A vow to tens of thousands

In the early hours of Monday, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva stood before tens of thousands of supporters in central São Paulo and made his promise explicit: after his lula election win, dictatorship and fascism would never return to Brazil. He called the result a historic day and declared to the crowd: “Democracy always, dictatorship never again. Democracy always, fascism never again.”

The president credited those who had campaigned for him, telling the gathered crowd: “This is God’s work – and it’s thanks to all of you.”

The numbers behind the win

The victory was built on a recovery that Brazilian politics had never seen. Lula had lost the first round in early October, then came back to beat Flávio Bolsonaro in the runoff by more than 4 million votes.

The scale of the turnaround was without precedent since the country returned to democratic rule:

• Lula finished with 64.2m votes to Bolsonaro's 59.8m, a 51.79% to 48.21% result, at least 10 million more votes than his first-round total.
• Never since the return of democracy after the 1964-85 military regime had the first-round loser managed to win the second vote.

Reaction at home and abroad

Within Lula's own team, health minister Alexandre Padilha called it a huge victory for the Brazilian people, pointing to the environment, the national health service, education and the constitution, and said at the São Paulo hotel where the team followed the count that it was an important signal to Latin America and the world.

World leaders responded quickly, with several framing the result in democratic terms:

• Mexico's president Claudia Sheinbaum tweeted: “Long live democracy, the people of Brazil won.”
• European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said democracy and multilateralism had won in Brazil.
• Spain's prime minister Pedro Sánchez wrote that the global progressive resurgence had just begun.
• UK foreign secretary Ed Miliband called the victory “a historic win for the global progressive movement”, pointing to cooperation on democracy, social justice and climate action.

Congratulation also came from rivals on the right. Chile's rightwing president José Antonio Kast telephoned Lula to offer his congratulations, Peru's president Keiko Fujimori saluted the Brazilian people for the democratic day, and Colombia's far-right president Abelardo de la Espriella, who had publicly backed Bolsonaro, acknowledged the win, tweeting that the people's will at the ballot box is sacred. A spokesperson for China's foreign ministry said China respects the choice of the Brazilian people.

The result also drew scepticism from Bolsonaro's allies abroad. Donald Trump, whose administration had rooted for a Bolsonaro victory and the pro-Trump so-called “orange wave” in Latin America's largest democracy, took almost 24 hours to comment and appeared to endorse the fraud claims, saying the election looked like another rigged election. Elon Musk claimed the “math doesn’t add up” for Lula's comeback, even though historically low abstention in the second round explained it.

Bolsonaro camp refuses to concede

Flávio Bolsonaro rejected the result, calling Lula's victory “sacanagem”, a Portuguese word that roughly translates as “bullshit”. In doing so he followed his father, former president Jair Bolsonaro, who refused to concede after losing the 2022 election to Lula and was later convicted of plotting a coup.

At the Brasília mansion where Bolsonaro watched the count, the atmosphere soured as the defeat became clear: what had initially resembled a lively birthday party turned into something closer to a wake. São Paulo's pro-Bolsonaro governor Tarcísio de Freitas sat next to him covering his face with his hand as allies came to terms with the loss.