Brazil Election Lula Flavio Bolsonaro Minas Gerais Bellwether
The Verdict That Was Quashed
The candidacy at the top of Brazil’s ballot rests on an accident of law.
In 2018, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was jailed on corruption charges.
He spent 580 days behind bars.
His conviction was then quashed.
That is the order in which the record gives it.
Lula is 80 years old.
He is a veteran of the Brazilian left.
He has served three terms.
He is the current president, and he is one of the two candidates who could be elected outright tonight — or pushed into a runoff on 25 October.
Every ballot has a prehistory.
Some prehistories are longer than others.
This one includes a prison cell and a reversal.
His first two terms ran from 2003 to 2011.
They are credited with overseeing a historic period of commodity-fuelled growth and poverty reduction.
The record shows an association between the commodity boom and the fall in poverty.
It does not, by itself, establish that one caused the other.
Poverty reduction is the other half of the record.
Brazilian presidents are limited to two consecutive terms.
Lula’s current term is his third.
The limit reaches past this weekend.
If Lula wins now, he cannot stand in 2030.
The rules of the contest are short enough to state plainly.
They shape everything that happens after the polls close.
Brazil’s president is directly elected.
Each voter’s ballot counts equally.
There is no electoral college (a body of electors that formally chooses a president).
No layer of intermediaries stands between the popular count and the result.
To win in the first round, a candidate needs more than 50% of the valid votes cast.
If no one crosses the line, the two highest-polling candidates meet again three weeks later.
The second round is the runoff.
It is set for 25 October.
Inauguration day is 5 January 2027.
Polls closed at 17.00 BRT (Brasília time), or 21.00 BST (British Summer Time), on Sunday.
Lula’s principal opponent is Flávio Bolsonaro.
He is 45 years old.
He is a lawyer and a former senator from Rio de Janeiro.
He is the far-right candidate in this race.
He is also the son of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president.
Jair Bolsonaro is in prison.
The sentence is 27 years.
It was imposed for masterminding a failed coup after losing the 2022 election.
He has endorsed his son’s campaign.
He hopes to regain his freedom if his son wins.
The Race Beyond the Frontrunners
Two names dominate the contest.
Other candidates also share the presidential ballot with them.
Neither frontrunner holds a clear lead in polling for the 25 October runoff.
Both have a chance of winning outright in the first round.
Flávio Bolsonaro has been described in some reports as close to U.S. President Donald Trump.
Those policies were restored after the four years of the previous administration.
Flávio Bolsonaro’s target names only the illegal.
Each has faced high levels of rejection.
Brazil has been largely polarized between two political forces in recent election cycles.
In Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro’s biggest favela (informal urban settlement), a resident named his own priorities: education and health, he said, while adding that no one was doing anything. [1] He was sitting as the sun began to dip.
He watched a long line of people wait for motorcycle taxis to carry them up the favela’s winding roads.
Those roads were strewn with electoral propaganda.
Neither the big names nor the other candidates on the ballot represented him.
The State That Has Picked Every Winner
One of the most important states to watch is Minas Gerais.
It is a mountainous mining and agricultural region.
It is larger than France.
It has 21 million inhabitants.
It is Brazil’s bellwether state.
A bellwether is not a law of physics.
It is a pattern that has held since democracy returned in the 1980s.
This one has held since democracy returned in the 1980s.
In that time, no candidate has won the presidency without triumphing in Minas.
The state’s count has preceded the national result since democracy returned in the 1980s.
The recent margins show how much weight it carries.
In 2018, Jair Bolsonaro beat Lula’s candidate there by more than 1.7m votes.
He was elected president.
Four years later, Lula reclaimed the state by fewer than 50,000 votes.
He also won the nationwide race.
In a state of 21 million people, fewer than 50,000 votes is a margin of roughly 0.2 percentage points.
It did not vanish in Minas.
Under the rules of a direct election, that margin counts exactly as much as a landslide.
Casting a ballot is not the same experience across the country.
Voting times varied across the country.
Brazilians vote for several positions besides president.
That is why queues traditionally run longer in the first round.
The ballot is longer, and so is the wait.
In the Amazon, the route to a ballot box can run along a river.
In a floating community in the municipality of Iranduba just across from Manaus, residents arrived by boat.
They voted at a floating municipal school.
A fisherwoman traveled to reach the floating polling station.
For her, the distance to the ballot box was measured in river time.
Kassio Nunes Marques, president of the Superior Electoral Court, addressed the day’s proceedings at a news conference. [1] He described the conduct of the vote and the transparency of the process. [1] Then the count.
As soon as the polls close, the counting begins.
The tally runs in real time on the electoral court’s website.
Anyone with a connection can watch it arrive.
The figures come without commentary, jurisdiction by jurisdiction.
Since democracy returned in the 1980s, the figure that has carried the most weight has come from the mining and farming state larger than France.
There, 21 million people live.
There, the last two presidential races were settled by margins of more than 1.7 million votes and of fewer than 50,000.
That is the number to listen for when the count is read out.
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