Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the Brazilian president, has vowed that dictatorship and fascism will never return to Brazil after winning a historic fourth term in power by defeating his far-right opponent, Flávio Bolsonaro. A few hours earlier Lula pulled off the most stunning political fightback in modern Brazilian history, bouncing back from a first-round defeat in early October to trounce Bolsonaro by more than 4m votes in the runoff. Democracy always, fascism never again.” Never, since the return of democracy after the 1964-85 military regime, had the first-round loser managed to win the second vote.
But Lula did precisely that on Sunday, prompting joyous scenes on the streets of São Paulo and cities all across Brazil, where he won 64.2m votes to Bolsonaro’s 59.8m – a 51.79% to 48.21% victory. That was at least 10m more votes than Lula secured in the first round. And the risks that the extreme right candidate entailed,” Lula’s health minister, Alexandre Padilha, told the Guardian shortly after the result was confirmed at the hotel where the president’s team was following the count in São Paulo.
It’s also an important signal to the rest of Latin America and to the world,” Padilha added. Following in the footsteps of his father, the former president Jair Bolsonaro, who refused to concede after losing the 2022 election to Lula and was later convicted of plotting a coup, Flávio Bolsonaro rejected the result. Bolsonaro called Lula’s victory “sacanagem”, a Portuguese word which roughly translates as “bullshit”.
But political leaders and governments from across the spectrum were quick to recognise Lula’s victory. Rightwing South American leaders also recognised Lula’s victory, with Chile’s president, José Antonio Kast, calling Lula to offer congratulations and Peru’s president, Keiko Fujimori, saluting “the Brazilian people for this democratic day”. The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said: “Democracy and multilateralism have won in Brazil.” A spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry said: “China respects the choice of the Brazilian people.” There was silence from Donald Trump, whose administration had been rooting for a Bolsonaro victory that would have seen the so-called pro-Trump “orange wave” continue its sweep across the region into Latin America’s largest democracy.
In the lead-up to Sunday’s vote, the US had been accused of seeking to influence the result through a campaign of economic and diplomatic pressure. Erika Hilton, a transgender lawmaker who recently became the most voted woman in Brazil’s congress, said those efforts had failed. Brazil and the Brazilians are too gigantic to be anybody’s backyard,” she said.
Lula’s victory will also have profound consequences for the environment and the Amazon rainforest in what is the world’s most biodiverse nation. On the eve of the vote, the former environment minister Marina Silva had warned that, if elected, Bolsonaro would seek to finish the “perverse project” of rainforest destruction started by his father, whose 2019-2022 administration saw a surge in deforestation. On Sunday night, Silva was in a buoyant mood, telling the Guardian: “My heart is happy and filled with gratitude to God and the Brazilian people.” “The thing I most feared was that our Indigenous territories would be invaded again [under another Bolsonaro government].
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