Da
Silva, the 77-year-old known as Lula, swung 50.8 percent of the vote
with Bolsonaro breathing down his neck at 49.2 percent, according to the
country’s electoral authority, which announced 98.8 percent of votes
had been counted.
Bolsonaro led the race for much of the day, but
as Lula overtook him with around 70 percent of the vote tallied, car
horns began to sound on the streets of downtown São Paulo, according to
the Associated Press.
“Our dream is coming true. We need to be free,” an elated 62-year-old
man celebrating on São Paulo’s Paulista Avenue told a reporter for The Guardian. “Brazil was in a very dangerous place and now we are getting back our freedom. The last four years have been horrible.”
Lula
has stoked his legend as a working-class hero, having risen from
shining shoes as a boy to become a union leader, and eventually Brazil’s
president in 2003. He served two terms, leaving office in 2010. A
corruption scandal yanked him abruptly out of political life, landing
him in prison on a nine-and-a-half-year sentence in 2018. He spent 580
days in jail, much of it in isolation, before being freed the next
November.
His conviction was nullified last year by Brazil’s Supreme Court, though he was never declared innocent of his money laundering and corruption charges.
Lula’s incarceration kept him from running in the 2018 presidential election, clearing the way for Bolsonaro’s ascendance.
The populist firebrand, now 67, touted conservative Christian values
during his term. A professed fanboy of former U.S. President Donald
Trump, Bolsonaro was widely criticized for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, with some calling his response one of the worst in the world.
Last October, a Brazilian congressional panel
recommended Bolsonaro be charged with “crimes against humanity” for his
alleged deliberate stoking of the pandemic, intentionally inflaming
infection numbers in a desperate bid to achieve herd immunity and revive
a flailing economy.
In this year’s knock-down, drag-out campaign,
Lula cast himself as the savior of Brazil’s democracy, promising to
return its population of 214 million to a more prosperous time.
“I’m
expecting our victory, for the good of Brazil,” Bolsonaro told
reporters on Sunday morning as he cast his vote at a Rio de Janeiro
military complex.
His defeat makes him the first Brazilian
president since the end of the nation’s military dictatorship in 1985 to
be voted out of office. Every president who tried for a second term
before him—Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Lula himself, and Dilma
Rousseff—won a second term.
“Today we are choosing the kind of
Brazil we want, how we want our society to organize. People will decide
what kind of life they want,” Lula told reporters from Sao Bernardo do
Campo on Sunday morning. “That’s why this is the most important day of
my life. I am convinced that Brazilians will vote for a plan under which
democracy wins.”
Lula will be sworn in in January.
