Lula wins fourth term in Brazil but faces hostile Congress and divided country

Brazil’s veteran left-wing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has been re-elected after a bitter campaign, defeating his right-wing rival, Flávio Bolsonaro. It is Lula’s fourth win in a presidential election, having served two terms as president from January 2003 to December 2010, and again from January 2023. But the road to his win in Sunday’s run-off was not smooth.

Bolsonaro beat Lula in the first round on 4 October, and many did not think he could turn the result around in just three weeks. He has also bucked a wider Latin American trend, where voters have punished incumbents and turned right. Across the region, larger countries such as Argentina, Chile and Colombia all now have conservative leaders at their helm.

Lula greets supporters after casting his ballot on Sunday Lula’s campaign sprang back to life following his first-round defeat, driven by street demonstrations and a massive social media push. The former metalworker, who has dominated Brazil’s left since he first ran for president in 1989, nevertheless faces the most challenging political landscape since he first took office in 2003.

His new term, set to begin on 5 January 2027, will start amid significant constraints at home and abroad, including animosity from US President Donald Trump. While Trump did not endorse Lula’s rival, Flávio Bolsonaro, directly, as he did with the right-wing candidates who went on to win presidential elections in Colombia and Honduras, there is little doubt his administration would have preferred a conservative at the helm of this country of 213 million people.

The White House regards Latin America as an area of US influence, and the Trump administration is keen to have leaders in power who support its policies, including on defence, security, and trade. It is also keen to reduce China’s influence in the Western Hemisphere. Brazil, oil-rich and home to the world’s second-largest reserves of rare earth minerals, is the only major country in South America not governed by a right-wing leader, with Lula widely seen as China-friendly.

Flávio Bolsonaro had promised to align Brazil more closely with Washington, while Lula warned the US not to interfere in the election and insisted Brazil would “never fit into anyone’s backyard”. But while the White House may be disappointed, environmentalists will welcome Lula’s victory, having feared that a Bolsonaro win would have given Brazil’s influential agribusiness and mining sectors more power.

They pointed to record levels of deforestation and forest fires in the Amazon during his father Jair’s presidency, arguing that under the younger Bolsonaro’s laxer environmental policies, destruction could recur in this key ecosystem. An aerial view from a Greenpeace flyover shows a fire burning in the Amazon rainforest during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP30), held near Centro Novo in the state of Maranhao, Brazil, in 2025 While Lula’s supporters are ecstatic about his victory, the result shows that the country remains deeply divided, with more than 48% of voters choosing Bolsonaro.

In addition to the challenge of uniting such a deeply polarised country, Lula will have to govern alongside the most right-wing Congress in Brazil’s democratic era. Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party (PL) was the party that made the biggest gains in the election. Yet Lula’s Workers’ Party organised huge rallies ahead of the run-off, showing the strong grassroots support it commands.

Before the election, Lula had described the poll as “a parting of the waters for Brazil”. He promised to bridge the gap between Brazil’s opposing political poles with “a new way of governing”, adding in a WhatsApp livestream before the election that “this country will never be the same again”. While he offered little detail on what the new way of governing would entail, he insisted he would “remain firm in the fight for a more just country, with opportunities for all and policies directed at the needs of the population”.

With a largely hostile Congress, this fight just may prove much harder for the veteran leader – who will be 85 by the end of his fourth term – than in his three previous terms in office.