Having finished second in the first round, Lula has gone on to win a fourth term. Amid the jubilation of some and the tears and anger of others, the question remains: what of a leader can outlive his body?
By Sunday afternoon, a sound truck was already parked outside the National Museum of the Republic in the heart of Brasília, where supporters of Flávio Bolsonaro had been invited to celebrate a victory the ballot boxes had yet to reveal. In Fortaleza, on Praça Portugal, a giant screen awaited Liberal Party activists, who erupted in cheers when their candidate pulled ahead. The lead held for some forty minutes, until the count from Bahia, Pernambuco and Ceará reversed the outcome. Shortly after 9 p.m., the Superior Electoral Court declared Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva the winner with 51.78 percent of the valid vote, or 64.2 million ballots.
Since direct presidential elections were restored in 1989, no one had ever won the presidency after finishing second in the first round. On October 4, Flávio led Lula by 2.2 million votes. Three weeks ago, I wrote that Lula needed to win over nearly six million voters and that nothing was beyond him. On the night of the first round, he boasted of being very good at mata-mata, the knockout stage. The bravado distilled a career of three failed presidential bids, 580 days in prison in Curitiba, an annulled conviction and a return to power. The former metalworker, who turned eighty-one on Tuesday, is now the only Brazilian to have been elected head of state four times.
Lula owes his victory to the voters of the Northeast. He was born in 1945 in the agreste of Pernambuco, near Garanhuns. He was seven when his mother, Dona Lindu, set off for São Paulo with all her children in the back of a pau-de-arara, one of the makeshift trucks that carried drought refugees to the industrial South. On Sunday, the region of his childhood lifted him back up the count, ballot box by ballot box. His campaign had targeted the roughly thirty million voters who abstained in the first round, and abstention fell to 19.2 percent, its lowest level since 2006. Women were his strongest base of support. This is hardly surprising: for twenty years, Bolsa Família payments have been made primarily to them, and in millions of households the state takes the form of a bank card in the mother’s name.
I have never supported Lula, and I do not support him now. On the night of the first round, I argued that no one votes for the person who grants them what is already theirs by right, since rights have replaced the padrinho, the patron. A right may well inspire gratitude without creating a debt toward whoever guarantees it. Yet the fear of losing it can mobilize, and one may also vote for the government one considers best able to protect what one holds to be legitimate.
On Saturday evening, neighbors had gathered beneath the windows of his home in Alto de Pinheiros, São Paulo, to sing Pra não dizer que não falei das flores, Geraldo Vandré’s song that became the anthem of resistance to the military dictatorship. Leaning out of his window, Lula answered them through a megaphone that his victory would be the victory of the Brazilian people. A thousand kilometers from the sound truck in Brasília, the celebration had begun on a residential street before the polls had even opened.
In his victory speech on Avenida Paulista, Lula issued no call for reconciliation. His first words targeted his opponent, a man who, he claimed, could lie so shamelessly that there was not “a single cell of humanity” in him. In 2022, he had called for laying down arms; this time, he refused to utter the words “national unity” and promised only a “civilized” country that respects the Constitution. His vocabulary was martial: a “general,” “troops,” soldiers male and female of an “army of democracy” that he declared more victorious than the armies of Russia, China or the United States. He described his emotion as the crowd sang the Independence Anthem with its line “or die for Brazil.” The flag and the anthem have never been foreign to the Brazilian left. The yellow of the Diretas Já movement in 1984 was the left’s own color, and Lula recalled that Geraldo Alckmin had taken part in that campaign. In truth, he was reclaiming symbols that bolsonarismo had monopolized since 2018.
Lula champions a secular state that guarantees freedom of worship for all, and moments later declared himself “chosen by God,” the finger of God resting upon his head. To defuse the question of his age, he compared himself to Franklin Roosevelt, who was likewise elected four times. Roosevelt was unable to complete his last term; “little Lula” would see his through to the end, “running faster than any of you,” and would never run for anything again. Roosevelt died in April 1945, early in his fourth term, of a cerebral hemorrhage. In December 2024, Lula underwent surgery for an intracranial hemorrhage.
On policy, one line stood out when he announced that the federal government would now “step onto the stage”: “To working people, we will offer protection. To criminals, we will offer prison.” In my analysis of the first round, I noted how long the left had dismissed public anxiety about crime as a middle-class fantasy, when the poorest are its first victims. Lula is now moving onto ground he had too long ceded to his opponents, even though the reform he announced will require a constitutional amendment and the backing of a Congress in which he has no majority.
Kantorowicz showed how the jurists of Elizabethan England distinguished between the king’s two bodies: the body natural, mortal and subject to infirmity, and the body politic, which never dies and ensures the continuity of authority. Lula knows that his own body has become the central stake of this term, even though the continuity of the Brazilian state is not in doubt and the presidency will survive him as it survived his predecessors. Yet although he has chosen successors before, he has never managed to pass on to them the full electoral strength he commands. Dilma Rousseff was elected twice with his backing before being impeached in 2016. Fernando Haddad, whom he designated as his replacement from prison in 2018, was defeated by Jair Bolsonaro, and again this year by Tarcísio de Freitas in São Paulo.
Lula’s victory settles nothing. It grants him four more years, during which his would-be heirs will have ample opportunity to count their forces, not least in the 2028 municipal elections. In Brasília, a single further hospitalization would be enough to reopen the succession calculus. Geraldo Alckmin, seventy-three, governed São Paulo for many years. In 2006 he ran against Lula for the presidency; twenty years later, he is vice president to the man he once sought to defeat. He knows how power is exercised, and the Constitution would allow him to take Lula’s place in the Planalto should the president be incapacitated. But Lula’s voters never promised to follow him. Alckmin did not live through the strikes of São Bernardo do Campo or the prison years in Curitiba, nor does he share the history that has bound Lula for decades to the workers of the ABC Paulista and the families of the Northeast.
Listening to his long speech on Sunday night, one sensed that Lula had grasped this. He attributed the victory to “honor, nationalism and democracy” and to an army of activists; he promised that the country would be built “not by me” but by those listening; and he announced that he would henceforth speak to the people several times a day, “directly,” no longer allowing himself to be “interpreted by bad-faith journalists.” All of this signals that the political animal understands what is at stake. This unmediated speech is in fact multiplying. The “general” he thanked, federal deputy André Janones, runs “Lula’s Army,” a network of WhatsApp channels that carried the campaign through group administrators, activists, regional relays and, at times, pastors.
At Flávio’s headquarters, the mood was one of dismay; the candidate seemed incredulous. The voices that reached me from the Brazil I carry in my blood expressed the same defeat in different registers. Many were crushed, and many wept. Yet the will to fight ran through nearly every message, often invoking Donald Trump or the example of Venezuela, and many could not understand who these millions of voters who had come out of nowhere could possibly be. One Brazilian wrote to me simply: “Eu vou estar por aí, vou continuar. Fica todos com Deus, tá certo.” I’ll be around, I’ll carry on. God be with you all. The sentence carried no anger and no accusation of fraud against Lula’s camp; it entrusted to God the promise to keep going.
On Sunday night, several of my correspondents spoke more about Jair than about Flávio. The father, now seventy-one, was sentenced to twenty-seven years and three months in prison for his role in the attempt to overturn the 2022 result and is serving his sentence in Brasília under electronic monitoring. Those who voted for Flávio were also hoping to set Jair free.
“A culpa é deles,” it was their fault, the fault of those who ran the campaign. “Não fez nada,” they did nothing. Others had only a few words left: “chega,” enough; “tão difícil,” so hard. Some wept; others were still trying to understand where these millions of Lula votes, which they had seen nowhere, had come from. In his study of funeral lamentation in Southern Italy, Ernesto De Martino described what he called the crisis of presence, when the loss of a being around whom an existence was organized shakes the very bearings of those left behind. No one died in Brazil on Sunday, but some of my correspondents no longer recognized their country in this result. Their anger, however, did not extinguish the stubborn resolve to carry on, the same resolve with which that man had told me he would still be there.
In March, in Texas, Flávio Bolsonaro had asked the United States to put pressure on the institutions of his own country. Why, then, these appeals to Trump in the messages I received on Sunday night?
In 1578, King Sebastian of Portugal vanished at the Battle of Alcácer-Quibir in Morocco. No body was ever identified with certainty, and some Portuguese refused to believe their king was dead. They awaited his return, as did their descendants, and the belief crossed the Atlantic to the sertão of Pernambuco, where, at Pedra Bonita in the nineteenth century, people went as far as human sacrifice, convinced that spilled blood would bring the sovereign back. Flávio fell just over four million votes short of the presidency; he lacks neither an army of loyal followers nor the means to continue the political fight. And yet some of my correspondents now look to Trump as their hope of political salvation.
On Sunday, many Bolsonaro voters spoke of Venezuela. For years, the Brazilian right has feared that the country would end up like Maduro’s, and Lula did little to reassure it when he received Maduro with full honors in 2023. Then the Americans captured Maduro in Caracas on January 3, 2026. Lula denounced it as interference; the PT called it a kidnapping. What Bolsonaro supporters forget is that their awaited savior is now negotiating with Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s former vice president, to protect American oil interests.
Flávio Bolsonaro refuses to recognize Lula’s victory and is demanding that the election be annulled. In Salvador and several other cities in Bahia, Justice Cristiano Zanin had granted two additional hours of voting because of transport disruptions. Some polling stations, however, had already closed, so that voters could find the door shut in one place while voting continued elsewhere. The Bolsonaro camp had itself requested extensions in seventeen municipalities in the South after heavy rains. Between this challenge and the four-million-vote margin, an explanation is still missing. In 2022, the electronic voting machines were blamed; this time, a judge. Yet those who wrote to me on Sunday night said little about Zanin. What they wanted to know above all was where all these Lula voters had come from. Among the people around them, they knew almost none.
Roberto DaMatta wrote of the casa and the rua, the house and the street, but his casa was far more than a domestic interior. It included the neighbor who had found your brother a job, the relative to whom you still owed money and who might well remind you of it ten years later. In the rua, you were no one. Political allegiance does not neatly follow income distribution: Lula draws his voters from among the poorest, but in the urban peripheries, small shopkeepers and Pentecostal families vote for the right. In these milieus, the church is not merely a place to hear a pastor preach. It is where people have found work, borrowed money, sometimes incurred a debt never quite repaid. And in Brazil, one does not tell everything to a stranger knocking at the door.
In 2022, Jair Bolsonaro won 49.10 percent of the vote against Lula. On Sunday, his son Flávio won 48.22 percent. Four years have passed and Jair has been convicted, yet the Bolsonaro name still rallies nearly half the country. In 2018, Jair had won 55 percent against Fernando Haddad. Since then, he has twice come up against Lula, whose strength lies partly in uniting against the Bolsonaros voters who have almost nothing else in common. In 2030, however, Lula will no longer be on the ballot.
The right emerges from this election better armed than it believes tonight, and those who intend to fight on know it. Sergio Moro, the judge who sent Lula to prison, will govern Paraná; Nikolas Ferreira set the all-time record for votes won by a federal deputy; and Tarcísio de Freitas was re-elected in São Paulo in the first round with 62.7 percent. The Liberal Party will form the largest group in both chambers without holding a majority, leaving the centrão, that bloc of parties with shifting loyalties, as the arbiter. The Senate could thus become the stage for a confrontation with the Supreme Court, several of whose justices face the threat of impeachment proceedings. As for Jair Bolsonaro’s release through amnesty or reduced sentences, the battle simply moves to new arenas: it will now be fought in Congress against the presidential veto, and before the courts.
There is no shortage of contenders within the Bolsonaro family. Michelle Bolsonaro has just been elected to the Senate, Flávio lost on Sunday, and Jair, despite his conviction, continues to weigh on the ambitions of the entire clan. But Tarcísio de Freitas was comfortably re-elected in São Paulo without bearing the Bolsonaro name, a fact that will have to be reckoned with when the time comes to choose a candidate for 2030. On the PT side, the question is who can inherit a following that has never transferred to anyone else. The party has its elected officials, its old unions, its long-standing feuds. Some families have grown old alongside Lula; some stood by him through his darkest years; others resented him without necessarily changing their vote. Whoever takes his place at the head of the PT will have to win over these people.
Lula’s victory pushes Brazil further from Israel. In February 2024, in Addis Ababa, he went so far as to compare Israel’s offensive in Gaza to Hitler’s extermination of the Jews. In July 2025, Brazil joined South Africa’s case before the International Court of Justice. In many evangelical families across Brazil, people were praying for Jerusalem long before the Gaza war made headlines, sometimes for several generations. A large share of this electorate voted for Flávio Bolsonaro. For my part, I have not forgiven Addis Ababa. One can condemn a government’s policy without invoking Hitler and the extermination of the Jews. Lula has won, and relations with Israel are unlikely to recover any time soon.
Three weeks ago, I still hoped this election might allow Brazilians to find one another again. I was wrong. In the sertão, the coronel decided who worked and sometimes who got credit; the padrinho knew whom to approach to secure a position or get a relative out of trouble. The old coronéis no longer rule Brazil as they once did, but these personal loyalties have never left its political life.
On January 5, 2027, Lula will once again receive the presidential sash. In 2023, Jair Bolsonaro was absent from the ceremony, and it was Aline Sousa, a recyclable-waste collector from Brasília, who placed the sash on him on the Planalto ramp. This time, Lula succeeds himself. In 2031, someone else will have to take his place. Mas Deus é brasileiro, não é?
