A month ago, few people in Brasília would have predicted this. Flávio Bolsonaro came out of the first round ahead, with 47.03 percent of the valid votes to Lula’s 45.16. By October 25, the order had flipped: 51.76 percent for Lula, 48.24 for Flávio, a gap of about four million votes. Since Brazil’s return to democracy, no candidate who finished second in the first round had ever won a runoff before.
It would be easy to treat the result as a replay of 2022, with the old union leader holding off the Bolsonaros once more. But I argue here that this misses what was actually on the ballot. The runoff was less a choice between two men than a verdict on a specific model of the Right, built on three pillars: a punitive politics that treats public security as a war on crime; the return of the armed forces to the center of public life; and a claim to power grounded in a family name rather than in a party or a program. That Right had been winning almost everywhere in South America. In Brazil, it lost.
The Right had been winning almost everywhere in South America. In Brazil, it lost.
The Roots of Lula’s Victory
Lula’s comeback has a clear geography. Turnout rose between the two rounds, from 78.92 to 80.79 percent. The country’s edges gave Lula his floor: in the Northeast, his share climbed from 63.77 to 69.37 percent and he carried all nine states, while the Amazonian North ended almost exactly level. But the swing that reversed the result came from the center. In Minas Gerais, the second-largest electorate, he overturned his first-round deficit, and his gains there and in São Paulo supplied most of the movement in the margin.
Income-level data are not yet available, but the map points in one direction: the popular classes of the territories furthest from Brasília and São Paulo decided this election. These are the voters of small towns in the sertão, of the urban peripheries, of an interior that pollsters reach only with difficulty and that often stays home in the first round. This time they came out, and in large numbers. The part of Brazil unmoved by the war on crime or by nostalgia for the generals turned out to be big enough to win.
The Lingering Power of the Bolsonaro Name
The promised pardon for Jair Bolsonaro was the point where three of the far right’s ideological pillars met: punishment for political enemies, impunity for the military, and loyalty to the family. Jair Bolsonaro is serving 27 years and three months for his attempted coup in 2023, and 20 officers were convicted with him, five of them senior. His son Flávio had promised an amnesty and a presidential pardon for them if Congress refused to pass one. Freeing his father meant freeing the generals too. The first consequence of Sunday’s vote therefore falls on the Federal Supreme Court: its rulings will stand. In a region where those who attempt coups with military support seldom pay for it, that counts for a great deal.
Still, writing the [Bolsonaro] family’s political obituary would be premature.
Still, writing the family’s political obituary would be premature. Flávio, who likes to call himself a “vaccinated Bolsonaro,” lost after winning the first round with his father in prison. Declining dynasties do not usually perform like that. Two days after the runoff, however, he fled: defying a Supreme Court travel ban issued in a money-laundering investigation, he crossed into Argentina and flew to Florida, reportedly with the help of Milei’s government, on a private jet operated by Baires Fly, a company entangled in Argentina’s ANDIS corruption scandal. An heir who leads the opposition from Miami, as his brother Eduardo already does, leaves the field at home open to others.
Even so, the surname is still the strongest asset on the Brazilian right, and it will likely still be in 2030, when Lula, who turns 81 this week, will not be running. What opens now is a contest over succession. The movement may stay with the sons or it may pass to someone like Tarcísio de Freitas, São Paulo’s governor and Jair Bolsonaro’s former infrastructure minister, who was comfortably re-elected in the first round on October 4, and who could offer much the same program without a father’s trial attached to it.
Bucking the Regional Trend
Brazil’s result is all the more striking because the rest of the region has gone the other way. In June, Peru elected Keiko Fujimori in her fourth attempt; her father dissolved Congress in 1992 with the army behind him. Colombia elected Abelardo de la Espriella, a celebrity lawyer-turned-outsider candidate who promised mega-prisons and an end to peace talks with armed groups. In March, at his Doral resort, Trump launched the “Shield of the Americas,” an anti-cartel coalition whose members committed themselves to the use of lethal military force. Argentina’s Javier Milei, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa, Paraguay’s Santiago Peña, Bolivia’s Rodrigo Paz, and Honduras’s Nasry Asfura signed on as founders, and José Antonio Kast, then Chile’s president-elect, was in the room. Brazil, Colombia and Peru stayed away. Two of those three have since moved right. The largest has not.
The regional picture is therefore rather different from what it was a month ago. A right-wing belt still runs from Buenos Aires to Bogotá, coordinated from Washington and held together by a common security doctrine. Outside it stands Lula’s Brazil, Sheinbaum’s Mexico, and Orsi’s Uruguay, with Venezuela still in transition. The list is short, but Brazil and Mexico together account for more than half of the region’s population and economic output, meaning Washington cannot claim hegemony over Latin America.
Brazil and Mexico together account for more than half of the region’s population and economic output, meaning Washington cannot claim hegemony over Latin America.
None of this amounts to a second pink tide. Chávez and Néstor Kirchner are gone, the commodity boom ended long ago, and two of Brazil’s Mercosur partners are governed by Milei and Peña. What Brazil can offer is more modest, and possibly more important: a refusal of the vocabulary of war. Flávio had proposed designating the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), Brazil’s largest criminal organization, born in São Paulo’s prisons, the Comando Vermelho, its main rival, based in Rio de Janeiro, and other urban militia groups as narco-terrorist organizations, and following the Salvadoran model of mass incarceration under a state of emergency. He discussed the plan with Bukele’s security minister, Gustavo Villatoro, at a meeting in São Paulo on August 30, and held up El Salvador as the reference for his own proposals.
Once organized crime is relabeled as terrorism, criminal policy turns into war policy, and soldiers on city streets gradually stop looking out of place. Lula’s victory keeps alive, in the region’s largest country, the idea that criminal organizations are a task for police, prosecutors, and financial investigators rather than for generals.
Lula’s Next Steps
That idea now has to survive the practice of government. The margin is narrow, and the next Congress is unlikely to be friendly: in the October 4 legislative elections, Flávio’s Liberal Party (PL) won 121 of the 513 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, against 88 for the federation led by Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT), and became the largest group in the Senate. Many of Flávio’s voters chose him because they fear crime and struggle with the cost of living, not because they miss the elder Bolsonaro.
If Lula answers those concerns by playing them down, he will hand Bolsonaro’s heirs their best argument for 2030. Pressure will come from the north as well. In 2025, with tariffs and with sanctions against Justice Alexandre de Moraes, Washington showed how it deals with a Brazil that puts its allies on trial. A president who stays out of the Shield of the Americas, criticizes Trump openly, and governs a country whose largest export market is China will be treated by the Trump administration as a serious problem.
For these reasons, the new government is likely to be judged less on foreign policy or economic reform than on public security. That is the ground on which the militarized right has built its majorities across the continent, and Lula will have to show that security can be provided by democratic means, without uniforms. Brazil’s standing in the region depends on this too, including its ability to hold Mercosur together and to carry its agreement with the European Union forward.
Lula will have to show that security can be provided by democratic means, without uniforms.
October 25 settled who will govern Brazil. It also showed that the militarized, hereditary illiberalism spreading across South America can be stopped. For now, what stopped it was about four million votes, most of them from the country’s peripheries. Lula’s last term will tell us whether that was a turning point or only a pause before Bolsonaro’s heirs try again.
Manuel Anselmi is Associate Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Bergamo. His research focuses on political ideologies, theories of populism, penal populism and Latin American politics, with particular attention to revolutionary Bolivarianism and the case of Morena in Mexico. He is the editor of the book series Lessico Democratico (Mondadori Università) and Democrazie e conflitti (Meltemi Editore). His main publications include: Chávez’s Children: Ideology, Education, and Society in Latin America (Lexington Books, 2015); Populism: An Introduction (Routledge, 2017); Multiple Populisms, co-edited with Paul Blokker (Routledge, 2019); Ideologie politiche (Mondadori Università, 2023); and The AMLO Administration in Mexico: Polity, Politics, and Policy, co-edited with José del Tronco (Bloomsbury, 2025).
Image made by Alberto Polimeni using “30/04/2026 – Pronunciamento à nação por ocasião do Dia do Trabalhador” by Ricardo Stuckert / PR and “12092026-PHOTO-2026-09-11-21-09-44-Edit” by Lula Oficial, both licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.
