By yourNEWS Media Newsroom.
BRASILIA, Brazil — Conservative Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro emerged from Brazil’s first-round presidential election in first place Sunday, finishing roughly two percentage points ahead of incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and forcing the deeply divided country into a runoff later this month.
With 99.57% of ballots counted in the official Superior Electoral Tribunal results, Bolsonaro had 47.12% of the valid vote, amounting to nearly 56 million ballots. Lula had 45.05%, or approximately 53.5 million votes.
Neither candidate reached the more-than-50% threshold required to win the presidency in the first round, meaning the two will meet again Oct. 25. In Brazil’s presidential system, blank and null ballots are excluded when calculating the majority necessary for a first-round victory.
Self-help author Augusto Cury finished a distant third with 2.89%, or about 3.4 million votes, leaving the overwhelming majority of Sunday’s presidential vote divided between Bolsonaro and Lula.
The result represented a stronger-than-expected showing for Bolsonaro, who entered Election Day trailing Lula narrowly in several of the final national polls. A collection of surveys released during the final week generally showed the two candidates close enough for the contest to remain within or near polling margins of error, but many gave Lula a small advantage.
Instead, Bolsonaro ended the night in front.
During the early count, Bolsonaro at times exceeded 50% of valid votes and appeared to have an outside chance of winning outright. His percentage declined as returns arrived from northeastern Brazil, historically one of Lula’s strongest regions.
The electoral map showed a country divided sharply by geography.
Lula’s Workers’ Party maintained broad strength across much of northern and northeastern Brazil. Bolsonaro performed strongly in the south and southeast, including the politically and economically important states of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
Roraima stood out as an exception to Lula’s strength across much of northern Brazil. The state borders Venezuela and has absorbed substantial migration from the neighboring country during years of political and economic upheaval there.
The regional split underscored the political polarization that has defined Brazilian presidential elections for much of the past decade.
Lula, 80, is seeking an unprecedented fourth nonconsecutive term as president. He governed Brazil from 2003 through 2010 and returned to the presidency after narrowly defeating Flávio Bolsonaro’s father, Jair Bolsonaro, in 2022.
Lula’s return to national office followed an extraordinary legal and political reversal.
The Workers’ Party leader was convicted in corruption cases arising from Brazil’s sprawling Operation Car Wash investigation and spent more than 500 days in prison. Those convictions prevented him from running in the 2018 presidential election.
Brazil’s Supreme Court later annulled the convictions on jurisdictional grounds, ruling that the federal court in Curitiba that handled the cases lacked jurisdiction over them. The decisions restored Lula’s political rights and allowed him to run again in 2022.
Lula subsequently defeated Jair Bolsonaro by a narrow margin and began his third presidential term in January 2023.
Four years later, the Bolsonaro name is once again standing between Lula and another term.
Flávio Bolsonaro entered the presidential race after his father became legally unable to seek the presidency.
Jair Bolsonaro was convicted by a panel of Brazil’s Supreme Federal Tribunal in 2025 on charges arising from an alleged effort to overturn his 2022 election defeat and was sentenced to more than 27 years in prison. He and his supporters have repeatedly maintained that the prosecutions were politically motivated, while Brazilian prosecutors and the court said the case concerned a criminal effort to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.
The former president had already been ruled ineligible for office in separate electoral cases before the criminal conviction extended the political consequences of his legal troubles.
With Jair unable to run, members of the Bolsonaro family and their political allies moved rapidly to identify a successor capable of carrying the movement into the 2026 election.
Flávio, a sitting senator from Rio de Janeiro, announced his candidacy in late 2025 and consolidated support from several figures who had themselves been considered potential presidential contenders.
Among the most important was São Paulo Gov. Tarcísio de Freitas, a former infrastructure minister under Jair Bolsonaro who opted to seek reelection rather than challenge Flávio for the presidential nomination.
That decision paid off for Tarcísio on Sunday as well. He won another term as governor of Brazil’s largest state in the first round.
Flávio Bolsonaro built his campaign around a combination of conservative social policies, tougher public-security measures and a more market-oriented economic agenda. His government platform has called for tighter controls on public spending and changes to Brazil’s fiscal system, while his crime plan proposes a more aggressive federal response to powerful criminal organizations.
He also repeatedly attacked Lula’s government over public safety, corruption, economic management and the growing power of Brazil’s courts.
Sunday’s results suggest that strategy succeeded in expanding Bolsonaro’s support beyond what most final polls indicated.
The Bolsonaro family also enjoyed a strong night in congressional contests.
Former first lady Michelle Bolsonaro won a Senate seat representing the Federal District, while Carlos Bolsonaro was elected to the Senate from Santa Catarina. Jair Renan Bolsonaro won a seat in the Chamber of Deputies from Santa Catarina, and Jair Bolsonaro’s brother Renato Bolsonaro was elected to the lower chamber from São Paulo.
The Bolsonaro family results gave the former president’s political movement an expanded presence in Congress even as Flávio prepared for the presidential runoff.
Rogéria Bolsonaro, Jair Bolsonaro’s former wife and the mother of Flávio, Carlos and Eduardo, also sought a congressional seat but did not join the four family members confirmed elected.
The first-round campaign itself had been turbulent and frequently dominated by controversies outside traditional policy debates.
One late dispute arose from remarks Lula made while speaking about men’s reluctance to undergo prostate examinations.
“Women learn to get touched from a young age, men don’t,” Lula said while discussing differences between women’s experience with routine medical examinations and men’s reluctance to undergo urological exams.
Opponents circulated the remark as evidence of something more sinister, with some Bolsonaro allies accusing Lula of making comments that normalized or supported sexual abuse of children.
Lula’s campaign said the statement had been deliberately stripped of its medical context.
Brazil’s Superior Electoral Tribunal subsequently ordered conservative lawmaker Nikolas Ferreira to remove a social media post about the remark. The court said Ferreira had taken Lula’s statement out of context and given it a sexual meaning that was not supported by the original remarks.
Conservatives criticized the decision as censorship, adding it to longstanding complaints about the electoral court’s power over political speech.
Another court decision became part of the controversy surrounding the final scheduled presidential debate.
Lula declined to participate in the debate organized by TV Globo. The Superior Electoral Tribunal subsequently ruled that the network could not display an empty podium representing the absent president, concluding that doing so could improperly penalize a candidate whose participation in the debate was voluntary.
Additional judicial decisions changed other participation rules shortly before the broadcast.
Flávio Bolsonaro ultimately withdrew as well, saying he wanted to debate Lula rather than the remaining candidates. Globo then canceled the event amid the withdrawals and last-minute changes to its previously established format.
The judicial involvement became another campaign issue, with Bolsonaro accusing the courts of intervening in ways favorable to Lula while the president’s allies defended the rulings as enforcement of election rules intended to prevent misleading political messaging.
Both campaigns also endured personal attacks as voting approached.
Bolsonaro opponents circulated allegations that his conservative Evangelical politics would threaten Catholic traditions, including claims involving devotion to the Virgin Mary. Bolsonaro’s allies rejected those allegations as false.
Brazil remains home to the world’s largest Catholic population, although Evangelical Christianity has expanded rapidly in recent decades and has become an increasingly important political constituency. Jair and Flávio Bolsonaro are Evangelical Christians, and religious voters have become an important component of their political coalition.
Those cultural divisions were layered onto voter concern about crime, corruption, household finances and Brazil’s fiscal position.
Lula entered the election able to point to low unemployment and improvements in some social indicators but faced dissatisfaction over the cost of living, government debt and public safety.
Flávio Bolsonaro sought to turn those concerns into a demand for political change while presenting himself as the continuation of his father’s conservative movement without simply replicating Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency.
The first-round results suggest that message resonated with a larger share of voters than polling organizations had anticipated.
The outcome also demonstrated the continuing strength of the Bolsonaro political movement despite the imprisonment and electoral disqualification of its founder.
Flávio did not merely secure a place in the second round. He finished ahead of a sitting president seeking reelection, while Bolsonaro-aligned candidates won important congressional and state races across the country.
Lula now enters the runoff having to make up the first-round deficit while seeking support from voters who backed Cury and the other candidates eliminated Sunday.
Bolsonaro faces a different challenge: converting a first-place finish of roughly 47% into the absolute majority required to become president.
The first-round ballots do not carry over. The Oct. 25 vote will constitute a new election between the two finalists, and the candidate receiving the majority of valid votes will become Brazil’s next president.
After Sunday’s unexpectedly strong Bolsonaro showing, Brazilians now face three more weeks of campaigning before deciding between two sharply different political projects — another Lula term under the Workers’ Party or the return of the Bolsonaro movement to the presidency under Jair Bolsonaro’s eldest son.
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