--- title: "Brazil's Election was a F*cking Mess" description: "Lula defied expectations to win Brazil's presidency at eighty-one, overcoming a first-round defeat through aggressive social media outreach and a significantly tougher stance on crime. However, a chaotic Supreme Court intervention extending voting hours deepened national divisions, whilst a hostile right-wing Congress now threatens to block his ambitious domestic agenda." url: https://fronts.co/videos/brazils-election-was-a-f-cking-mess.md canonical: https://fronts.co/videos/brazils-election-was-a-f-cking-mess/ datePublished: 2026-11-02T12:59:42.000Z dateModified: 2026-11-02T12:59:42.000Z author: - name: Fronts Staff url: https://fronts.co/authors/fronts-team/ publisher: Fronts image: "https://media.fronts.co/cdn-cgi/image/width=1200,height=630,fit=cover,gravity=auto,quality=80,format=auto/images/video-library/homefronts-global-768.webp" type: NewsArticle language: en access: members isAccessibleForFree: false tokens: 4327 --- Well, that was unexpected. After the first round of Brazil's presidential race, wearing Coma President Luis Inacio Lula de Silva finished second to Flavio Bolsonaro, the political obituaries practically wrote themselves. I mean, no candidate since democracy was restored in Brazil had ever lost the first round and won the second. Lula was toast. Well, three weeks later, and the polls, the pundits, and polymarket all called this wrong. At a young age of 81, Lula is now headed for a fourth term, but only after an election cycle that could best be described as "messy" and at worst can be described as "fucking shambles." There were giveaways to the electorate, a last-second Supreme Court intervention into poll opening times, and once the dust had settled, there was the worst plunge for Brazil's currency since 1999. Brazil went into this election cycle already deeply divided, with nobody trusting the other side any further that they could throw them. That's the country that Lula will need into his new term, and with four more years ahead of him, the questions are still how exactly he pulled off this comeback and what he plans to do with it. An election in chaos All things considered Brazil has had a pretty rough time when it comes to recent presidential elections. Back in 2022, Lula narrowly defeated then-president Hayer Bolsonaro by less than two points, and the country went through a tumultuous version of its own January 6, when thousands of Bolsonaro supporters stormed Congress, the presidential palace of the Supreme Court. Four years later, the country really hasn't moved on. The right-wing candidate this time around was none other than Bolsonaro's son, Flavio. While Diya wasn't on the ballot, the controversy surrounding him, his legal case, and his 27 year house arrest order very much were, so when polls were about to close at 5 o'clock in the evening, Brasilia Time, many in the country thought that finally, after all this time, the country be able to move on. Well, ladies and gentlemen, as we should all know by now, 2026 is not a year that allows you to move on from just about anything. At 5.02pm, two minutes after polls closed, an emergency order from one justice on the country's Supreme Court was made public. All polls across the country were to stay open through 7pm. As you could probably imagine, this created absolute bedlam. Most polling stations had dutifully closed up at 5 on the dot, Brasilia Time, and some workers had already headed home by the time the news broke. Those that were still there were finding out via reports on social media that they were either to stay open or reopen while others essentially threw on their hands and said, "We don't know, suspending voting, and waiting to hear back from officials on what the hell they were supposed to do." And in case this wasn't pandemonium enough, the Supreme Court followed that order up about an hour later with a clarification. The polling stations that had been still open when the extension came down were to stay open until 7, but the polling stations that had already closed were to remain closed. This made things even more confusing as many of them had first closed down at 5, reopened one way or another after that first ruling, and now had no idea what was going on. The reason behind this last-minute injection of excitement was a complaint from Lula's campaign that public transport had been restricted in several cities, preventing poorer voters from reaching their polling stations. His team initially requested the voting be extended in three municipalities before eventually asking for an extension nationwide. Long story short, it made its way up to one of the Supreme Court's justices who issued the ruling of the rest of history. The political fallout was immediate and for fairly obvious reasons. As The New York Times reported, four separate electoral lawyers they interviewed about the ruling described the situation as being completely unprecedented with some warning that it could potentially provide grounds for annulling the election entirely. The concern was that voters in different parts of the country had effectively been given different amounts of time to cast their ballots, depending on whether their polling station figured out what they were supposed to do after those orders started to come down. Unsurprisingly, Flavio was furious. After Lula's victory was announced, he initially refused to recognize the results and declared that his campaign would seek to have the election overturned, period. This started to fall apart as the day dragged on, though, as it turned out, his campaign had also requested partial extensions in areas that had been experiencing heavy rain that ostensibly hurt voters' ability to reach the polls. While the legal questions are certainly serious ones, it becomes a lot harder to argue that an election has been stolen via an extension when your own campaign requested an extension. A later analysis found that, in spite of all the back and forth, only around 35,000 votes had been cast during the two additional hours across the whole country. Given Lula's margin of victory was over 4 million votes, it was ultimately a lot of trouble for nothing. And so, last night, Flavio's Liberal Party formally recognized Lula's victory, though Flavio announced that he would lead the opposition in Congress, which he promised to turn into a fortress against the incoming government, but we'll get to that in just a moment. The issue with all of this is that, even if Flavio's concession of defeat is genuine, the circumstances of the election's extension have created a massive atmosphere of distrust in a country that's already painfully divided. For Flavio's fans, already primed to doubt the results, the election now feels tainted. For Lula's fans, they may have won, but it came only after there was yet another dispute about how valid his victory was. And at the center of it all is the Supreme Court, which has not been shy about inserting itself into hotly contested political issues. This wasn't helped yesterday, by the fact that Flavio found himself on the receiving end of a federal order that he was to surrender his passport following another Supreme Court intervention that barred him from leaving the country. The order relates to a separate investigation involving allegations of money laundering, which Flavio denies, but you can see how Brazilian politics has essentially turned into one-sided corruption against the other in swearing that if they're the ones to get power, they'll make their opponents see justice. And that doesn't seem like a recipe for stability going forwards, does it? A stunning comeback. Despite all the chaos surrounding the election, we should still be clear that the final result was extraordinary. Lula had been all but written off. When we covered the first round here on Homefronts, we assumed he was toast, and with good reason. While Flavio had come up short of an outright majority, he still placed first. Lula, meanwhile, only managed to scrape together roughly 45%, and critically, the other candidates eliminated in their round all leaned right. So it seemed natural that their voters, when faced with the old-school left- wing Lula, or the new right-wing Bolsonaro, would switch their votes to Flavio. Ultimately though, the second round saw Lula win 52-48. Given just how massive Brazil is, this equated to a margin of nearly 4.5 million votes and a total pick-up of more than 10 million for Lula from the first round. That, of course, raises the question of where exactly these votes came from. In a country so enormous as Brazil, there's rarely going to be one clear, concise answer to a question like that, but the turnout figures offer a pretty good place to start. Despite fewer candidates running, nearly 3 million more Brazilians voted in the run-off than in the first round, which is an unusually large increase. That was especially important for Lula, given that more than 30 million voters had stayed home during the first round, including a big chunk of younger Brazilians. And while we can't know exactly how each of those additional voters cast their ballots, there's good evidence to suggest that the newer voters broke his way. On that front, Lula deserves full credit. After the first round of feet, his campaign underwent a makeover, reaching out to younger voters online. The president had previously used social media to post-workout videos to show that age was just a number, but started really leaning into it after losing in the first round. His first political video posted on October 7th raked in more than 23 million views in a single day, and Lula spent the rest of the month recording several of them every day. Beyond just how he got his message out, Lula also shifted what his message was. Specifically, he began to really lean into what a Bolsonaro presidency could mean for poorer Brazilians. His campaign warned that Flavio would cut social benefits, especially programs like Bolsa Familia, the nation's main welfare program that Lula set up back in 2003 to provide cash payments to lower-income Brazilians. Flavio should be known to actually be campaigned against any such cuts, but as with the Tories claiming they won't make cuts to the NHS in Britain, clearly voters trusted his opponents more. Even still, getting more of his own supporters to show up was only half of the battle for Lula. As we mentioned, combining the votes of the eliminated right-wing or center- right candidates with Flavios should have locked the left-winger out of power. So what happened? Here, the role and legacy of higher Bolsonaro seems to have helped Lula out. The 9 million-plus Brazilians who had voted for other right-wing candidates ultimately were less enthusiastic about putting another Bolsonaro into the presidential palace. In fact, a data foliar survey before the runoff found that among supporters of the four eliminated candidates, only 46 percent of them indicated that they'd vote for Flavio with another quarter saying they'd back Lula. After all, Ren and Santos essentially ran as the right-wing alternative to the Bolsonaros, so it makes sense that his voters, who wanted right-wing but not another Bolson aro, might instead choose to stay home. And this gets to something that neither side is going to come out and admit, but really did function as the deciding factor for many. There were just a lot of Brazilians who weren't really into either of these guys. Lula, despite those workout videos, is going to be 85 by the time his term ends. And as two American presidents in a row have shown us, cognitive abilities don 't tend to improve at that age. Beyond his being ancient, plenty of Brazilians were frustrated with his government over everything from the cost of living to corruption and crime, and the prospect of another four years of this was something they could do without. Crime in particular was a weak area for Lula, including with his own supporters. Another poll from just two days before the election found that 69 percent wanted combating crime and violence to be a top priority for the next president, an issue that Flavio had made central to his campaign. This seems to be the area where Lula has pivoted hardest, and it makes him rather distinctive from the rest of the Latin American Left, which has long struggled with the rise of security concerns. For days after the first round, he unveiled his new campaign slogan, "For working people, protection, for criminals, prison." That was a way tougher message than Brazilians were used to hearing from Lula, and really speaks to the inroads that the Baqueli-style talk of "lock them up" has made well beyond the right. A few days after this, Lula made it clear that this wouldn't just be talk either. He announced that he supported lowering the age of criminal responsibility from 18 to 16 for especially violent crimes. Flavio was, of course, still campaigning on tougher measures than Lula, including chemical castration for rapists and the construction of Salvadoran seacort-style mega- presence. But it's difficult to overstate how much this disarmed the single biggest stumbling block for Latin America's Left. Even suggesting that they would pursue a more security-oriented approach in a country that sees a majority of homicides go unsolved appears to have stripped the right of its ability to present itself as the party of law and order. Now, there's reason to question whether this was truly an 11th-hour conversion or a politically shrewd Hail Mary that will promptly get discarded. And the already overcrowded Brazilian prisons can't really fit too many more inmates, which is part of what's made calls for building new facilities so popular in the region. Just look at Costa Rica, where 92% support seek out replicas coming to their country. And while it's not quite as high throughout all of Latin America, it's hard to argue with poll figures like that. All of which, of course, raises the question of just what Lula's next term will actually look like. Lula's fourth term When it comes to the future, where Brazil goes next isn't exactly clear. On the foreign policy side of the equation, Lula will largely be free to pursue the same strategy of claiming to be an independent country while essentially cozying up with Russia and China, much to the chagrin of Washington. In fact, the US seems to be the biggest loser of the election. The Trump administration was very eager to get Brazil as its latest addition to the shield of the Americas, which Lula has repeatedly refused to join over concerns that it could give the US a pretext to do some military adventuring. This disagreement has become even more hotly contested after the US designated Brazil's two largest criminal organisations as terrorist organisations, something that L ula fiercely opposed on sovereignty grounds. Beyond just angering the Trump administration, though, it will likely be free to keep deepening economic ties with the BRICS alliance without needing congressional approval for every decision. It doesn't mean that Brazil and the US are headed for some massive confrontation, while it's a bit much to present Lula as truly neutral between China, Russia and the US. We also can't say that he's the second coming of Nicholas Maduro. Across his past three terms, he has been willing to maintain working relationships with governments he disagrees with and given the sheer size of his country, Washington has plenty of reasons to keep talking with him. Beyond foreign policy, though, Lula's chances of being able to accomplish much of his agenda are much narrower. The presidential office was not the only spot-up for grabs this month. All of the lower house and two-thirds of the Senate were on the ballot, many of which were already decided during the first round. Those results didn't go Lula's way. Nearly three and five seats in the lower house are now held by some form of right-wing party with the Senate shifting even further in that direction. This is made even more difficult for the new president. By the fact that Flavio's Liberal Party will now be the single largest party in both chambers, while Lula's workers' party will hold only a lackluster 70 of the lower house's 513 seats. Their shift was what led us to run our other piece earlier this month on Brazil 's shift to the right, though that does seem to be more the expense of the center than the left at this point. The country has long had a collection of parties known as the Centraal, which are essentially willing to work with who ever happens to be president, so long as they can secure enough of their own interests. Lula has long relied on them to help reach majorities in the legislature, despite lacking majorities of his own in the past. Their loss of seats is a serious issue for Lula, whose domestic agenda had largely stalled out already. Last year, lawmakers voted by a 383-98 margin to strike down his proposed increase on taxes on financial transactions, and a few months later, the lower house effectively killed another proposal to overhaul investment taxes. These weren't even Lula's signature proposals, either. They were aimed at just funding the government, and he couldn't even get those through. All of this makes his campaign promises to expand social spending, increase public service investment, and generally to build on his genuinely transformative previous administrations considerably more difficult to deliver. And that, ultimately, is the state of Brazilian politics today. Lula has managed to pull off a comeback that many thought was impossible, but with his back against the wall, he's going to face a far more difficult four years than any of his previous three times. Despite how hard-fought it was, Lula might ultimately find that winning the election was the easy part. Thank you for watching.