very known quantity, who had delivered them all the previous gains, over the unknown quantity, who had also promised to sell Brazil down the drain to US oligarchs.
What’s Next?
Anyone who was paying attention, who knew the above three factors, would have been able to predict Lula’s successful reelection. Beyond that though, it is impossible to know what the future holds.
Bolsonaro and his congressional majority will attempt to impeach Lula, that much is a given. But Trump and Marco Rubio might also decide to coup Lula, and install Bolsonaro as an illegal President. They may even try a military invasion (though, if they do try, they will fail). Or, Lula just shrugs off Trump’s threats like Canada’s Carney or Mexico’s Sheinbaum, and continues delivering for his people while fighting against US encroachment.
The next two months will be critical; the new term begins on January 1. If Trump or Bolsonaro do act, it will be in that timeframe. They already acted once, in the act that saw Bolsonaro’s father imprisoned when he attempted to overthrow the Constitution. Historians of coups everywhere know that unless coup plotters are in prison or dead, they will always try, try again. Until they win. It’s up to Lula to ensure they don’t.