Lula Turns 53.9 Million First-Round Votes Into 64.2 Million to Win Brazil Runoff

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will serve another term as Brazil's president after adding 10.3 million votes between the two rounds of voting, moving from 53.9 million in the first round to 64.2 million in the runoff. Flávio Bolsonaro went from 56.1 million to 59.8 million. The shift handed Lula the presidency after analysts had treated a Bolsonaro win as certain.

Three weeks before the result, Lula told allies he could not explain a second-place finish. Nine million votes held by candidates outside the two finalists were expected to move to Bolsonaro, and political scientist Fábio Vasconcellos said the transfer of those ballots was the central question of the campaign.

The response began in Niterói, a city of 480,000 across Guanabara Bay from Rio de Janeiro, where Fluminense Federal University students protested the night after the first round against a return to power for the Bolsonaro family. Former president Jair Bolsonaro, father of Flávio Bolsonaro, is under house arrest for attempting a coup. Two days later a student protest took over downtown Rio, and similar demonstrations spread across the country in the days that followed.

On the second day after the first round, congressman André Janones, a Lula ally, opened a WhatsApp channel called "Lula's Army" with audio messages and daily instructions on producing pro-Lula content. The channel reached 60,000 followers in its first day and passed 10 million by election Sunday. Janones also ran a 24-hour YouTube live stream on the eve of the vote, then entered hospital last week, the only day the channel went quiet. Lula called him "our general" in his victory speech on Sunday night.

Vasconcellos, a researcher at the Federal University of Paraná, attributed the result to the streets, social media and government action together. In the weeks before the vote Lula approved a package of benefits at the limits of what electoral law allows, including larger and earlier payments from the main cash-transfer program for poor families. Lula also began recording selfie videos despite not owning a mobile phone; he turns 81 on Tuesday and said on Sunday night he had been given one.

Lula said in his victory speech: "I want to thank the generosity of Brazil's young people who took to the streets to defend democracy." Marco Aurélio de Carvalho, Lula's campaign manager, said the turnaround came down to "President Lula. We have a great statesman on our team."

Lula has said this was his last election. Political scientist Camila Rocha, who has interviewed undecided voters since May, said: "That is a very big challenge because, in the polling on this, Lula's dominance is still very strong. There is no one in his party with the same leadership."