On Sunday, Oct. 25, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was reelected in the second round of Brazil’s presidential election. It was a historic comeback. Since direct presidential elections resumed in 1989, no candidate who finished second in the first round had gone on to win the runoff. Lula’s victory also interrupted a regional trend that had begun to look like an unstoppable conservative tsunami. What happened?
In recent years, conservative candidates have won seven consecutive presidential elections across Latin America. These leaders come in many flavors: From conservatives like José Antonio Kast in Chile to radical libertarians such as Javier Milei in Argentina; from lifelong political figures such as Keiko Fujimori in Peru to newcomers like Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia. Despite their differences, many have made crime, corruption, and distrust of established institutions central to political debate. Some offer a more direct promise, personified by El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele: give us power, remove the obstacles, and we will deliver results. Several have also embraced Trump or drawn on MAGA politics, although their relationships with Washington differ. And yet Lula just broke this emerging regional narrative.
The first lesson is that political trends are reversible.
Brazil is not an isolated case. Lula’s comeback echoes Poland’s 2023 change of government, Orbán’s defeat in Hungary this April, and the student-backed opposition’s victory in Serbia on the same day Brazilians voted. These movements differ considerably, but each shows that political dominance can be challenged. Lula’s election gives the Latin American left a breath of fresh air. Lula himself first came to power during the pink tide, whose later decline is another reminder that political trends are not set in stone.
Brazil also shows how a reversal can happen: Through changes in the message and in the means of reaching voters.
Labor unions and college campuses were once crucial spaces for the left. Today political identities are also formed in neighborhood networks, WhatsApp groups, podcasts, and social media feeds. In Brazil, evangelical churches are another important space. The right has invested heavily in some of these networks. The paradigmatic voter for the left might once have been a union worker; today, a driver in the service economy might encounter politics through a podcast during a long shift. A message built for the first worker may not address the second worker’s concerns or carry the same urgency.
After a disappointing first round, Lula’s campaign expanded its digital outreach and intensified its efforts to bring voters to the polls. Its comeback suggests that these spaces remain open to political competition, even where the right has built a strong presence.
The second lesson is that election results can be a poor measure of a society’s ideology.
A large part of the electorate is polarized, but election results also depend on turnout and the choices voters face.
Lula lost the first round by roughly 2.2 million votes and won the second by roughly 4.4 million. Nearly three million additional people voted in the runoff, while blank and null votes also fell. These numbers cannot tell us why many individual voters changed their minds, much less why some may have voted for Lula for the first time, while others chose him over Flávio after supporting a different candidate in the first round. Yet, these numbers reveal an electorate more open to mobilization than the first-round result suggested.
That uncertainty matters for the larger question surrounding recent elections. Are voters becoming more conservative? Or have right-wing candidates been more effective at responding to people who feel that established politicians cannot control violence, improve their lives, or explain those failures?
Recent research offers a clue. The 2026 AmericasBarometer, conducted by Vanderbilt University’s Center for Global Democracy and LAPOP Lab, finds mostly modest increases between 2023 and 2026 in the share of Latin Americans placing themselves on the political right. Electoral outcomes appear to be moving faster than ideological self-identification.
That leaves room for another explanation: the right has been more effective at channeling discontent over crime, living costs, and the failures of incumbents. Lula’s victory shows that this advantage can be contested.
The third lesson is that an election does not settle how a country will be governed.
Flávio Bolsonaro lost, but his Liberal Party remains the largest in the Chamber of Deputies, and the incoming Congress is strongly conservative. Lula will have to govern with opponents who retain electoral strength, organizational power, and influence over legislation and appointments. Winning the presidency gives him another term but putting his policies into practice will require negotiation with parties whose priorities differ from those of Lula and his party.
That distinction between winning office and exercising power extends across the region. Peru’s and Colombia’s recent presidential races were exceptionally close, and neither Fujimori nor de la Espriella commands a congressional majority. Their ability to deliver on their promises will depend on building coalitions. Where leaders face fewer effective constraints, the risk is different. El Salvador shows the stakes: in 2025, Bukele’s allies removed presidential term limits, weakening a basic constraint on executive power. But we need to remember that Latin American institutions differ greatly in their capacity to hold leaders accountable.
For governments of both the left and the right, the test comes after election day. Can they deliver security and opportunity? Can they do so while accepting opposition, independent courts, and the possibility of losing the next election?
For Lula, those questions are now immediate. His comeback interrupted the right’s regional momentum, but he must answer voters’ concerns about crime and living costs while negotiating with a Congress in which his opponents have gained power. And can the left offer credible answers to the problems voters are asking it to solve?
Whether Lula can do that will determine if his victory becomes a durable alternative to the right’s recent successes or merely a pause. What he does next will tell us more about Latin America’s political future than the color we assign to its electoral map.
This post was written by Edgar Franco-Vivanco, Assistant Professor of Political Science and a faculty associate at the University of Michigan Center for Political Studies and the Michigan Institute for Data Science. His research interests include Latin American politics, historical political economy, criminal violence, and Indigenous politics. He is a co-PI of the Historical Institutions Lab and the director of LATAM-EH.
