Brazil’s Lula da Silva, at the age of 80, was re-elected president of Brazil on Sunday night, defeating his right-wing rival, Sen. Flavio Bolsonaro, by a 52-48% margin: more than 4 million votes. The result was a decisive reversal of the first round of voting held on October 4, when Bolsonaro unexpectedly received 2 million votes more than Lula, with 47% of the vote compared to Lula’s 45% (a runoff is required when no candidate receives more than 50%).

That first-round result made Flavio the clear favorite to win last night’s runoff election. Ever since Brazil re-democratized in 1985 (emerging from a 1964 U.S.-supported military coup and resulting 21-year military dictatorship), every presidential candidate who won the first round of voting and proceeded to the runoff was elected president — until last night. That the candidates who trailed Lula and Bolsonaro in the first round were oriented more to the right than the left made a reversal appear particularly unlikely.

Perhaps the most dire obstacle Lula faced in his attempt to surpass Bolsonaro in the runoff was the crushing nationwide defeat Lula’s party and its allies suffered in the first round. Bolsonaro’s party now holds the governorships of Brazil’s key states and is the largest party by far in the Senate and House. Those results appeared to be such a resounding rejection of both Lula and his party that it was difficult to imagine how a reversal could be engineered in barely three weeks.

That Lula’s final election ended in such a dramatic and unlikely outcome seems fitting. “Highly unlikely” is perhaps the most apt description for Lula’s decades of political life. If anything, it is woefully inadequate to describe Lula’s life story: someone born into Brazil’s notoriously crushing poverty as the seventh of eight children, engulfed by all the family pathologies and denial of opportunities that typically entails, only to then ascend to be by far the single most dominant political figure of a very large and complex country as it rose in influence, importance, global prestige and sophistication.

Despite how it is often portrayed in American discourse — especially in some of the cruder factions of the current White House and State Department — Brazil is not a small, poor, or insignificant country. It is the fourth most-populated democracy on the planet, the world’s fifth-largest nation by land mass, the hemisphere’s second-largest nation after the U.S., touts one of the world’s ten largest economies, is a founding member of B.R.I.C.S., has pioneered some of the most successful programs of social advancement and health care, is the largest and most influential country in Latin America, and is blessed with many of the world’s most vital natural resources.

As is true of all elections, it will take weeks or even months to develop a full and accurate explanation for this outcome and the lessons it entails. As one might imagine, there is no shortage of instantly concocted pundit theories and narratives already permeating Brazilian and international media that purport to explain what happened and why. In lieu of attempting a comprehensive explanation for election results that are barely twelve hours old, I will instead offer a few isolated observations:

First , Lula da Silva is one of the very few genuine giants of political and world history of the late 20th century and first quarter of the 21st century.

That is an observation entirely unrelated to the vitriolic debates over whether he has been a force for good or evil in Brazil. It is simply a value-neutral testament to how consequential he has been over the last five decades: not just for Brazil but for the world. His domination of Brazilian politics since the start of the century surpasses the influence of any other single political leader in the democratic world, and does so by a sizable margin.

Lula is, of course, an extremely polarizing figure. In Brazil, he is revered by millions with a religious-type fervor, and hated by millions of others with a blinding fury that has built over decades. That is not unusual for transformative figures throughout history; intense love and intense hate are typically unprovoked by the ordinary or the unremarkable.

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That Lula has governed for so long is not what makes him so singularly significant. There are political leaders who linger and are re-elected to govern their country for many years who are not transformative. In fact, it is often their commitment to status quo continuity and stability that is their prime political asset (Germany’s Angela Merkel, who served 16 years as Germany’s chancellor, comes to mind).

But the Brazil in which Lula first emerged as a union activist, political leader and founder of his Workers Party (P.T.) in the 1980s is a radically different Brazil than the one that just elected him to his fourth term last night. And many of Brazil’s most important and enduring transformations over those decades — for better or worse — have Lula and the political movement he built as their prime author.

Before being elected president in 2002, Lula ran three times and lost. He finally won on his fourth try by vowing to moderate his economic agenda, accommodate Brazil’s financial centers, and choosing a banker-friendly businessman as his Vice President. He was re-elected in 2006 and was term-limited out of office in 2010, leaving with an 80% approval rating that enabled him to anoint his then-obscure successor: Brazil’s first female president, Dilma Rousseff, who coasted to victory in 2010 and was then narrowly re-elected in 2014 (before being impeached on farcical charges in 2016).

After being imprisoned in 2018 on corruption charges while gearing up to run again that year, Lula was released from prison in 2019 and then narrowly defeated Jair Bolsonaro in the 2022 election to win his third term. Lula’s victory last night over the son of the now-imprisoned Jair Bolsonaro, Flavio, means that by the end of Lula’s fourth term in 2030, when he will be 84 years old, P.T. will have governed Brazil for 22 of its last 28 years. That is political domination.

Lula’s life story is not just remarkable on its own but reflective of Brazil’s transformation. It was the last country in the Americas to have abolished slavery (doing so in 188 . It has been defined — plagued — by a violently oppressive and rigid socio-economic caste system in which class mobility barely existed. Lula’s self-made rise from the lowest depths of poverty to the highest realm of power and influence is not just a stunningly impressive personal accomplishment but a reflection of the national and regional modernization he both symbolizes and played a key role in inspiring (and again, these biographical accomplishments all sit alongside and do not at all dilute the intense objections I and millions of others have to key parts of his political life).

None of this was an accident. There is a very small handful of political leaders who can be compared to Lula when it comes to pure, raw charisma and force of will. All of those skills are value-neutral; they can be used for good or for evil. They are, however, necessary prerequisites to be a transformative political figure. Love him or hate him, Lula has all of them in abundance, and he has used them to transform his country, the region, and the world more broadly in a way that very few of his contemporaries on the world stage can claim.

Second , Last night’s election victory is not as shocking or miraculous as it is being portrayed this morning. Regardless of the metric one uses, this was not even in the same universe as, say, the shock of Donald Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton. Polls in the days leading up to last night’s vote showed a very close and tightening race, yet the narrative of Lula’s imminent loss — for all sorts of interesting reasons — nonetheless persisted.

After the first round of voting, it is true that a Lula victory was unlikely. And last night’s outcome was a surprise even when viewed through the prism of traditional polling and analytical metrics. But a Lula runoff victory never required some sort of unprecedented mathematical aberration or borderline-supernatural miracle, a view that many are being led to believe this morning by many who wish to depict Lula’s victory as the byproduct of systemic fraud.

Contrary to the now-automatic claims from election losers across the democratic world that only widespread election fraud could explain their loss (rather than their own mistakes), Bolsonaro’s victory in the runoff (as I noted several times over the past couple of weeks, including on Saturday) was never as certain as many were led to assume. And there were several rational reasons for caution when assuming Lula would lose.

One of the primary culprits here may be prediction markets, which for weeks depicted a Bolsonaro victory as a virtual inevitability by assigning that outcome a probability of between 80-90%. It may have been rational to bet on a Bolsonaro victory; again, classic political metrics led most Brazilian experts to believe he would likely win. But that did not mean that a Lula victory was next to impossible or even remote.

It is true that after the first round of voting, an assumption quickly formed among Brazil’s political and media class that Lula faced very low odds in his attempt to overcome Bolsonaro in the runoff election. The second-place finisher had never overtaken the first-round winner to win. None of the eliminated presidential candidates with non-trivial first-round vote totals were left-wing, and a few were clearly on the right, creating the reasonable presumption that most of the up-for-grabs “third-way” voters would migrate to Bolsonaro rather than to Lula (or would just abstain, which would help Bolsonaro as the frontrunner).

Though Lula’s campaign announced a strategy to target those who abstained in the first round and incentivize them to vote, there was little reason to believe such voters would change their minds in just a few weeks, particularly given that opinions about Lula and Bolsonaro — now the two central players in Brazil’s political drama — tend to be fixed in cement (early data suggests that this strategy of motivating first-round non-voters did succeed at least in part).

The perceived inevitability of Bolsonaro’s win was also very vibe-based. The nationwide devastation in the first round of left-wing candidates in the Congressional and gubernatorial races (almost entirely unforeseen by polling) understandably demoralized the Brazilian left. It appeared to highlight one of the glaring failures of Lula and P.T. (shared by many of the West’s left-liberal political parties the refusal to develop a generation of talented post-Lula leaders capable of speaking to the working class, as well as the lack of communication strategies suited to the age of influencers and streamers. There is also a new generation or even two generations of Brazilians who are too young to have lived through the rise of Lula and thus seem to care little about his iconography; to them, he is not an anti-establishment icon but rather the face of the establishment they have come to despise.

But what all of this seemed to me to overlook most was Lula himself. Whatever else one might have to say about Lula and the many flaws and defects of the P.T. — and I am someone who has had and still has quite a lot to say about all of that — the one thing nobody can deny is that they know how to win elections, and they know how to wield power. In stark contrast to much of the modern-day political left in the U.S. and Europe, Lula and the P.T. are ruthless and extremely shrewd political operators.

Lula did not intrude into and then take over an elite political leadership once reserved solely for the nation’s most affluent and aristocratic families without knowing how to wield power. The P.T. did not vanquish a political and economic establishment that once viewed it as a grave threat (before the P.T. itself became the political establishment) by meticulously observing the niceties of political ethics, mores, and etiquette. As anyone who has opposed the P.T. and has been targeted by them will tell you (and I can attest to this firsthand), few factions are more unscrupulous at poisoning the reputation of opponents without the slightest regard for truth. They have had twenty years in power to build the machine that does it, and while the dominance of the political right online has diluted some of that power, it remains a formidable force.

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Many of these trends were quite visible in the last two weeks. A deluge of fake stories about Bolsonaro’s dastardly plot to end the welfare program on which tens of millions of Brazil’s poor depend for their survival pulsated through the P.T.’s communication machinery. One of the P.T.’s most despicable, unscrupulous and scandal-ridden operatives (a Congressman named Andre Janones) built, to his credit, an innovative group channel on WhatsApp that quickly attracted millions of members and spread the P.T.’s messaging — both true and false — with remarkable discipline, velocity and reach.

As the election approached, Lula spent weeks cynically announcing a dizzying array of government policies and presents that he never tried to implement in his first four years that were barely disguised attempts to pay citizens to vote for him. While the Bolsonaro faithful seemed complacent in their belief that they had already won, all of this quickly re-energized Lula’s faithful flock after their first-round humiliation. Millions of them took to the street for massive and highly energized marches of the type that were once the hallmarks of the populist energy that first drove Lula into power.

But beyond my own general faith in the ability of Lula and his P.T.’s ruthless machine to win elections — a ruthlessness I have seen and experienced firsthand many times over the years — the polling trends heading into the election simply did not support the air of inevitability narratively assigned to a Bolsonaro victory. While Bolsonaro led in almost all polls since the first round, the margins were never large. And as the runoff approached, and as the P.T.’s efforts intensified, the trend was clear: the gap was closing. And that clear pro-P.T. momentum was a clear sign that a Bolsonaro victory, while still the most likely outcome, was far from a certainty (as I put it on Saturday, “Flavio is still probably the favorite but it's now more 60/40 or 55/45 than 80/20”).

Third , As for the predictable allegations of election fraud that instantly emerged, it's only been a few hours since the results became available. The full data will take days and weeks to assess. That complaints of election fraud are now all but automatic in close races has diminished their credibility. Analyzing election data is not my area of expertise, and I will thus leave these various claims to others to litigate. I have not seen, in the hours since the election results, anything that would approximate a smoking gun or even convincing evidence of fraud, which is not the same as asserting its absence.

What I do think is vital to note, however, is that there were election irregularities in the vote last night, and they illustrate one of the worst legacies of Lula’s last four years. Brazil’s Supreme Court was once an internationally respected judicial body, largely because it was so steadfastly apolitized. Presidents were expected to appoint, and the Senate to confirm, only those with the most impressive technical legal credentials. Unlike in the U.S., it was all but taboo in Brazil to appoint Supreme Court justices for nakedly political or ideological ends. Any powerful institution composed of human beings will fall short of that ideal, of course, and Brazil’s Supreme Court has had many political controversies, but Brazil’s court system was, until recently, a model admired in North America and Europe.

Now the opposite is true. Brazil’s Supreme Court is an international joke and disgrace, and the fault lies largely with Lula. Rather than appointing well-regarded legal specialists to the courts, he has appointed lackeys, political allies and friends. He filled one Supreme Court opening with one of his closest political allies, Flavio Dino, and another with his personal lawyer who represented him in the corruption cases he faced: Cristiano Zanin.

The Supreme Court — not Lula or the elected Congress — has been the dominant political force over the last four years, censoring and even imprisoning their critics in ways that even their defenders now acknowledge are endangering Brazilian democracy. And all of that is independent of the grotesque abuses of power and scandals of Brazil’s most destructive force, Alexandre de Moraes (I have reported on these developments with great alarm and detail in countless venues in both Brazil and in the U.S. and will not re-review them here).

All of this has significantly eroded the once-sterling reputation and legitimacy of the court: both in Brazil and internationally. Last night’s election is certain to accelerate that decline. The court last night approved a request from Lula’s campaign to extend by two hours the close of Brazil’s voting. Though common in the U.S., such a ruling is virtually unheard of in Brazil, where election rules are rigidly defined and enforced. And that highly unusual ruling was issued by Zanin: the Supreme Court judge who, before Lula installed him on the court, was Lula’s personal lawyer.

It is precisely this kind of behavior that has so aggressively undermined Brazil’s democratic and judicial institutions. It has created the appearance, quite valid in my view, that Brazil’s court long ago abandoned any pretense of adherence to minimal legal and constitutional protections and principles, replacing them with an unlimited willingness to act for political gain and to crush dissent. And I continue to regard this as the greatest threat to Brazilian democracy.

To the extent that these suspicions of election fraud grow — and in 2022, the court all but criminalized any attempts to question the outcome of the legitimacy of the 2022 result — most of the blame will lie with this deliberate, systemic degradation of Brazil’s court and judicial power by Lula and his political movement. And Lula’s victory last night means that he will be able to select four new judges to replace retiring ones on the Supreme Court.

One theory for Lula’s turnaround is that many voters — after witnessing the domination of Bolsonaro’s party in the first round of voting — fear any one party from having too much centralized power and prefer divided government. Perhaps one of the few encouraging signs for Brazilian politics is that it is now deeply divided: a victorious Lula will face a deeply hostile Congress and Senate filled with his most stalwart political enemies. That a deeply divided government is so often the best outcome voters can expect in so many democratic countries is perhaps the most potent indictment of the 21st century’s democratic world.