By Orestes Enrique DIaz RodrIguez (Latinoamérica21)
HAVANA TIMES – The victory of far-right candidate Flavio Bolsonaro in the first round caught Lula by surprise, as he had expected to win the election outright. It is still difficult to understand what these expectations were based on. Pollsters showed that most Brazilians disapproved of his administration. In fact, on the only two occasions when the Workers’ Party (PT) won in the first round, in 2006 and 2010, it did so buoyed by high approval ratings for the incumbent administration, led by Lula himself. In Brazil, since the return of democracy, no presidential candidate from the ruling party has ultimately emerged victorious when that party faced negative public perceptions. After all, the best predictor of a president’s reelection prospects is their approval rating.
Such excessive confidence might have remained merely anecdotal had it not almost certainly contributed to Flavio Bolsonaro’s victory and that of his Liberal Party in both chambers of Congress. With the support of their right-wing allies (the Progressive Party and the Republicans), Bolsonaro’s supporters could come to control 59% of both chambers, potentially even shifting the balance of power within the Supreme Federal Court in their favor. To make matters worse, the coalition that won the first round also captured the governorships of the most populous and wealthiest states. According to Brazilian political scientist Rivera Hoyos, Bolsonarism has secured the conditions necessary to transform a change of governing party into a change of regime.
Flavio Bolsonaro has not yet secured the presidency. However, the candidates who finished third through fifth in the first round—psychiatrist and popular self-help author Augusto Cury and former governors Ronaldo Caiado and Romeu Zema—have announced their support for the far-right candidate in the runoff. Historical precedent also appears to favor Bolsonaro. In Brazil, no presidential candidate who lost the first round has ever managed to reverse that result in the second.
The Presidential Election Is Not Yet Decided
The course of events in Brazil does not necessarily follow the script of a chronicle of a death foretold. For the governing coalition, some signs are encouraging. Comparative experience shows that when an incumbent president runs for consecutive reelection, approval ratings tend not to stagnate or decline but rather to rise significantly. Their share of the vote also tends to increase.
Heading into the runoff of the 2014 presidential elections in Colombia and Brazil, the approval ratings of Presidents Juan Manuel Santos and Dilma Rousseff, respectively, rose by several percentage points, contributing to their electoral victories. A similar trend occurred in the 2019 presidential election in Argentina and the 2022 election in Brazil, involving former presidents Mauricio Macri and Jair Bolsonaro, although neither managed to win.
Thanks to a substantial reassessment of his administration between the primaries and the first round, Macri managed to avoid the electoral debacle suggested by the preliminary results before the first round. Meanwhile, Jair Bolsonaro’s approval rating went from being clearly negative before the campaign to nearly matching his disapproval rating. This allowed him to put up a fierce fight against his rival Lula, ultimately losing by the narrowest of margins.
In the three weeks following Brazil’s first round, the main polling firms have begun recording an upward trend in Lula’s approval rating, to varying degrees. According to Datafolha, its October 15 survey showed a statistical tie between approval and disapproval. Lula’s administration had not yet achieved a positive rating, but it had managed to emerge from negative territory. Interestingly, the survey was conducted before the approval of the constitutional reform establishing two days of rest per week without any reduction in wages, a central plank of Lula’s campaign. The measure will benefit 14 million Brazilians.
Meanwhile, political scientist Rovira Kaltwasser has identified voter punishment of incumbent governments, particularly those on the left, as one of the main conditions behind the far right’s rise to power in the region. Indeed, in 2023, Kirchnerism suffered a crushing electoral defeat that Javier Milei capitalized on. In Chile in 2025, the governing Broad Front coalition and its candidate Jeannette Jara were overwhelmingly defeated by Jose Antonio Kast and the Republican Party. By contrast, in Brazil’s presidential first round, Lula and the PT lost by less than two percentage points. This result reflects an extremely close, partial defeat in which we do not necessarily see voters punishing the government.
More Than an Election
The significance of next Sunday’s runoff may extend far beyond that of any ordinary election. Given the enormous institutional power accumulated by Bolsonarism after the first round, if it also gains control of the executive branch, it would have the opportunity to move toward subordinating institutional checks and balances and establishing a right-wing populist regime.
We should not forget that toward the end of Jair Bolsonaro’s 2018–2022 term, Bolsonarism displayed its most authoritarian side, going so far as to threaten to reject election results when they turned against it. And just one week after Lula’s inauguration in January 2023, Bolsonaro’s supporters orchestrated an unprecedented mass assault on the country’s principal branches of government.
As he approaches his 81st birthday, the outcome of the runoff could ultimately define the contours of Lula’s political legacy. How a political career ends matters. The image of Lula handing over the presidential sash to Jair Bolsonaro’s son would hardly be the ideal conclusion. Nearly eighteen years of Lula and the Workers’ Party in power would end with the transfer of the country’s highest office to their very antithesis: the Bolsonaro clan.
Throughout his political career, Lula has been forced to reinvent himself on numerous occasions. He first won the presidency in 2002 after three consecutive defeats. During his first administration, he managed to secure approval for his social policies and emerge unscathed from the Mensalão corruption scandal, which landed his chief of staff Jose Dirceu in prison and also implicated Communications Minister Luiz Gushiken, Transport Minister Anderson Adauto, and a dozen members of Congress.
Lula then managed, after completing his two terms, to leave as his successor the first woman in Brazil’s history to hold the presidency. In 2018, he went to prison, but after a year and a half he secured his release and, as a presidential candidate, went on to wrest the presidency from an incumbent far-right leader.
Now, in the words of journalist and political scientist Giancarlo Summa, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva faces his final and most difficult test of political survival. Will there still be room for one last reinvention?
First published in Spanish by Latinoamerica21 and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.