Brazil votes in first round pitting Lula against Bolsonaro's son, with runoff likely

Brazilians voted Sunday in the first round of a presidential election that pits President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, seeking an unprecedented fourth term, against Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the eldest son and chosen political heir of jailed former president Jair Bolsonaro. With 158.7 million people registered to cast ballots, the contest is the most closely watched in Brazil since the 2022 race that first brought Lula back to power.

A fractured early count

The Superior Electoral Court began releasing real-time results at 5 p.m. Brasília time. By roughly 6:30 p.m., with about 36 percent of the country's nearly 500,000 polling sections reporting, Flávio Bolsonaro had 50.6 percent of valid votes (about 21.4 million) to Lula's 41.2 percent (about 17.4 million), a gap of more than nine points. Four other candidates — Goiás Governor Ronaldo Caiado, businessman Augusto Cury, activist Renan Santos and Minas Gerais Senator Romeu Zema — were splitting the remaining votes, none above 3 percent.

The numbers come with a significant caveat that election-night veterans in Brazil know well: states that lean toward Bolsonaro's Liberal Party, including the Federal District, Paraná and Mato Grosso do Sul, finished counting far faster than Lula's strongholds in the poorer northeastern states of Bahia, Pernambuco and Ceará, where tabulation was still in early stages. Brazilian electoral law requires a candidate to win more than half of all valid votes — excluding blank and null ballots — to avoid a second round, and both campaigns have spent months preparing for a runoff on October 25 that most pollsters consider the more likely outcome.

How Brazil got here

The race was reshaped a year ago when Jair Bolsonaro, convicted of orchestrating an attempted coup after his 2022 defeat, began serving a 27-year prison sentence and was barred from seeking office until 2030. He anointed Flávio, a Rio de Janeiro senator first elected in 2018, as the Liberal Party's standard-bearer in December. Lula, now 80, is running for a fourth nonconsecutive term on a record that includes falling unemployment but also persistent inflation in food and housing costs.

Trade policy became an unlikely campaign flashpoint. Washington imposed a 25 percent tariff on a range of Brazilian goods in July, and polling has since shown Brazilians split over who was to blame: Lula's campaign accused Flávio Bolsonaro's family of lobbying for the tariffs during Jair's trial, while Flávio publicly asked President Trump to delay them, arguing the levies would only help the incumbent. Both campaigns have also been dogged by corruption inquiries — prosecutors have examined an alleged influence-peddling scheme involving Lula's eldest son, while a separate banking scandal has touched both a senior figure in Flávio Bolsonaro's finance network and one of Lula's closest Senate allies.

Voters were also electing all 513 members of the lower Chamber of Deputies, two-thirds of the Senate and governors in all 27 states and the Federal District, meaning Sunday's ballot will reshape the Congress that either Lula or Flávio Bolsonaro must work with starting in February. Pollsters had described the presidential race as the tightest since democracy was restored in 1985, with surveys in the campaign's final weeks showing the two men within a few points of each other in a hypothetical runoff, far closer than the partial first-round count suggested.

Who is affected

The electoral court authorized the armed forces, under a July decree signed by Lula, to help secure polling and transport ballot boxes in isolated or high-risk areas. In Rio de Janeiro state, electoral officials relocated 72 polling stations across 20 municipalities, affecting roughly 202,000 voters, moving sites out of neighborhoods controlled by criminal gangs or militias, according to the regional electoral court's own account of the operation. Separately, federal police said they had opened six inquiries and made 129 arrests in 21 states by mid-afternoon on election day, mostly over vote-buying, and were investigating the distribution of lapel brooches rigged with hidden cameras to photograph marked ballots — a practice reported to break ballot-secrecy law after one device was seized in Cabo Frio.

Seven international bodies — the Organization of American States, the European Union, the Mercosur Parliament, the Arab League, the Inter-American Union of Electoral Organizations, the Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries and the Carter Center — deployed observers for the vote. The OAS mission alone sent 55 experts from 17 countries to 15 of Brazil's 26 states, its fifth such mission since 2018. Analysts have also flagged record abstention as a risk to legitimacy: officials had warned turnout could fall enough to push the no-show rate above 22 percent, which would be the highest since Brazil's return to democracy.

Reaction and the road to a runoff

Lula used his address to the United Nations General Assembly in September to pre-empt accusations that a loss would stem from outside pressure, telling world leaders that Brazil's vote was not open to interference from Washington or anywhere else.

"Our democracy and our sovereignty are non-negotiable. We will continue as an independent nation and as a free people from any kind of guardianship," Lula told the assembly, adding that Brazil "does not fit in anyone's backyard."

Flávio Bolsonaro has cast the election as a referendum on his father's imprisonment and on the Workers' Party's long dominance of Brazilian politics, while distancing himself during the final stretch from the tariff fight for fear it would be read as inviting foreign meddling on his behalf. Electoral analysts cautioned against reading too much into Sunday's early returns, noting that the faster-reporting states have skewed toward Flávio Bolsonaro while the slower, more populous northeast has historically favored Lula.

What happens next

If, as expected, neither candidate clears 50 percent of the valid vote once all of the country's roughly 500,000 polling sections are tallied — a process electoral authorities say should be largely complete within hours of polls closing — Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro will advance to an October 25 runoff alongside separate second-round contests for governorships that also failed to produce an outright winner. Brazil's electoral court must certify first-round results in the coming days, and the three-week runoff campaign is expected to center on the same fault lines that defined Sunday's vote: trade relations with the United States, the legacy of Jair Bolsonaro's conviction, and the corruption allegations trailing both candidates into the final stretch.