Brazil’s 2026 general election has emerged as a study in striking political paradoxes, one rooted directly in the decades-long career of incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The Workers’ Party (PT) candidate, who built his political legacy on lifting millions out of poverty through economic growth and state-led social protection, now finds himself trailing in first-round results after a political shift among the very demographic his policies helped create. When Brazil heads to the polls for the runoff election on October 25, voters will not just choose between Lula and right-wing challenger Flávio Bolsonaro — they will decide the future direction of a nation transformed by Lula’s own reforms.
In the first round of voting held Sunday, preliminary results confirmed Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, secured 47.03% of valid votes, edging out Lula who took 45.16%. The gap of just over 2.2 million votes marked the first time in Lula’s decades-long political career that he will enter a runoff trailing his opponent. Beyond the presidential race, the results confirmed a dramatic rightward shift across Brazil’s national legislature: the Bolsonaro family’s Liberal Party (PL) became the largest single bloc in both the Senate and Chamber of Deputies, outperforming all polling projections and cementing a new power balance in Brasilia regardless of the runoff outcome.
To understand how Lula arrived at this juncture, analysts point to the shifting social landscape his own administrations built over the last 20 years. When Lula first took office in 2003, his identity as a former metalworker and union leader was clear: he represented low-wage workers, impoverished families, and groups shut out of Brazil’s traditional elite-dominated power structure. His signature policy, the Bolsa Família cash transfer program, paired with aggressive minimum wage hikes and expanded social spending, pulled more than 20 million Brazilians out of extreme poverty and lifted a large segment of the population into the lower middle class.
It is this upward mobility that has created the electoral paradox facing Lula today, according to Felipe Krause, director of the Brazilian Studies Programme at the University of Oxford. Krause argues Lula’s Workers’ Party has failed to adapt to the social change its own policies brought about. The new lower middle class that emerged from Lula’s social programs no longer automatically views the state as the primary solution to its challenges, he explains. For this growing demographic, entrepreneurship, individual autonomy, and market access have often become more pressing priorities than traditional union and labor rights — a shift seen across many global economies, but one with uniquely transformative political consequences in Brazil.
Twenty years ago, many of these voters relied on formal employment, union representation, and state social safety nets to make ends meet. Today, a growing share work as small business owners, online sellers, gig workers, delivery drivers, and freelancers. While this group still needs social security protections, its relationship with the state has grown far more complex, notes Thomas Zicman de Barros, a researcher affiliated with Sciences Po in Paris. Zicman de Barros describes a rising embrace of individualism and the “self-made” ideal among Brazilian voters: the core question is no longer “what can the government do for me?” but rather “why is the government making it so hard for me to build something on my own?”
This public sentiment has created a clear opening for Flávio Bolsonaro, whose campaign blends a hardline public safety agenda with a platform of cutting bureaucracy, reducing taxes, and expanding space for individual economic activity. His rhetoric echoes the libertarian politics of Argentine President Javier Milei, who successfully campaigned to slash state bureaucracy by tapping into widespread voter anger that the state is a barrier to, rather than a driver of, upward mobility.
A second layer of the paradox comes in the state of Brazil’s economy, which defies simple narratives of failure that would explain Lula’s underperformance. Economic data does not back the idea that Brazilian voters rejected Lula because his economic policies failed to deliver growth. The country’s labor market has rebounded steadily in recent years: households enter the election with higher employment and incomes than in recent years, according to analysis from leading Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, but they also carry higher debt loads. High interest rates and soaring living costs continue to squeeze household budgets significantly. The International Monetary Fund has labeled Brazil’s economy resilient, forecasting continued growth in 2026 while warning of persistent inflation pressure and the need to put public debt on a sustainable path.
The core challenge for Lula is not that voters have failed to see economic progress, but that progress has not translated into confidence about future upward mobility. A voter who earns more today but struggles with sky-high housing costs, grocery prices, interest payments, and debt may still feel that their improvement is insufficient, Krause explains. This amounts to a broader lack of confidence that there will be room to continue advancing in the future — a gap that can erode political support even when headline economic indicators are improving.
Flávio Bolsonaro has not just sought to mobilize his father’s old conservative base; he has built a broad new coalition that taps into this shifting voter sentiment. On one side are traditional conservative voters, including the large bloc of evangelical Brazilians and long-time supporters of Jair Bolsonaro. On the other is the growing group of economically ambitious voters who no longer identify with the traditional left-wing rhetoric of the Workers’ Party. This coalition explains how the Bolsonaro family, despite Jair Bolsonaro’s ongoing legal troubles and multiple controversies surrounding family members, continues to successfully position itself as an anti-establishment force, Zicman de Barros argues.
This positioning is rooted in a key political shift: Lula, once the firebrand union leader challenging Brazil’s old power structures, now represents the established political system. As the incumbent president of one of the world’s largest democracies, leading a party that has operated at the national level for decades, Lula has become the face of the status quo for many younger or economically ambitious voters, even as he defends democratic institutions from far-right attacks. For his traditional base, he remains the leader who ended poverty and expanded social mobility; for a growing share of the electorate, he is the embodiment of the stagnant system that is holding back their progress.
The election results also lay bare the deep geographic polarization that continues to divide Brazil. Flávio Bolsonaro won 14 states and the Federal District, while Lula carried 12. Lula’s largest margins came from the impoverished Northeast, where his social policies remain deeply popular, while Bolsonaro dominated the South, Southeast, Midwest and North. Key swing state Minas Gerais, long seen as a political bellwether for Brazil, went to Flávio by a 4.9-point margin, while Rio Grande do Sul delivered a 19.9-point win for the challenger. The results confirm that Lula’s once-broad national coalition is becoming far harder to hold together.
More than a quarter of eligible Brazilian voters did not align with either candidate in the first round: roughly 21% of registered voters stayed home on election day, amounting to around 33 million abstentions, while another 9.2 million votes went to third-party candidates. That means both candidates will spend the three-week runoff campaign fighting to win over these swing voters, whose choices will likely decide the final outcome. Analysts note that the preferences of these voters remain unclear: they may have voted third party out of protest, ideological alignment, or a desire for a different economic approach, giving both campaigns room to court them.
Observers warn that focusing only on the presidential race overlooks the most consequential shift of the 2026 election: the clear rightward shift in Congress. The Liberal Party expanded its Chamber of Deputies representation from 98 to 121 seats, and grew its Senate bloc from 15 to 28 seats, while Lula’s Workers’ Party holds just 9 Senate seats and 88 lower house seats. Even if Lula wins the runoff, he will face a far more hostile legislative landscape than he did during his current term, making it far harder to pass his policy agenda without concessions to center and right-wing parties. For the Bolsonaro camp, the legislative results deliver a solid power base that will shape Brazilian policy regardless of the presidential outcome, meaning the election will determine not just who holds the presidency, but what laws, budgets, and institutional reforms can pass over the next four years.
This rightward shift also carries major consequences for environmental policy, particularly protection of the Amazon rainforest and Indigenous territories. Indigenous and environmental advocacy groups have warned that the new congressional balance of power will clear the way for policies to expand mining and agricultural development on protected Indigenous lands, a direct reversal of Lula’s signature international climate agenda that has focused on curbing Amazon deforestation. The election outcome will thus directly shape how much space Brazil opens for economic exploitation of its most ecologically sensitive protected areas.
Ultimately, it is an oversimplification to say Lula’s electoral challenges are solely a product of his own successes. A range of other factors, including public concern over crime, cultural divides, deep political polarization, corruption scandals, religious identity, and the personal political appeal of the Bolsonaro family have all shaped the 2026 race. But the core paradox remains: Lula helped build a new Brazil where millions of people are no longer focused solely on survival, and a large share of this group now holds different ambitions: small business ownership, higher incomes, home ownership, and financial autonomy.
As Brazilians prepare to vote in the runoff, the election has become a choice between two competing visions of the nation’s progress, shaped by the changes of the last 20 years. Lula must not just defend his existing social achievements; he must convince voters that the same state that lifted them out of poverty can also help them continue to advance toward their new ambitions. Flávio Bolsonaro offers a competing narrative: that the next step of progress requires less state intervention and more space for individual initiative. On October 25, Brazilian voters will decide which vision of their country’s future they embrace.