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Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro rose to the top in the first round of Brazil's presidential election on October 4, securing 50.20 percent of the votes, against incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's 41.63 percent. These numbers are based on roughly 47% of total expected ballots. If, when the count is completed, Senator Bolsonaro is above 50%, he will win the presidency in the first round of elections, a crushing defeat to the Brazilian left.
With many votes still to be counted it is not yet clear if Bolsonaro will secure enough votes to avoid a second round and go straight to the run-off on October 25 against Lula. Preliminary results were at odds with the majority of pre-election polls that had predicted a Lula victory. However, results so far confirm the potency of the Bolsonaro brand on the Brazilian right, even in the absence of its main founder.
Bolsonaro, 45, son of Jair Bolsonaro, ran as a continuation of the right's agenda with tough crime policies, amnesty for some and a sharp break with the left. He won in 15 states, with strong showings in major states such as São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais. Lula won in 12 states.
The elder Bolsonaro, who is serving a lengthy prison sentence tied to the aftermath of the 2022 election and barred from running, has endorsed his son. To win his fourth non-consecutive term at roughly 80, Lula is stressing his achievements and warning of threats to democracy.
Turnout was around 79%. The minor candidates failed to reach the required number of votes and so will not be taking part in the second round. The run-off will be a straight fight between the populist right and the veteran left, and Washington will be watching with interest as a Trump-aligned challenger comes within reach of the presidency.
Millions of Brazilians - and much of the American right - perceive this as a fixed game. Jair Bolsonaro, the father of the man who now carries the movement that he built, is not on the ballot. He is in prison, serving a 27-year sentence. He was sentenced in 2025 by the Supreme Federal Court, in a case led by Justice Alexandre de Moraes, which convicted him of plotting a coup to undo the results of the 2022 election.
There are many reasons to be skeptical of this race, for starters the circumstances of the previous conviction of the former president. Instead of a jury, Bolsonaro was tried by a group of a few justices. Moraes, the jurist who has been fighting with Bolsonaro for years and even put some of his allies in jail, was both investigator and judge. The decisive testimony came from a plea-bargaining former aide. The sentence also carries a ban on holding public office that effectively runs until Bolsonaro is nearly 100 years old, removing the most popular figure on the Brazilian right from every election for the rest of his life.
For his supporters, the sequence of events is clear: Brazil's leading opposition candidate was criminalized, silenced and caged by the same institutions that support the sitting president he would challenge for the role. Jair Bolsonaro has already declared a witch hunt is underway and President Trump has called the prosecution of the former president political persecution. He even tied U.S. trade measures to Brazil's treatment of the former president.
That is the shadow hanging over the October 25 runoff, where Lula is seeking a fourth term while the man who nearly beat him last time sits behind bars, barred from running, and his son Flávio carries the banner. Whatever one makes of the January 2023 unrest in Brasília, it is a pattern well known to Americans: a left-wing establishment using the courts to eliminate its strongest rival before the voters can weigh in. For a movement that watched its own leader face a wave of prosecutions, the Brazilian case looks a lot like lawfare rather than the regular application of the law, and the large surprise lead that Flávio got in the first round of elections seems to suggest that the Brazilian voters see things the same way.
