Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, after coming in second in the first round of presidential voting three weeks ago, staged a dramatic come-from-behind victory in the run-off, defeating Flavio Bolsonaro, the son of the former president and Trump acolyte Jair Bolsonaro.

With nearly 99% of votes counted the 80-year-old leftist received 51.75% of the vote to his 45-year-old rival’s 48.25%.

Lula narrowly lost the first round of the election to Bolsonaro in early October, casting his political future into doubt and plunging progressive Brazilians into three weeks of despair. Never, since the return of democracy in the 1980s, has the first round runner-up won the second vote.

But Lula did precisely that on Sunday, prompting joyous scenes on the streets of São Paulo, where he had been following the count, and at the hotel where he was watching the count.
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For Lula, who turns 81 on Tuesday, the victory represents a sensational final chapter in a storied political career that began when he emerged as a union leader in São Paulo’s industrial suburbs in the late 1970s.

After entering politics, the former factory worker who was born in rural poverty made three unsuccessful presidential bids, in 1989, 1994 and 1998, before finally becoming Brazil’s first elected working-class president in 2002.

Lula stepped down after the maximum two consecutive terms allowed by the constitution but returned to power after winning the 2022 election against Bolsonaro’s father, then the incumbent president Jair Bolsonaro, who was subsequently jailed for plotting a coup.

Lula’s win is bad news for Bolsonaro who is serving a 27-year sentence for that botched power grab and was hoping to be freed and given a role in government had his son prevailed.

It seems like Lula’s supporters were a little complacent and did not turn out in sufficient numbers for the first round of voting. But they seemed to be galvanized by the prospect of Bolsonaro winning and a million people turned out in Rio and another million in Sao Paolo yesterday for Lula’s final rallies.

“I’ll be sincere: in the first round the left failed. But in the second round they woke up,” said Caio Marques, a 40-year-old photographer from Franca, a city in the interior of São Paulo state. “And there is no coup that will take this away from us.”

I hope that Lula is energized enough by his win to be really aggressive in improving the conditions of Brazil’s poor and fighting the oligarchs during his last term.

One very positive aspect of this result is that it will really tick Trump off, since he sees Bolsonaro in his own image

It is also a blow for Donald Trump, the Bolsonaro clan’s most important international ally. The US president had been hoping Bolsonaro would become the latest in a series of pro-Trump leaders to take power in Latin America, including Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia, Daniel Noboa in Ecuador, José Antonio Kast in Chile and Javier Milei in Argentina.

Confirmation of Lula’s victory was greeted with anger and bewilderment in Brasília, where Bolsonaro is living under house arrest and where his son watched the count.

And just like Trump, Bolsonaro is refusing to concede that he lost to Lula, just like his father refused to concede four years earlier and attempted a coup for which he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison for 27 years.

In another good result, Serbia’s right wing Aleksandar Vučić’s party was ousted by a student-led protest movement. But at least he conceded defeat.

Aleksandar Vučić announced the end of his 12-year reign as the most powerful man in Serbia on Sunday following a pivotal election that swept the Student List protest movement to victory. Aleksandar Vučić announced the end of his 12-year reign as the most powerful man in Serbia on Sunday following a pivotal election that swept the Student List protest movement to victory.
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Vučić said the Student List had secured a majority of between 135 and 140 mandates in the country’s 250-seat parliament, while his own party won 105.
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Vučić served as prime minister from 2014 to 2017 and then held the presidency until resigning in September to lead the progressives into the election. Under his rule Serbia was classed as an electoral autocracy by the Sweden-based V-Dem research institute and only “partly free” by the Washington-based Freedom House advocacy NGO.
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A group of university students announced in May last year that they would run in Sunday’s elections and put forward a list of experts to lead the ballot, largely doctors, engineers and other professionals.

I am concerned that Democratic voters in the US may also be too complacent about the mid-term elections due to all the rosy forecasts of Republican defeats and not turn out and vote, leading to a situation similar to the first round of Brazil’s voting. I am bracing myself for a disappointing outcome next Tuesday and so am savoring these two good results.