Brazil’s political elite — including Bolsonaro’s allies — have acknowledged Lula’s win defeating the incumbent.
Former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated the incumbent Jaír Bolsonaro in Sunday’s runoff elections in Brazil. Lula’s victory returns the leftist leader to power, as the country’s electorate rejected four years of Bolsonaro’s right-wing rule — a result that many of Brazil’s leaders, including on the right, have acknowledged, except Bolsonaro himself.
Bolsonaro has yet to concede the election, hours after Lula won 50.9 percent of the vote to Bolsonaro’s 49.1 percent. But in that void, Brazil’s politicians — including some of Bolsonaro’s closest allies — have affirmed Lula’s electoral victory and promised to work with the new administration. World leaders have also congratulated Lula on his win.
The full-throated support for the legitimacy of Lula’s win has blunted the potential threat of Bolsonaro’s silence — and the threat of the possibility the incumbent might not accept the electoral results.
Bolsonaro has long sowed doubts about election integrity in Brazil and raised the specter of voter fraud throughout his presidency, including in the 2018 election he actually won.
In the lead-up to the 2022 elections, he amplified and intensified those claims, especially as Lula led in the polls and Bolsonaro faced political backlash for his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and the economy. Specifically, Bolsonaro lied about the security of the country’s electronic voting system (which, in use since 2002, was created to reduce fraud and corruption and to manage the logistics of a complex voting system). “I’ll hand over the presidential sash to whoever wins the election cleanly,” the far-right Bolsonaro said in July 2021. “Not with fraud.”
But Bolsonaro is looking more and more isolated. Although some of his supporters have protested, including truck drivers blocking roads, the political establishment has already signaled strongly that it is preparing for Lula’s inauguration on January 1.
Exactly how smooth a transition that may be is still in question.
