Brazil: Bolsonaro wins in the first round with 47 per cent, Lula on 45 per cent; a run-off is scheduled for 25 October
Flavio Bolsonaro has beaten Lula in the first round and is now the favourite heading into the run-off on 25 October, which will decide who will become Brazil’s 40th president. The Trump-style candidate secured 47.14 per cent of the vote, whilst the outgoing president received 45.03 per cent, with a difference of around 2.5 million votes between them. Lula’s comment: “Democracy has taught us a lesson; the run-off will be the real test.” His challenger: “This result marks the end of Lula’s party.” Voter turnout stood at 79 per cent.
- The Brazilian presidential election is heading for a second round on 25 October between the left-wing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the right-wing senator Flávio Bolsonaro, as neither candidate secured the more than 50 per cent of valid votes required to win in the first round. It was a close race, with Flávio Bolsonaro edging out Lula in the first round of Sunday’s election. With over 99 per cent of the votes counted, Bolsonaro secured around 47.03 per cent of the vote, whilst Lula came second with 45.16 per cent. The other candidates trailed far behind, all of whom, incidentally, belong to the right-wing spectrum: psychiatrist Augusto Cury came third with 2.89 per cent of the vote, ahead of businessman Renan Santos (2.24 per cent) and former minister Ronaldo Caiado (2.18 per cent).
Lula narrowly defeated Bolsonaro’s father, the former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro, in 2022; he is now serving a 27-year prison sentence under house arrest after being convicted of plotting to overturn those elections and prevent Lula from taking office.
Abstention tips the balance
The final outcome will likely be decided by abstentions, which stood at 21.08 per cent (in a country where voting is, at least in theory, compulsory); Flavio Bolsonaro is, however, the favourite because, on paper, he is expected to attract the votes of the other right-wing candidates, who collectively secured over 6 per cent of the vote.
The next three weeks of the election campaign are therefore set to be fiercely contested, with Lula having already thrown down the gauntlet by pledging to expose Bolsonaro’s alleged links – for which he has already received praise from other right-wing leaders in South America, such as Argentina’s Javier Milei – with illegal armed groups, an accusation that has, incidentally, been around for some time.
Lula: “I’m very good at knockout rounds”
“I would have liked to have won the election in the first round, but it’s not the first time I’ve thought about it. I thought about it in ’89 and it didn’t work out; I thought about it in ’94, in ’98, in 2002, in 2006… then we thought about it in 2010 with Dilma, in 2014, then I thought about it with Haddad in 2018, with me in 2018… it didn’t work out. Do you know why it didn’t work out? Because people like it when I compete in the second round. And I’m very good at run-offs.” So said the President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, commenting on the results of the first round of the election, which, surprisingly, saw Flávio Bolsonaro emerge victorious. “The result is often unexpected. We never get what we wanted. I must confess that I was convinced I would win the election in the first round, but I’ve thought that in the past too,” the president emphasised. “But we have the second round, and that’s the moment of truth. It’s time to show the true face of Brazil today and what we want,” he explained.
