Bolsonaro wins first round of Brazilian presidential election, as Trump-backed candidates continue red wave

Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, won the first round of the Brazilian presidential election tonight, turning in a surprisingly strong showing and continuing a long run of wins for Latin American Trump-backed right-wing candidates.

Although the race had tightened considerably in the weeks leading up to the election, the vast majority of the polls showed incumbent President Inacio Lula da Silva with a single-digit lead.

Bolsonaro will now face off against President Lula da Silva in an October 25 second-round election. With 99% of the votes in, Bolsonaro led Lula 47.2% to 44.9%, in a race Lula had widely been expected to win.

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Tonight, the question on everyone's mind: how could the pollsters get the results so wrong?

The polling failure will serve to give further ammunition to the Brazilian right and the Bolsonaro camp, which have long alleged that the nation's leading pollsters turn in work biased in favor of Lula and his Workers Party.

The polling situation was similarly unfavorable to Jair Bolsonaro in the 2022 and 2018 elections, but relatively minor in comparison with the disparity in tonight's electoral results.

Bolsonaro put in an incredibly strong showing in his electoral strongholds in the south of Brazil, winning the country's three largest states by large margins.

In Sao Paulo state, the nation's largest, Bolsonaro led Lula 52% to 38%.

In Minas Gerais, which is Brazil's historic bellwether state, Bolsonaro led Lula 48% to 43%, while in his stronghold of Rio de Janeiro, he bested the incumbent president 53% to 39%.

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Lula racked up large margins in his traditional strongholds in the Northeast, where he won vote-rich Bahia, Pernambuco and Ceara by large margins, but it was not enough to surmount Bolsonaro's unprecedented electoral strength in Brazil's south.

Bolsonaro enjoyed a close relationship with Donald Trump through the course of the campaign, who made no secret of his intent to unceremoniously eject longtime geopolitical adversary Lula from office.

Tonight's surprising result is merely the latest in a long string of right-wing victories across Latin America, which has recently ushered in a red wave of conservative candidates in Chile, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia.

The election will undoubtedly prompt a period of soul-searching for the Brazilian left, which may be asking, "Should Lula have run at all?"

At 80 years old, with three presidential terms under his belt and aspiring to a fourth, Lula was widely viewed as the only contender who could unite the contentious and often-fractured Brazilian left.

Lula's political story marks one of the greatest comebacks in history. Once imprisoned on corruption charges, Lula was freed by the nation's Supreme Court and then defeated incumbent Jair Bolsonaro in a heated 2022 election by a razor-thin margin.

Famously, he pledged to serve only one term as president in 2022 and then reneged on that promise. Now, the move seems likely to backfire on him, in what will almost certainly be his last electoral campaign.

Flavio Bolsonaro will now face off against incumbent Lula in a second-round election on October 25. Bolsonaro begins the race with several structural advantages.

In addition to vastly outperforming across the country and proving the pollsters wrong, he is likely to win the majority of the votes of the major third-party candidates: Augusto Cury, Renan Santos, Ronaldo Caiado and Romeu Zema.

Together, these four candidates received nearly 8% of the vote.

Caiado, Zema and Santos are generally seen as candidates leaning to the political right, while Cury is a centrist. Caiado, Santos and Cury have allegedly said they do not plan to make an endorsement in the second round.

If elected, Flavio Bolsonaro is all but certain to free his father and senior Brazilian military officers, who are currently jailed on charges of planning a coup to remain in power following the 2022 election.

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The election also saw other members of the Bolsonaro family ushered into higher office: Jair Bolsonaro's wife, Michelly, was elected senator, as was his son Carlos, while another son, Renan, was elected federal deputy.

Bolsonaro's Liberal Party also turned in strong results in races for both chambers of Brazil's Congress, particularly in the Senate, where they are expected to hold 29 seats, compared to just nine for Lula's Workers Party.

In Brazil's lower chamber, the Liberal Party is also expected to hold the greatest number of seats, with 121, while Brazil Fe, a left-wing coalition, is on track to secure 78 seats.

Political analyst Flavio Morgenstern argued, "This election was not about Flavio Bolsonaro vs. Lula. It's about all of freedom-loving Brazil against the Brazilian Supreme Court. People have no voice in the institutions, and all the power in Brazil is concentrated in the Supreme Court."

The Brazilian right and the Bolsonaro family have long butted heads with the nation's Supreme Federal Court, which is dominated by justices appointed by the Workers Party.

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While Bolsonaro appears to have the wind in his sails, it is too early to count out Lula in the second-round election in three weeks. Lula is renowned as a smart and effective campaigner and still commands a powerful electoral machinery.

Yet, is winning election to an unprecedented fourth term a feat too daunting for even Lula, the great giant of the Latin American left?