BRASÍLIA — Brazil’s presidential race just produced its biggest shock in a generation. Right-wing senator Flávio Bolsonaro finished first in Sunday’s election with 47 percent of the vote, beating the sitting president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who managed 45 percent. Neither cleared the majority needed to win outright, so the deeply polarized nation will vote again on October 25.
The result landed like a thunderclap because almost every poll had pointed the other way. Survey after survey put Lula in front heading into the weekend, and his camp had gone into Sunday expecting — privately, at least — a first-round win. Instead, it was the underdog who walked out ahead, the little-known senator who only a few months ago was plucked from obscurity by his father to carry the family name back to the presidency.
The name that did the work
Flávio Bolsonaro, 45, is the eldest son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is currently serving a 27-year prison sentence for attempting to overturn his 2022 defeat by Lula. Unable to run himself, the elder Bolsonaro anointed his son as his political heir — a choice that many analysts initially dismissed as a sentimental gesture from a man with nothing left but his name.
That name, it turned out, was enough. The Bolsonaro brand rallied Brazil’s conservative base behind the candidate despite a campaign thick with scandals and mudslinging on both sides. Flávio himself sounded genuinely surprised as results trickled in, telling supporters he was “truly happy” and predicting a “very real possibility” of victory in the runoff.
Lula, nearly 81 and chasing a fourth term that would cement his legacy, conceded the night had not gone as planned. “I admit I was convinced I would win in the first round,” he said. “The game is about to start. In extra time, we will win over the Brazilian people.” Then, flashing the football metaphors he loves: “I’m very good at knockout stages.”
A parliament tilts right
The presidential numbers were only half the story. Sunday also delivered a wave of landslide wins for the right in congressional and gubernatorial races, a massive setback for Lula’s Workers’ Party that will haunt whichever man wins the presidency. A hostile parliament can paralyze a Brazilian president — and a pro-Bolsonaro one would hand him a governing machine on day one.
Markets reacted instantly. The Brazilian stock market jumped 5.5 percent in early Monday trading, and the real surged more than 4 percent against the US dollar, as investors priced in a pro-business shift. Betting markets were even more emphatic: on Polymarket, Flávio Bolsonaro’s chances of taking the presidency surged to 85 percent on Monday.
Why this matters
Brazil is South America’s largest economy and its biggest democracy, and Sunday’s result extends a regional rightward march that Washington has been openly cheering. Donald Trump hosted the younger Bolsonaro at the White House and praised him during the campaign — stopping short of a formal endorsement, but the signal was unmistakable. Lula, for his part, has framed the election as a fight between democracy and “barbarism,” warning that Brazil’s sovereignty is at stake under American pressure.
There is, however, one number the Bolsonaro camp should not ignore: abstention. A record 21 percent of Brazil’s 158 million registered voters simply stayed home on Sunday — and voting is technically compulsory. That pool of disengaged voters is the only real variable left in the runoff, and it offers the Lula camp its one narrow path back. Few Brazilians, after all, voted with enthusiasm on Sunday; one lifelong Lula supporter, a 62-year-old caregiver, told reporters she switched to Bolsonaro at the ballot box just “to see what happens, to see if anything changes.”
Three weeks is not long in politics. But the polls were wrong once already, and in a country this divided, the knockout round — as Lula himself would say — is a different game entirely.
