Brazil’s Bolsonaro Wins First Round as Trump Allies Ride Red Wave

Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, won the first round of Brazil’s presidential election tonight with a surprisingly strong performance, extending a broader run of victories for Latin American right-wing candidates backed by Donald Trump.

The contest had tightened significantly in the weeks before voting, but most polls still showed incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva holding a single-digit lead.

Flávio Bolsonaro will now meet Lula in a second-round runoff on October 25. With 99% of the vote counted, Bolsonaro held a 47.2% to 44.9% advantage over Lula in an election the incumbent had been widely expected to win.

The immediate question dominating the aftermath is how pollsters could have missed the result by such a wide margin.

The dramatic polling miss is likely to strengthen the Brazilian right and the Bolsonaro camp, which have long accused the country’s leading pollsters of producing surveys that favor Lula and his Workers’ Party.

Polling also underestimated Jair Bolsonaro in the 2022 and 2018 elections, although those discrepancies were relatively small compared with the gap between the surveys and tonight’s results.

Bolsonaro delivered an especially powerful performance in his southern strongholds, winning Brazil’s three largest states by substantial margins:

In São Paulo, the country’s most populous state, Bolsonaro led Lula 52% to 38%.

In Minas Gerais, Brazil’s historic bellwether state, Bolsonaro held a 48% to 43% advantage. In his home stronghold of Rio de Janeiro, he defeated the incumbent 53% to 39%.

Lula built commanding leads in his traditional northeastern bases, including the vote-rich states of Bahia, Pernambuco and Ceará. Those margins, however, were not enough to offset Bolsonaro’s unprecedented strength across southern Brazil.

Flávio Bolsonaro maintained a close relationship with Donald Trump during the campaign. Trump made clear that he wanted to remove Lula, a longtime geopolitical adversary, from office.

The unexpected result is the latest in a series of right-wing victories across Latin America, where conservative candidates have recently gained power in Chile, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia.

The outcome is certain to trigger a period of reflection within Brazil’s left, including questions over whether Lula should have sought another term.

At 80, after three presidential terms and an attempt to win a fourth, Lula had been widely regarded as the only candidate capable of uniting Brazil’s divided and often-fractured left.

CONTINUE READING: Spain’s Prime Minister Calls Early Elections as Housing Crisis Pressure Mounts

Lula’s political career has included one of the country’s most remarkable comebacks. After being imprisoned on corruption charges, he was freed by Brazil’s Supreme Court and went on to defeat incumbent Jair Bolsonaro in a closely fought 2022 election.

Lula had famously promised in 2022 to serve only one term before reversing course. That decision now appears likely to work against him as he approaches what will almost certainly be his final electoral campaign.

Flávio Bolsonaro will face Lula in the October 25 runoff, entering the second round with several structural advantages.

In addition to vastly outperforming across the country, and proving the pollsters wrong, he is likely to win the majority of the votes of the major third-party candidates: Augusto Cury, Renan Santos, Ronaldo Caiado, and Romeu Zema.

Together, these four candidates received nearly 8% of the vote.

Caiado, Zema, and Santos are generally seen as candidates leaning to the political right, while Cury is a centrist. Caiado, Santos, and Cury have allegedly said they do not plan to make an endorsement in the second round.

If elected, Flavio Bolsonaro is all but certain to free his father, and senior Brazilian military officers, who are currently jailed on charges of planning a coup to remain in power following the 2022 election.

The election also saw other members of the Bolsonaro family ushered into higher office: Jair Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelly, was elected senator, as was his son Carlos, while another son, Renan, was elected federal deputy.

Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party also turned in strong results in races for both chambers of Brazil’s Congress, particularly in the Senate, where they are expected to hold 29 seats, compared to just 9 for Lula’s Workers Party.

In Brazil’s lower chamber, the Liberal Party is also expected to hold the greatest number of seats, with 121, while Brazil Fe, a left-wing coalition, is on track to secure 78 seats.

Political analyst Flavio Morgenstern argued, “This election was not about Flavio Bolsonaro vs. Lula. It’s about all of freedom-loving Brazil against the Brazilian Supreme Court. People have no voice in the institutions, and all the power in Brazil is concentrated in the Supreme Court.”

The Brazilian right and the Bolsonaro family have long butted heads with the nation’s Supreme Federal Court, which is dominated by justices appointed by the Workers Party.

While Bolsonaro appears to have the wind in his sails, it is too early to count out Lula in the second round election in three weeks. Lula is renowned as a smart and effective campaigner, and still commands a powerful electoral machinery.

Yet, is winning election to an unprecedented fourth term a feat too daunting for even Lula, the great giant of the Latin American left?