Brazil election heads to runoff as Flávio Bolsonaro edges past Lula in first round

Brazil's presidential election will be decided in a second round on October 25 after neither candidate secured more than half the valid votes in Sunday's first round, according to the official count.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, seeking a fourth term, finished about 1.8 percentage points behind Flávio Bolsonaro — a gap of roughly 2.2 million votes. Flávio Bolsonaro, the eldest son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, also fell short of the 50 per cent threshold that Brazilian law requires for an outright victory, so the two will meet again in a runoff.

"I confess to you that I was convinced I would win the election in the first round," Lula told supporters in São Paulo, acknowledging the result was not what his campaign had expected. He said the runoff would offer voters a direct choice between two competing visions for the country. "The second round is a new campaign."

Flávio Bolsonaro, speaking to reporters in Brasília, said the vote showed that Brazilians were demanding change. "It is the end of the era of the Workers Party (PT); it is a big change in our country," he said.

Analysts caution that a runoff is, in effect, a fresh election and that a first-round gap of less than two points leaves the contest open. Both camps will be watching the roughly 40 million voters who abstained or cast blank or invalid ballots.

The congressional results, however, pointed clearly in one direction. Candidates from the Bolsonaros' Liberal Party (PL) set voting records in the Chamber of Deputies, and the party emerged as the dominant force in the Senate and made significant gains in state assemblies. It won 19 Senate seats, which will raise its representation from 15 to 28 when the new term begins in February 2027 — the second-largest single-party bloc in the Senate since Brazil's return to democracy in 1985. Allies of Flávio Bolsonaro also account for a majority of the governors elected in the first round.

The most notable feature of the shift, analysts say, is where the PL's growth came from. Its gains were made largely at the expense of traditional conservative and centre-right parties, rather than Lula's PT, which held its position in both chambers of Congress. A similar pattern — of the right consolidating around a single force — has been observed in several other Latin American countries in recent years.

Religion was another factor. Evangelical voters have increasingly consolidated behind the Bolsonaro family, while Lula did not convert Brazil's large Catholic population into the advantage his campaign had anticipated. In municipalities with an above-average share of evangelical residents, Flávio Bolsonaro won 52 per cent of valid votes. In those with the highest concentration of Catholics, Lula's share was 11 percentage points lower than in his previous presidential bid. The pattern follows a campaign controversy over Nossa Senhora Aparecida, Brazil's patron saint, that became a political issue during the race.

Both campaigns now face the task of appealing beyond their core support. Flávio Bolsonaro's team is expected to make opposition to the PT the central theme of its runoff strategy and to court voters who backed other right-wing candidates eliminated in the first round. His campaign has secured political support in five states where gubernatorial races will go to a second round, compared with four for Lula.

With the runoff set for October 25, the outcome will rest on which side can bring out the voters who stayed home on Sunday, and on whether the first-round movement towards the right continues into the second.