Lula ends his last political campaign with an event on Avenida Paulista in São Paulo. (Paulo Pinto/Agência Brasil)

Last night, President Lula made election history in Brazil when he came back from a loss in the first round to defeat Bolsonaro’s son by more than 4 million votes, beating back the creep of fascism across South America.

It’s hard to convey the extent to which the odds were stacked against Lula in this election. Up until the very last minute, the betting sites were all still predicting with an ~80 percent likelihood that Flávio Bolsonaro—son of the man who attempted to assassinate Lula—was going to win. He was promising to hand over Brazil’s rare earth minerals to Donald Trump and control of the Amazon to right-wing tech billionaires. Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk were openly suppressing pro-Lula accounts across Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and amplifying fake news/AI deepfakes to benefit Bolsonaro. Netanyahu strongly backed Bolsonaro. As leftist activist Ariana Jasmine put it, “Lula didn’t just beat Bolsonaro: He beat Trump, Netanyahu/Israel, Meta interference, algorithms, the right-wing wave taking Latin America, and the elite billionaire class.”

Here in Brazil, we also witnessed a coup attempt unfolding in real time yesterday. In São Paulo and Salvador—both of which are governed by Bolsonaro allies, but favored Lula at the polls—they sabotaged public transportation to prevent voters from getting to election sites. São Paulo’s buses were running at 60% capacity in neighborhoods that were expected to vote heavily for Lula, despite being federally ordered to run at 100% everywhere. Salvador locked up 544 city buses in a warehouse and reportedly turned off traffic lights to create a jam. Flights to the Northeast of Brazil, which was considered critical to Lula’s reelection, were spontaneously canceled on election day, so that voters who worked in Rio or SP and were trying to get home to cast a ballot couldn’t make it. When Lula’s party called for the arrest of Salvador’s transportation chief, he was conveniently already in Paris.

Nevertheless, Lula supporters picked stranded voters up in their cars and gave them rides to the polls all day. People poured into the Northeast by ferry to vote. (This video was a real shot in the arm.) Indigenous voters traveled miles together by foot to vote against the further destruction of the Amazon.

The Supreme Court ultimately extended Brazil’s election by two hours, at the request of both candidates1, but Lula didn’t even end up needing the extra time. He won by over 4 million votes; only ~35,000 were cast during overtime, which couldn’t have affected the result. (Keep that in mind as Bolsonaro and the American right try to claim the election was rigged because of the extension.)

So what changed between the first election round and the second that could produce this massive swing towards Lula?

A few thoughts on this:

The left was complacent before the first round, assuming Lula would win because Bolsonaro is so notoriously corrupt. There were no huge demonstrations on the streets or sweeping social media campaigns or displays of enthusiasm for Lula. 33 million people didn’t vote at all—especially those who had to travel long distances to get to their home region to vote.
Bolsonaro’s victory in that round—and the massive threats to democracy and human rights and all of our ability to breathe in the future that his presidency posed—woke everyone the hell up. The left finally did take to the streets, organizing some of the biggest demonstrations the nation has ever seen.
A left-leaning official here named André Janones, who’s a social media and organizing genius, built a WhatsApp group 10 million people strong to give out marching orders on how to defeat the algorithm and boost Lula online. He was responsible for the massive Instagram campaign in which people wore Brazil jerseys, made the letter L with their hands and posted it en masse (appeal to influencers’/celebrities’ narcissism by giving them something they can post of themselves!). He taught people how to defeat a right-wing hashtag campaign on X by using a similar hashtag that overlaps a word or two and having thousands of people post it at the same time, making it even more viral and thereby erasing the original one. He made a commitment never to deploy “fake news,” but to beat the right by spreading facts and reality only. And he clipped some of Lula’s best moments from the debates and had his network disseminate them instantly and widely, generating actual positive passion for Lula rather than just negative warnings about a second Bolsonaro.
Bolsonaro revealed himself to be a colossal asshole and thug during the debates, which also hurt him a lot with a nation that values decency toward older people. He tried to emulate Trump in the first debate, stalking the stage and hovering behind/bullying Lula, an 80-year-old man and working class legend. One of Lula’s best moments, which I think was a critical turning point in the second round, happened when Bolsonaro mocked him for having “nine fingers” on stage as a reference to the pinky finger Lula lost from working in a factory.
Lula’s response was perfect: “He called me ‘nine fingers,’” Lula said. “If there's anyone who knows what the world of work is like, it's me. I worked at night, even when I wasn't supposed to be working. I will not allow a militiaman to call me ‘nine fingers’. He has never worked a day in his life….The first job he had was a fake job given to him by his father.”

What Lula and the left pulled off in this election felt nothing short of a political miracle, but it was fueled quite simply by great organizing. It should instruct and blow wind into the sails of the American left as they head into their own elections against a fascist oligarchy with a disinformation super-spreading machine. There are a few billionaires with outsized power over elections and the media, and that’s hard to beat. But in the end, there are still a whole lot more of us than them. As Lula told the Steelworkers Union in 2018, "The powerful can kill one, two, or 100 roses, but they'll never stop the arrival of spring."

1

Bolsonaro requested a time extension due to bad weather only in 3 areas that he knew he would win; Lula requested an extension nationwide due to the travel sabotage in major cities.

Hallelula!