Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won a fourth term as Brazil's president, his second in a row, on Sunday, October 25. The Superior Electoral Court (TSE), which runs Brazil's elections, counted 64,256,232 votes for Lula (51.79% of valid votes) and 59,826,041 for Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro (48.21%), a margin of 4,430,191, with every polling section tallied. Bolsonaro refused to concede and on Sunday night said he would ask the courts to annul the election, objecting that a Supreme Court justice who was once Lula's lawyer, ruling alone on a complaint from Lula's coalition, had extended voting nationwide by two hours at the scheduled 5 p.m. close. Bolsonaro's campaign had also asked the electoral court that afternoon to extend voting in some rain-hit cities, and the TSE's president, Kassio Nunes Marques, who was appointed to the Supreme Court by Bolsonaro's father, said the extension did not change the result. On Monday Bolsonaro's office said he would not pursue annulment for now; he will instead ask the electoral courts to strip Lula's ticket of its mandate over alleged abuse of power, and his party recognized the result. President Trump, offering no evidence, said the vote "looked like another rigged election."
How the extension happened
Lula's coalition first asked for an extension at 1:22 p.m., citing reduced bus service in Salvador and other cities in Bahia, then widened the request to the whole country, according to a timeline published by the Brazilian news site Poder360. At 3:50 p.m. Bolsonaro's campaign asked the TSE to extend voting in specific cities in the South and Southeast, citing heavy rain, flooding and power cuts. At 4:22 p.m. Lula's campaign took its request to the Supreme Federal Court (STF), arguing that the Bahia cities were defying an STF ruling that guarantees free public transport on election days. The case was assigned by lot to Justice Cristiano Zanin, Lula's former defense lawyer, whom Lula appointed to the court. Acting alone, Zanin ordered voting extended "for two hours, until 7 p.m., Brasília time ... in all sections of all of Brazil," and told the TSE to carry it out. The timing is disputed: the Associated Press reported the ruling came three minutes before 5 p.m.; Poder360's timeline says it was released at 5:03. Poder360 wrote that the ruling "runs over" the TSE, "which is who should decide" on the campaigns' requests.
The order was then narrowed. In a follow-up note, Zanin wrote that both candidacies had reported problems transporting voters and that the extension applied only "where the ballot boxes were not closed." Some polling stations had already shut down their voting machines and could not resume, and AP reporters saw stations in Brasília and Rio de Janeiro close shortly after 5 p.m. How many stayed open is not clear.
Bolsonaro's grounds, and the court's response
"It is impossible to recognize the result of the elections in the context in which these things happened. We will use our legal team; we will ask for the annulment of these elections," Bolsonaro said Sunday night. (Quotes from Portuguese are Profoundd's translations.) He said Zanin, "who is not part of the Superior Electoral Court," had changed "the rules of the game in the middle of the game," and added: "I will never know, in a state where the ballot boxes were not reopened, how many votes I could have had." He also said Liberal Party (PL) inspectors were removed from the TSE's secure server room once the decision was made. The TSE replied on Monday: "The statement is false." Two PL inspectors attended the voting-machine integrity test and the tallying, it said, with attendance records and video of the tallying room, and the server room is not open to visitors. Nunes Marques said he had "absolute confidence in the entire electoral process" and that the court briefly held back incoming results after the ruling so that no partial figures leaked.
Globo's news site g1, analyzing machine logs from 497,897 polling sections, counted 35,521 presidential votes recorded after 5 p.m., about 0.8% of Lula's margin, according to the newspaper A Crítica's report of that analysis. A separate analysis of electoral-court data by the researcher Pedro Burgos, reported by Folha de S.Paulo, counted 34,330 votes cast after 5 p.m., most of them by 5:20 p.m., probably by voters already in line. The logs do not show whom anyone voted for, and voters already in line at 5 p.m. may vote under normal rules. The count measures how many votes came in after 5 p.m., not Bolsonaro's objection that the extension was applied unevenly: where polling places closed on time and did not reopen, there is no way to know how many more people would have voted. João Pedro Padua, a law professor at Fluminense Federal University, told the AP that "the extension of voting hours is unusual, but for it to invalidate the elections, the candidate would have to prove that it affected voters' ability to freely express their will. There doesn't seem to have been any such impact."
Monday: a different case, and a passport order
No annulment petition was filed. On Monday evening Bolsonaro's office told Poder360 that, for now, it had no plans to pursue one. In a video, citing possible misuse of government resources and the spread of false information, Bolsonaro said instead: "So I will indeed ask for Lula's ticket to be stripped of its mandate for all the abuses he committed." That type of case, which alleges abuse of political or economic power, can cost the winners their mandate and make them ineligible if the accusations are proven, and it does not necessarily challenge the validity of the votes, Poder360 explained. His party recognized the result that evening. "We recognize the presidential result, proclaimed by the Superior Electoral Court," the PL's president, Valdemar Costa Neto, said in a statement that also called for the questions raised to be clarified through democratic debate and described the government's pre-election social spending as electioneering; the statement did not congratulate Lula or cite specific irregularities, Metrópoles reported.
Separately, Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered Bolsonaro to hand over his passports, including his diplomatic one, and barred him from leaving Brazil, in an investigation of possible money laundering and capital flight involving the senator and Willer Tomaz, a lawyer described as his friend, InfoMoney reported. In a video, Bolsonaro called the order an attempt at intimidation and said it rested on his brother Eduardo's suggestion, in a U.S. interview on October 23, that he leave Brazil if he lost. "I never thought of leaving the country. I will hand over my passports and I will defend myself against this aberration," he said, adding that he would comply but contest the order.
Reactions
President Trump, who said before polls closed that he was "monitoring" the runoff, told reporters on Monday before flying to a rally in Mississippi that "it looked like another rigged election, frankly," and that "elections have to be indisputable and it looked very bad to me," the Associated Press reported; he offered no evidence. Asked whether he would act, he said, "I'm not running for Brazil, I'm running for the USA," adding, "I like Lula, I get along with him very well," Ireland's RTÉ reported. The electoral court has said the extension did not change the result. Officials in Lula's office and the foreign ministry judge that the remark will have no consequences and needs no reaction for now, SBT News reported. The State Department had not commented by Monday night, as far as Profoundd could find. Donald Trump Jr. criticized the extension: "If a conservative government in Brazil did this, everyone in the mainstream press in America would lose their minds." Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, said Trump "must respect the results and not undermine Brazil's elections." Eduardo Bolsonaro, the candidate's brother, posted an English-language video calling the election fraudulent and asking for international pressure to annul it, Portugal's Observador reported. Mexico's Claudia Sheinbaum, Canada's Mark Carney, Chile's José Antonio Kast, the European Commission and China were among those who congratulated Lula, and the Kremlin welcomed his re-election; Argentina's Javier Milei had not reacted, RTÉ noted.
In his victory speech Lula called the result "a defeat for denialism and lies" and said Brazil "will not accept being anyone's backyard." Flávio Bolsonaro's father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, is serving a 27-year sentence for plotting to overturn his 2022 loss to Lula; he denies wrongdoing. Lula begins his new term on January 5, 2027.
This article reflects reporting through the night of Monday, October 26, 2026. Sources: the Associated Press via The Boston Globe; RTÉ; SBT News; Poder360 on dropping the annulment request and the abuse-of-power case; Metrópoles on the PL statement; InfoMoney; Folha de S.Paulo; Superior Electoral Court official results; Poder360, extension timeline and court documents, Bolsonaro's statement and the TSE's response; The Associated Press via PBS NewsHour; NPR; CNN; Al Jazeera; A Crítica; Metrópoles; Observador.
