Lula and Bolsonaro head to Brazil’s presidential runoff

Bolsonaro led the first-round count as his Liberal Party secured at least 18 Senate seats and won five governorships.RIO DE JANEIRO (CN) — President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro will face each other in Brazil’s presidential runoff on Oct. 25 after neither candidate won more than half the valid votes in Sunday’s election.With 99.84% of the votes counted, Bolsonaro, the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, had 47.07% of the valid votes, compared with Lula’s 45.12%, according to the Superior Electoral Court. Valid votes exclude blank and invalid ballots.Of Brazil’s 158.7 million eligible voters, 124.5 million had cast ballots. About 33.2 million voters did not turn out, an abstention rate of roughly 21%.Lula is seeking a fourth presidential term after serving from 2003 to 2010 and returning to office in 2023. Bolsonaro is seeking to bring his family back to the presidency four years after his father’s defeat by Lula.The former president is serving a 27-year, three-month sentence for attempting a coup after the 2022 election. He named his son as his preferred presidential candidate in late 2025.Lula said election results are often unexpected and that he had been convinced he would win in the first round. He recalled having the same expectation when he faced Geraldo Alckmin, now his vice president, in 2006.He said a new campaign would begin Monday, with only two candidates and an opportunity to show the differences between their proposals for Brazil.“No one can offer Brazilian society a future more than we can,” he said.Bolsonaro said he was pleased with the result and nearly 56 million Brazilians had voted for change, despite polls that placed him behind Lula.“The end of the Workers’ Party era has been declared,” he said.He pledged to form “a government that will appoint at least four Supreme Court justices who will not try to interfere in elections.”In the race for the 54 Senate seats up for election, Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party had secured at least 18 seats, while Lula’s Workers’ Party had won at least three.Liberal Party winners include former first lady Michelle Bolsonaro in the Federal District, along with Carlos Bolsonaro, the presidential candidate’s brother, in Santa Catarina.In the governor’s races, Tarcísio de Freitas, a member of the Republican Party and an ally of Flávio Bolsonaro, won reelection in the first round in São Paulo, Brazil’s most populous state. The Liberal Party also won the governorships of Paraná, Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Rondônia and Roraima.Supreme Court Justice Kassio Nunes Marques, who heads the Superior Electoral Court, said Sunday afternoon that voting was proceeding without significant problems. By then, election officials had replaced 1,121 electronic voting machines, about 0.2% of the total, without affecting votes already recorded, according to the court.Nunes Marques also said the court’s teams had found no concrete evidence of foreign interference in the election.In September, Lula’s coalition asked the court to investigate possible U.S. interference benefiting Bolsonaro. The lawsuit seeks to remove Bolsonaro and his running mate, Alfredo Gaspar, from office if they win the election.Lula and Bolsonaro will have three weeks to seek endorsements from candidates eliminated in the first round and win over voters who did not support them Sunday.Courthouse News reporter Marília Marasciulo is based in Brazil.Subscribe to our free newslettersOur weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.Additional Reads