Brazil in dispute: the offensive enters the runoff
Flávio Bolsonaro won the first round with 47.03% of valid votes, against 45.16% for Lula, a difference of 2.2 million votes. The Liberal Party took the largest Senate caucus since 1988 and the largest single-party caucus in the Chamber of Deputies. Abstention, at 21.08%, is the highest since 1998. The decision is on 25 October.
The first round ended after midnight on 4 October 2026 with the question the Planalto Palace spent the whole campaign trying to avoid: there will be a second vote, and the president arrives at it from behind. With 99.99% of the ballots counted, the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) confirmed senator Flávio Bolsonaro, of the Liberal Party (PL), with 56,104,268 votes, 47.03% of valid votes, against 53,876,617 for president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, of the Workers’ Party (PT), 45.16%, according to the official result. The gap is 2,227,651 votes, 1.87 percentage points. The second vote is on 25 October.
In São Paulo, the president spoke like a man who had bet on a victory that did not come. “I confess I was convinced I would win the election in the first round,” said Lula, who announced a new campaign from Monday the 5th, to discuss “what Brazil I think has to be built”. “The runoff is the moment of the proof of nine. It is time for us to show the true photograph of Brazil [...] and of the Brazil we want.”
Flávio followed the count with his family at a house in Lago Sul, in Brasília, and read the result as a verdict. “I could not be more fulfilled to identify that Brazil wants change. I was happy with the result in every region,” said the senator, who also criticised the interference of the Supreme Federal Court (STF) in the election.
The night, however, did not decide only who enters the final stretch ahead. The ballot boxes handed the Bolsonarist right the Congress it went after, with the Senate at the centre of the plan; they recorded the highest abstention since 1998; and they gave an electoral base to a dispute the Brazilian government spent the year treating as the target of a foreign offensive with its own name, documents and declared targets.
The Congress that came out of the polls
The Senate was one of the campaign’s main targets, and the election left the candidate’s party a third of the way ahead of the rest. The PL elected 19 senators and will hold 28 of the 81 seats from February 2027, the largest caucus at the start of a legislature since 1988, according to the Senate news service. The second-largest caucus, the PT’s, has nine senators. Then come the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB), with eight, Republicanos and Progressistas, with six each, Brazil Union and the Social Democratic Party (PSD), with five each, the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB), with four, the New Party, with three, Podemos and the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), with two each, and the Sustainability Network and the Democratic Labour Party (PDT), with one each. One senator-elect has no party.
In five states voters chose two PL senators each: Rio de Janeiro, Santa Catarina, Mato Grosso do Sul, Rondônia and the Federal District. Two of them are Michelle Bolsonaro, elected in the Federal District alongside Bia Kicis, and Carlos Bolsonaro, elected in Santa Catarina alongside Carol de Toni, which will put the mother and the brother of former president Jair Bolsonaro on the floor together with the convicted patriarch. In Santa Catarina, Carol de Toni took 2,630,319 votes, 33.47% of the valid ones, and Carlos Bolsonaro 1,991,041, 25.34%, according to Estadão: with Jorge Seif, elected in 2022, the PL will now hold all three seats of the state. Of the 54 seats up for renewal, 40 went to new senators and 14 to incumbents re-elected, out of 32 who tried to return.
Women elected to the Senate number 12, the highest figure in history, and the female caucus is expected to reach 18 seats at the start of the next legislature.
In the Chamber of Deputies, the PL elected 121 members, the largest single-party caucus in the house, according to the TSE tables. The largest caucus, counting federations, belongs to the União Progressista federation, formed by Brazil Union and Progressistas, with 104 deputies. The Brasil da Esperança federation, which brings together the PT, the Communist Party of Brazil and the Green Party, has 81. Then come the PSD, with 42, the MDB and Republicanos, with 41 each, Podemos, with 20, the PSDB-Cidadania federation, with 18, the PDT, with 16, the PSB and the federation of the Socialism and Liberty Party with the Sustainability Network, with 15 each, the Renovação Solidária federation, with 12, and Avante, with seven.
The explanation for that arithmetic lies in the way the vote arrived. In the states the right won, the presidential candidate, the governor, both senators and the federal deputies of the same camp had practically identical tallies, with differences in the thousands. “They vote as a bloc,” summarised host Breno Altman on the programme 20 Minutos, of Opera Mundi, on the night of the first round. “There was an organisation of the vote that is remarkable, and the left does not have it,” answered political analyst Beto Vasques, of the Laboratory of Public Opinion and Digital Media (Labop). In Rio Grande do Sul, the PL elected governor Luciano Zucco outright in the first round, alongside both senators. The logic, however, does not repeat itself in the same way on 25 October: without the proportional election and without the pull of the governors, the bloc loses the engine that took that voter to the polls.
The bill that the 2027 calendar will present is another matter. At least 31 senators-elect defend the impeachment of STF justices, according to a survey by Estadão, Globo counted 34; added to the 17 sitting senators who have already spoken out, that would make 51, although the headline of Globo's story says 50 (link). That is a simple majority of the house, and the reason the Senate became the campaign’s priority: some one hundred impeachment requests await a decision in the drawer of the house speaker, Davi Alcolumbre, of Brazil Union of Amapá.
The election also decided who will make the next appointments to the Court. The next president will name four STF justices: the seat of Luís Roberto Barroso, still open after the rejection of the nomination of attorney general Jorge Messias, and those of Luiz Fux, Cármen Lúcia and Gilmar Mendes, who retire by 2030. Two justices today were appointed by Jair Bolsonaro. Allies of the senator treat the crisis on the Court as the campaign’s best opportunity, and campaign coordinator Rogério Marinho is named as the bolsonarista choice to preside over the Senate from 2027.
The containment wall
The comparison Vasques drew on the night of the count is with 2022. “If in 22 Lula managed to build a containment wall, I think this year he managed only damage limitation. He was the sweeper behind the defence,” he said. The conservative advance of 2026 would have been larger without the president at the top of the ticket: any other candidate of the left, in his assessment, would have harvested a more dramatic result.
The wave has a geography, and it is not that of 1989. The agribusiness belt, the “agrob” the conversation in the programme drew over the map, runs through the interior of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Paraná, São Paulo, part of Minas Gerais, Tocantins, Goiás, Rondônia, Acre, Roraima and part of Pará. It is the region where population and income grow fastest and where, in the analyst’s description, cultural codes distinct from those of the Northeast consolidate, the region that keeps voting progressive and where Lula won comfortably. The Southeast worked as a pendulum: São Paulo and Minas Gerais, two of the three largest electoral colleges in the country, together hold close to 40% of the national electorate, and both ended with Flávio ahead.
The turnaround Brazil has never seen
If Lula turns it around, it will be the first time. No Brazilian presidential election has been reversed in the runoff since 1989: in every contest decided over two votes, whoever led in the first led in the second, as Estadão’s history of the runoffs shows. The difficulty has a number: the president arrives on 25 October with 45.16% of valid votes, against the 48.43% he added up in the first round of 2022, when he finished 5.23 points ahead of Jair Bolsonaro, who had 43.20%, according to the TSE.
The overall picture measured before the vote was a technical tie: in the two polls Datafolha conducted in September 2026, with 4,003 in-person interviews, Lula stood at 46% of intentions and Flávio at 44%, with 8% blank and null, according to Globo.
For Vasques, the polls did not err. The average of the last rounds gave Lula a three-and-a-half-point lead, and the ballot box delivered two points to Flávio. Quaest, released the day before, came closest: it predicted 46% to 45% of valid votes, and the count gave 45% to 47%, both figures inside the margin. At Datafolha, Lula’s number hit, but Flávio’s did not: the institute had him at 42% and he took 47%. At Atlas, Flávio’s variation also left the margin: 44.1% the day before, 47% at the ballot box. “A poll, when it gives a value within a margin of two points either way, does not err, because statistically it would be inside the interval,” the analyst said.
The hypothesis he had been defending since before the vote is that this election works as a third round of 2022, with the runoff’s tactical vote brought forward into the first round. If that is so, the best compass was the runoff simulation, rather than first-round vote intention: across the 12 rounds from Datafolha and the 10 or 11 from Quaest, the mean, the median and the mode pointed to a technical tie, with Lula around two points ahead, which is the 1.8-point distance by which he beat Jair Bolsonaro in the second vote of 2022.
What displaced the news coverage in the final week, in his assessment, was the cancellation of the Globo television network debate scheduled for the night of 1 October. The network dropped the confrontation after two court decisions handed down hours before the programme: justice Estela Aranha, of the TSE, barred the display of Lula’s empty podium, after he had pulled out of the debate, and the questions addressed to him; and justice Gilmar Mendes, of the STF, ordered the inclusion of candidate Renan Santos, of Missão, outside the network’s invitation criteria. Flávio announced he would not attend and called the decisions censorship, and the first round of 2026 became the first since 2006 without one of the best-placed candidates in a televised debate, according to Folha de S.Paulo. In the qualitative groups, Vasques said, voters first rebuked the senator for pulling out at the last minute; later, when the campaign began calling the episode censorship by the Supreme Court, the target became Lula. “The president had managed to get out of that STF agenda, and suddenly it came back through the back door.”
Quaest captured the movement in the two largest colleges in the final week: in Minas Gerais, Lula’s lead turned into a tie; in São Paulo, it turned into a victory for Flávio, who finished the first round with 12,922,023 votes in the state, against 9,505,413 for Lula, a gap of 3.4 million, and a win in 605 of the 645 municipalities of São Paulo, with Lula ahead in 39 of them, among them the capital, where he took 46.58%, according to g1. “Many voters ended up voting for Flávio on the back of the vote for Tarcísio,” the analyst assessed, on the pull of the re-elected governor of São Paulo.
Flávio’s path runs through a transfer that was already measured before the vote. In a poll released on 23 September 2026, Datafolha showed that, among the voters of the four candidates outside the polarisation, the senator drew 43% of intentions against 30% for Lula, with 26% blank and null, according to Folha de S.Paulo. The breakdown pointed to 48% to 25% among the voters of Romeu Zema, of the New Party, 43% to 22% among those of Renan Santos, of Missão, 43% to 30% among those of Ronaldo Caiado, of the PSD, and 41% to 35% among those of Augusto Cury, of Avante. The four added up to 15 points in the September 2026 polls, and the tactical vote was the senator’s closing argument, as he spent the final stretch asking for the consolidation of the right in a single round.
The campaign does not treat an endorsement as a vote. The internal assessment, according to Globo, is that statements by Cury, Zema and Caiado carry political weight, but only part of the electorate follows the guidance. Renan Santos is out of the count after criticising Flávio during the first round. With Caiado’s group, expectations are lower, and there is doubt about the PSD president, Gilberto Kassab, who has not taken a position. On the map, the senator will go after the Northeast, where he lost in all nine states, and counts on more frequent appearances by the governor of São Paulo, Tarcísio de Freitas, of Republicanos, already re-elected. Lula won in 12 of the 27 states: the nine of the Northeast, Amazonas, Pará and Amapá. Flávio won the other 15, among them São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, the three in the South and the four in the Center-West, according to the Reuters map.
The 33 million who stayed away
Abstention was 21.08%, the highest since 1998 and 0.13 point above the first round of 2022. More than 33 million voters did not turn up, and of the 158,745,463 eligible to vote, 78.92% went to the polls, according to Estadão. Mato Grosso do Sul recorded the highest rate, 23.85%, and Ceará the lowest, 15.33%. The 2022 election had 20.95% of absences in the first round; 2018, 20.33%; 2014, 19.39%.
Those who did vote also declared less enthusiasm. A Travessia poll for Estadão released on 2 October 2026 found that four in every ten Brazilians would go to the polls driven by discouragement, anger or disbelief, and that 20.2% were still not certain they would show up.
Vasques works with three types of swing voter: the pure one, who oscillates directly between the two candidates and has become increasingly rare; the conservative one, who oscillates between abstaining, casting a blank or null vote and voting for Flávio; and the progressive one, who oscillates between Lula and abstention. In every case, the news is what moves the vote, and that is why the debate episode weighed in his account.
On the absence, the analyst’s reading is that abstention stayed almost stable relative to 2022 and that it tends to grow in the second vote, because the proportional campaign and the governor races, which work as a machine to get voters out of the house, leave the stage. The typical absentee of the Lulista camp, a voter of low schooling and income, is, in his assessment, the most sensitive to mobilisation on 25 October, when there is a single vote to type. He also raised a hypothesis that went unanswered in the early hours: part of the right’s bosses may have no interest in a Flávio victory, because the Bolsonaro family would keep control of anti-Petism and project eight years in power. “Many bosses of the right do not want Flávio elected; they prefer a moribund Lula, fragile, against the ropes.”
The offensive had an address
A week before the vote, the Brazilian government turned suspicion into procedure. On 1 October, the Attorney General’s Office (AGU) asked the Federal Police (PF) and the Prosecutor General’s Office (PGR) to investigate the alleged financing by Donald Trump’s government of interference in the Brazilian election, after the British newspaper The Guardian revealed that the State Department directed US$ 1 million, some R$ 5.1 million, to a project aimed at groups that contest the STF’s actions. The criminal complaint signed by attorney general Jorge Messias asks that it be established who took part in the operation and who would receive the money in Brazil, according to Agência Brasil.
The request was not born that week. On 23 September 2026, Lula’s campaign had already gone to the TSE asking the Court to rule on the risk of foreign money influencing the result, and the Planalto’s alert was older: it began in January 2026, after the US military operation that captured Nicolás Maduro in Caracas, and grew with Trump’s public support for the ruling party’s candidate in Honduras and with the US$ 20 billion package from the United States Treasury for Javier Milei’s Argentina. In April 2026, the monitoring extended to Hungary, Peru and Colombia. In the Planalto’s reading, the pressure over Pix, over the regulation of digital platforms and over critical minerals is part of the same movement, according to Poder360.
What Washington asked for is documented. In 2025, the United States government handed Itamaraty a list of 21 points that went beyond trade: four of them dealt with Brazilian political-institutional questions, among them the demand that “political dissidents” be able to take part in the 2026 presidential election, as Poder360 revealed. The offensive has a name. The National Security Strategy sent to the US Congress in November 2025 has a section titled “Western Hemisphere: The Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” and states that the United States will “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere”. A month later, after Maduro’s capture, Trump renamed the doctrine: “The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we’ve superseded it by a lot. They now call it the Donroe doctrine,” he said on 3 January 2026.
The instrument of that policy is the Shield of the Americas, launched on 5 March 2026 with its inaugural summit two days later, in Miami, under the United States Southern Command. On 22 September 2026, the same day as Lula’s speech at the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN), the coalition released the Joint Statement on Defending Hemispheric Sovereignty, signed by 15 governments, with a list of 24 criminal organisations treated as “transnational narco-terrorists”. Item 16 is Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC); item 17 is Comando Vermelho (CV). Brazil does not sign the statement and stayed out of the coalition along with Mexico. Both Brazilian factions had already been designated specially designated global terrorists by the State Department on 28 May 2026, and foreign terrorist organisations on 5 June 2026.
Against Brazil, the other arm of the offensive is commercial. The Section 301 investigation under the Trade Act of 1974 concluded on 15 July 2026 and imposed an additional 25% tariff on most Brazilian imports, with exemptions for beef, instant coffee, orange juice and civil aircraft, in force since 22 July. The Planalto rejected the decision and called the day “a regrettable landmark” in relations between the two countries, in a note to the press in which it attributed the tariff barrage to the “active collaboration of the Bolsonaro family” and announced it would invoke the Reciprocity Act and the World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement mechanism.
So far there is a document demanding an election with no restriction on “dissidents”, a coalition listing Brazilian factions without Brazil’s participation, a tariff applied over issues such as Pix and platform regulation, and a US$ 1 million transfer that the AGU wants the PF and the PGR to explain. In his review of the vote, the TSE president, Kassio Nunes Marques, said the international risk monitoring teams identified “no concrete indication of international interference” in the electoral process, according to the TSE.
Washington also entered the final stretch calculation, and Vasques’s reading is that the White House “was very skilful in the last two weeks” and entered a “sepulchral silence”: words from Trump or Marco Rubio in those days would help Lula, and the US government began to operate “under the sheets”. With a runoff in which the candidate it backs starts ahead, the analyst said, the support tends to continue, in the most discreet possible form, which is the most effective.
The platforms and the rule that shrank
The 2026 election was the first in Brazil with written rules for artificial intelligence (AI). TSE Ordinance 463, of 27 July 2026, required providers with more than five million monthly active users in the country to deliver, by 16 August 2026, electoral compliance plans describing how they handle AI-generated content, the moderation of coordinated inauthentic behaviour networks and advertising transparency. The platforms met the deadline, according to Conjur. The list of those that delivered, published by the legal news outlet JOTA, brings together Google, Discord, Kwai, LinkedIn, Mercado Livre, Meta, OpenAI, Pinterest, TikTok, Telegram and X.
The initial design was tougher. The TSE draft provided for shorter deadlines, more detail, external auditing and monthly reports. The final version, signed by the Court’s president, Kassio Nunes Marques, extended the deadlines, reduced the requirements and swapped the monthly reports for an annual filing, as the legal news outlet JOTA reported.
What the platforms promised is written in the plans. In the document it submitted to the TSE in September 2026, Meta provided for labels and context information for false content, removal of harmful content, a ban on political advertising on WhatsApp and rules for the responsible use of generative artificial intelligence, according to Agência Brasil. What circulated is something else. A report by Agência Lupa released in July, which reviewed 632 publications from five electoral cycles, showed that 73.1% of the fact-checks of viral rumours dealt with electronic ballot boxes, the count, ballot-box records and how the TSE works, and that 90.9% of the 286 viral items analysed were labelled false, according to the study Anatomia da Desinformação Eleitoral.
On election day, the Court had to act alone: Nunes Marques ordered WhatsApp to block the circulation of a false video about the ballot boxes, with a fine of R$ 100,000 per hour of non-compliance with the ruling.
The evangelicals and the vote the campaign went after
The evangelical electorate, 29% of the total, is the senator’s most solid base. A Datafolha poll in April 2026 gave Flávio 49% of intentions against 25% for Lula in the first round, and 61% against 30% in the runoff simulation. Among Catholics, 49% of the sample, the picture reverses: Lula had 43% and Flávio 30%, with 51% to 41% in the runoff.
The migration of leaders to the PL candidate was recorded during the campaign. Bishop Robson Rodovalho, of the Sara Nossa Terra church, summed up the movement: “No army prevails divided. One way or another, we will have to tune ourselves.” Pastor Marco Feliciano reminded Flávio, at a service, that in 2022 the coordinators of Jair Bolsonaro’s campaign counted on 90% of evangelicals and discovered that around 30% did not vote for him.
The commitment being demanded has an address in Congress. The Evangelical Parliamentary Front presided over the session that approved, on 28 May 2026, constitutional amendment 5/2023, by deputy Marcelo Crivella, of Republicanos, which extends the churches’ tax immunity to the purchase of goods and the contracting of services by temples, day-care centres, care homes, therapeutic communities and seminaries. The text passed in two rounds, 385 to 93 and 368 to 96, with the favourable guidance of the PL and the bloc formed by Brazil Union, the PSD, the MDB, Progressistas, the PSDB, Podemos and Republicanos, and is now in the Senate, according to Rádio Senado. The Finance Ministry estimates that the extension will raise the value-added tax rate created by the tax reform by around 0.5 percentage point.
It is this electorate that elected Michelle Bolsonaro and Carlos Bolsonaro, and it is the one the promise of change in the STF’s composition reaches most directly: of the four justices the next president will appoint, three retire within the next five years.
What the vote on 25 October decides
The runoff decides who governs the answer. Lula arrives at it with the speech he delivered at the UN on 22 September 2026, when he named the mechanisms of the offensive and said that sovereignty is not outsourced, and with a Congress that, at best, will be an adversary: the legislature that takes office on 1 February 2027 has 28 PL senators, 121 PL deputies and 51 senators willing to open proceedings against STF justices. Flávio arrives with a 2.2 million-vote lead, with the largest Senate caucus since 1988 in the party that launched him and with the expectation that the votes of the defeated candidates of the right will add to his.
In the reading Vasques presented on the night of the first round, the second vote will be decided less by moderation or radicalisation than by a war of rejections. “The campaign to deconstruct the adversary is more important than anything,” he said. The target is the senator: bad company, his father’s conviction, inexperience in government and the image of dependence on the family, in an electorate that, according to him, has already shown it wants change and has not yet bought the idea that Flávio is safe change. Lula would have three weeks and, in the analyst’s count, at least three debates, on Band and Globo, to contrast projects and legacies, in a plebiscitary election: the question the voter answered in the first round is whether the president deserves four more years, and the campaign’s job is to shift it to the alternative. The warning he left is about the ground: “The winds of change are dominant, the spirit of the times is on the side of the right.”
None of this, however, is automatic. The Brazilian presidential election has never been turned around in the runoff, and it is that statistic the government is trying to turn into a campaign in the three weeks that remain. The record abstention, the 26% blank and null among the voters of the candidates outside the polarisation and the resistance of much of the evangelical electorate to obeying the guidance of pastors are the numbers that keep the decision open. What is already decided is the other side: whoever wins on 25 October will govern with the Congress elected amid Washington’s political offensive and with a Senate majority that treats the Supreme Court as a target.