President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva overcame a first-round deficit to defeat the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro by about 3.6 points, setting up a renewed test of relations with the Trump administration.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won re-election in Brazil on Sunday, defeating Senator Flávio Bolsonaro in a runoff that closed one of the most closely watched campaigns in the hemisphere and immediately opened a fight over its legitimacy.
With all ballots counted, Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court reported that Mr. Lula received 51.79 percent of the valid vote, about 64.3 million votes, to 48.21 percent, about 59.8 million, for Mr. Bolsonaro, according to the Brazilian Senate’s news agency and The Guardian’s results tracker. Turnout was about 80.8 percent.
The result is a reversal of the first round on Oct. 4, when Mr. Bolsonaro, the eldest son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, led with 47.03 percent to Mr. Lula’s 45.16 percent. Mr. Lula, 80, will be inaugurated on Jan. 5, 2027, to a fourth, nonconsecutive term — the first Brazilian presidential candidate to come back from a first-round deficit and win.
A challenge from the losing side
Mr. Bolsonaro did not concede. In remarks reported by Anadolu Agency, he said he would ask the courts to void the vote.
“We will engage our legal team and seek to have these elections annulled,” he said. “I will not accept that the rules of the game have been arbitrarily changed — once again — by Lula’s friends on the Federal Supreme Court.”
His complaint centers on a decision late on Election Day by Justice Cristiano Zanin, who extended voting until 7 p.m. in some areas after the Lula campaign reported failures in public transportation that it said kept voters from the polls. Justice Zanin was Mr. Lula’s personal lawyer before the president appointed him to the court in 2023. The Bolsonaro campaign had also requested extensions in some places, according to Anadolu.
The margin, more than four million votes, is wider than Mr. Lula’s 2022 victory over Jair Bolsonaro, who was sentenced to 27 years in prison after the Supreme Court convicted him last year of plotting to overturn that election.
Washington’s position
The Trump administration had made Brazil a foreign-policy priority. In July 2025, President Trump imposed tariffs on Brazilian goods under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, declaring a national emergency over what the White House described as the politically motivated prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro and Brazilian court actions against American technology companies and the free speech of Americans. The Treasury Department that month sanctioned Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who oversaw the Bolsonaro case, under the Global Magnitsky Act; it lifted those sanctions in December.
Mr. Trump did not formally endorse Flávio Bolsonaro, the BBC reported. The White House is also intent on curbing China’s influence in South America, the BBC noted; Brazil holds the world’s second-largest reserves of rare earth elements.
In an Oct. 15 reply to Senator Bernie Sanders and House Democrats who had asked the administration to commit in advance to recognizing the result, the State Department said it supports “the right of the Brazilian people to a free and fair electoral process” and would keep working with “the elected government” on security, trade and investment, The Rio Times reported. The department defended the earlier measures against Justice Moraes as resting on “documented evidence of serious human rights violations.” In August, a State Department official told the Brazilian outlet g1 that the United States respects whatever government Brazilians choose through free and fair elections.
Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, led by Senators Jeanne Shaheen, Tim Kaine and Peter Welch, had accused the administration of a “campaign of interference and destabilization” in Brazil in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
As of Sunday night the White House had not commented on the outcome, Folha de S.Paulo reported. Donald Trump Jr. wrote that “if a conservative government in Brazil did this, everyone in the mainstream press in America would lose their minds,” according to Al Jazeera.
Trade talks ahead
The practical agenda is trade. Brazilian goods still face U.S. tariffs of 37.5 percent, and negotiations that stalled during the campaign are expected to resume after the vote, Folha reported. Mr. Lula and Mr. Trump met in Kuala Lumpur in October 2025; Mr. Lula has said Brazil will “never fit into anyone’s backyard,” while signaling he wants a working relationship with Washington.
He returns to office facing the most right-leaning Congress since Brazil’s return to democracy, the BBC noted, which will constrain his domestic agenda even as environmental groups welcomed a result they see as protecting the Amazon.
Reaction in California
California officials, who have built ties with Brazil on climate policy, welcomed the result. Governor Gavin Newsom’s office said California was “proud to stand with Brazil and partners around the world who share our commitment to defending democracy, protecting our environment, strengthening workers’ rights, and building an economy that works for working families,” Al Jazeera reported.
Representative Ro Khanna of Fremont, the Silicon Valley Democrat who has become one of his party’s leading voices on trade and foreign policy, hailed the outcome on X. “People all across the world are fighting back against extremism. With Lula in Brazil, they just won,” he wrote, adding that Mr. Trump “must respect the results and not undermine Brazil’s elections.”
For the Bay Area, Brazil matters as a market, a source of the critical minerals the technology industry depends on, and a regulatory front line: its courts have been among the most assertive in the world in ordering American social media platforms to remove content. How Mr. Lula’s fourth term and Mr. Trump’s second manage those disputes will be watched closely in Silicon Valley.
Nasrin Haidari covers foreign affairs and geopolitics, including diplomacy, trade disputes and conflicts, and their ties to California and the Pacific. More from Nasrin Haidari
