RIO DE JANEIRO – The shock election victory of Brazil’s left-wing President has dealt a blow to Donald Trump‘s efforts to spread US dominance across Latin America.
The leftist veteran Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva pulled off a historic comeback on Sunday evening when he beat right-wing populist and Trump ally Flávio Bolsonaro – son of the disgraced former president Jair Bolsonaro – in a bitterly fought presidential election runoff.
Lula claimed a historic fourth term in power with just under 52 per cent of the vote compared with Bolsonaro’s 48 per cent, Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court said – more than four million more votes. The unexpected victory makes him the first Brazilian elected president after losing the first round since the country’s first post-dictatorship election in 1989.
The surprise victory bucks the trend of right-wing leaders sweeping the continent, and represents a bitter loss for Trump, who had thrown his support behind Bolsonaro as part of his efforts to pull the region further into Washington’s orbit under his so-called Donroe Doctrine.
Seven right-wing leaders have been elected since April 2025, including in Chile, Peru and Colombia, and the Trump administration made no secret of wanting Latin America’s largest democracy to become the eighth.
Last year, Trump slapped 50 per cent tariffs on Brazil, citing the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro, who, like Trump after his loss in the 2020 election, refused to concede his defeat to Lula in 2022. Bolsonaro is serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup to stay in power which ended in a US Capitol-style attack on government buildings.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the Workers’ Party candidate, celebrates after winning the presidential runoff, in Sao Paulo (Photo: Brian Snyder/ Reuters)“It is a Witch Hunt that should end IMMEDIATELY!” Trump wrote in a letter to Lula he shared online in 2025. Trump has described right-wing ally Bolsonaro as a friend and hosted him at his Mar-a-Lago resort when they were both in power in 2020.
Flávio Bolsonaro ran on a vague anti-establishment platform of fiscal conservatism, hardline security and freeing his father. Now, following in his father’s footsteps, he has now refused to accept last night’s election result, and has called for it to be annulled.
But counterintuitively, the biggest contributor to Lula’s re-election may have been Trump himself.
His efforts to pressure Brazil backfired because they allowed Lula to campaign for a “sovereign Brazil”. This including warning against handing over the country’s rare-earth minerals to the US – which the Trump administration has made it clear they want to secure.
“We will not allow Brazil to be anyone’s backyard,” Lula told crowds packed onto Copacabana’s beachfront on the eve of the election.
Fears also grew in recent weeks that even America’s Silicon Valley was meddling in Brazilian democracy after Lula’s social media accounts were restricted.
Presidential candidate Flavio Bolsonaro after the results of the general election day (Photo: Ton Molina/Getty Images)Brazil’s electoral court ordered Meta to explain allegations of algorithmic bias after its AI-generated campaign images favouring Bolsonaro while refusing similar requests for Lula. Meta denied political interference and blamed technical errors.
Furthermore, a Reuters investigation on Saturday revealed that two senior US State Department officials, Darren Beattie and Ricardo Pita, had pushed for sanctions intended to weaken Lula and return the Bolsonaro family to power.
‘I didn’t think he could do it’
But none of it mattered in the end. As the results came in on Sunday evening, supporters dressed in red and covered in Lula stickers took to the streets and screamed the President’s name to the backdrop of fireworks.
“I didn’t think he could do it, honestly, after the first round,” said 36-year-old Thiago Silva, who was celebrating in downtown Rio de Janeiro with his mother. “It’s an incredible relief.”
Bolsonaro had success tapping into voters’ security concerns by vowing to round up criminals in new prisons. He also pledged to bring down Brazil’s public debt, which had risen by more than 10 percentage points during Lula’s latest term.
“The time for change has come,” Bolsonaro told reporters in his hometown of Rio de Janeiro on Sunday after casting his vote. “Brazil can’t take any more. Everyone’s lives have gotten worse.”
Lula, on the other hand, pledged to protect his social programmes and squeezed through popular policies in the weeks before the election, including banning betting companies and reducing the working week from six days to five.
The President warned that Bolsonaro would pick up where his father — who presided over a surge in the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and the deaths of more than 700,000 Brazilians during the pandemic — left off.
Lula, a former trade unionist, also warned that Bolsonaro would likely follow in the authoritarian footsteps of his father. “Either we keep democracy functioning, or we will have a militiaman governing this country from the presidential palace,” Lula said in the final debate as the candidates traded barbs.
The result secured a fourth term for Lula and his Workers’ Party after a campaign that resembled a bizarre Brazilian spin-off of US politics.
Brazilians celebrate Lula’s victory in Sao Paulo (Photo: Luca Meola/Getty Images)The left-wing veteran was widely written off by political analysts three weeks ago after trailing Bolsonaro by more than 2.2 million votes in the first round.
As Lula tried to remind Brazilians of the health and social programmes the Workers’ Party created and the millions of Brazilians he had lifted out of poverty, his old-left politics looked outdated at times. The 80-year-old uploaded videos of himself boxing to show he was not a Brazilian Joe Biden. However, in debates he struggled to match the energy of his 45-year-old adversary and respond to the Trumpian barrage of disinformation.
Nineteen of 21 statements by Bolsonaro examined during one debate were false or inaccurate, the fact-checking organisation Aos Fatos found.
“I’ve never seen politics like it in my life,” said 64-year-old Monica Ronai in Rio de Janeiro. “The lying, the hate and the misinformation. It’s like trying to play a board game against someone who decides to take the board away.”
Lula will face hurdles ahead, with a right-wing Congress that is all but certain to impede his agenda, and Bolsonaro continuing to claim the result is was “impossible”.
However, many in the country will be ecstatic at the result, not least because Brazil defied the will of the US. As Erika Hilton, a Brazilian congresswoman, declared: “We defeated Meta. We defeated the betting industry. We defeated the United States.”
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