Brazil turned its back on Lula despite favorable economic conditions

Lula went into the election with many of the numbers on his side. Unemployment currently stands at 5.3%, its lowest level in three decades. Poverty, while still high, is also at a historic low. Workers’ real incomes have risen by 17% in four years. And yet, on Sunday, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 80, seeking a fourth term as president, finished second. Flávio Bolsonaro won 47.0% of valid votes, against Lula’s 45.1%. The presidency will now be decided in a runoff on October 25.

Lula, a former metalworker and founder of the center-left Workers’ Party, governed Brazil from 2003 to 2010 and returned to power in 2023 after defeating Jair Bolsonaro by less than two percentage points. Bolsonaro, the leading figure of the Brazilian right and president from 2019 to 2022, is barred from running for office and was convicted in 2025 of attempting a coup. His place on the ballot was taken by his eldest son, Flávio, a senator from Rio de Janeiro.

The result came as a surprise. The polling average had Lula ahead by nearly three points.

Compared with the first round in 2022, Lula lost 3.5 percentage points, while the Bolsonaro family candidate gained 3.9. The gap between the two therefore swung by just over seven points. The shift was not enormous, but it reached almost the entire country. Lula lost ground in 25 of Brazil’s 27 states. Of the country’s 5,570 municipalities, 716 that had voted for Lula in 2022 chose Flávio this time, while none moved in the opposite direction. Minas Gerais, the state that has backed the winner in every presidential election since 1989, went from giving Lula a five-point lead to giving Flávio a five-point lead.

Where did the president lose the most ground? The variable that best explains the pattern is city size. In municipalities with fewer than 10,000 voters, Lula’s share fell by 6.5 points; in cities with more than one million voters, it dropped by just 0.4 points. Lula’s vote still has a very strong class dimension: he performs much better in poorer municipalities than in richer ones. But his losses were similar in both. The same pattern appears with evangelical voters. The Bolsonaro family performs particularly well where evangelical churches have a stronger presence, but Flávio gained just as much in those municipalities as he did in less evangelical ones.

Brazil’s electoral geography remains split in two. The Northeast, the country’s poorest region and Lula’s birthplace, gave him an advantage of 11 million votes. In 2022, the margin had been 13 million—enough to offset the richer and more conservative South and Southeast. This time, it was not.

There was less movement among Brazilians living abroad. The nearly 39,000 eligible voters in Italy gave Lula roughly the same 15-point advantage as in 2022.

How does a government lose votes with so many favorable indicators? Part of the answer may lie in the economy itself. Growth has slowed from 3.4% in 2024 to around 2% this year. Consumption is barely growing, the Central Bank’s interest rate remains at 13.75%, and households are spending a record 29% of their income on debt payments. Many families may feel more financially squeezed than the employment statistics would suggest.

Something similar happened to the Democrats in the United States in 2024. Unemployment was around 4% and the economy was growing faster than Europe’s, yet Kamala Harris, Joe Biden’s vice president, lost to Donald Trump. Prices, which had risen by roughly 20% since 2021, weighed more heavily on voters.

There has also been an ideological shift, one that is much more cultural than economic. According to Datafolha, in 2022, 49% of Brazilians placed themselves on the left and 34% on the right. By June, those figures had shifted to 39% and 44%, respectively. On cultural issues—religion, meritocracy, drugs and public security—52% hold right-wing positions. On economic issues—state intervention, labor laws, and public health and education—the left predominates, by 45% to 28%.

There is also a regional factor. Since 2020, Latin America has held 25 presidential elections, and in 19 of them the incumbent party lost, whether it was from the left or the right. But of the four presidents who sought reelection during that period, three won: Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Luis Abinader in the Dominican Republic and Daniel Noboa in Ecuador. The only one who lost was Jair Bolsonaro, in 2022. Lula now risks becoming the second.

The arithmetic for the runoff is demanding. Minor candidates won 7.8% of the vote. If the same people turn out again, Lula needs to win more than six out of every ten of those votes. Between the two rounds in 2022, Bolsonaro captured close to 70% of them.

Lula has contested four presidential runoffs. He won all three in which he entered the second round in first place: 2002, 2006 and 2022. The only time he went into a runoff from behind was in 1989, Brazil’s first direct presidential election after the dictatorship. He lost to Fernando Collor.