Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has secured re-election as Brazil’s president after defeating Senator Flávio Bolsonaro in the country’s presidential run-off. The final official count gave Lula 64,256,232 votes, or 51.79% of valid ballots. Bolsonaro received 59,826,041 votes, or 48.21%.
The result gives Lula a fourth, non-consecutive presidential term. It also reverses the order of the first round, in which Bolsonaro had finished ahead. The run-off was held on Sunday 25 October, with the complete tally later confirming Lula’s lead by 4,430,191 votes.
All 499,248 voting sections had been totalled when the final figures were recorded. Brazil had 158,745,502 eligible voters for the run-off. Of those, 128,236,074 took part, producing turnout of 80.78%. The abstention rate was 19.22%, lower than the 21.08% recorded in the first round.
The election day included an unusual late change to voting hours. A Supreme Court decision extended voting from 5pm to 7pm in Brasília for polling places that were still open. The adjustment came after the scheduled closing time, when many electronic voting machines had already been shut down and could not be reopened. Electoral administrators temporarily paused the receipt of voting-section reports while they dealt with the resulting accumulation of files.
Officials said the count was able to proceed after those operational difficulties. They reported that 1,551 electronic voting machines, representing 0.31% of those used in the second round, had needed to be replaced. The final count lists 124,082,273 valid votes, alongside 1,430,496 blank ballots and 2,723,305 null ballots.
The administration of the vote remained a central issue in the second round. Brazil’s electoral authorities said they had made more than 95,000 polling locations available across the country in an effort to reduce travel distances. They also said that regional electoral courts had been instructed to monitor the provision of free public transport where it applied on polling day. The late extension of voting hours therefore became a practical test of the systems supporting a national electronic count.
Election officials also reported a high volume of legal proceedings during the campaign and voting period. The electoral court said 2,265 cases had been submitted to it, including 827 formal representations and 446 requests for a right of reply. Those figures describe the scale of legal activity around the contest; they do not alter the completed tally or the declaration of the winner.
The close contest had brought Brazil’s two established political camps into a second-round vote after neither candidate passed the required threshold in the first ballot. Lula had previously served as president from 2003 to 2011 before returning to office in 2023. The new result makes him the first candidate in Brazil’s democratic era to win the presidency after placing second in the opening round.
For voters, the outcome settles the immediate contest but does not remove the political divisions exposed during the campaign. Lula will take office with a new mandate based on a narrow national majority, while Bolsonaro’s total confirms the scale of support assembled by his campaign across the country.
The official declaration followed the completion of the nationwide count rather than a projection. With every voting section included, the figures establish the result of the 2026 presidential election and bring a closely fought run-off to a formal conclusion.
