Lula took the runoff with 51.79% of the vote against Flávio Bolsonaro’s 48.21%, according to the official tally with 100% of ballots counted. That translated into 64.25 million votes for the incumbent, a reversal of the first round on 4 October, when Bolsonaro had led 47.03% to 45.16%.

Al Jazeera described the comeback as the first time since Brazil’s return to democracy in 1985 that a candidate has lost the first round and still gone on to win the runoff. Lula, 80, told supporters on Sunday night that he had just one thing to say to them.

“I just had to tell you that I love you. Tomorrow, the fight continues.”

Flávio Bolsonaro did not concede. He said he could not recognize the result and signaled that his camp would challenge it, citing a two-hour voting extension granted at some polling stations.

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Flávio ran on his father’s shirt

This was never going to be a quiet runoff. Flávio Bolsonaro is the eldest son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who began serving a 27-year prison sentence in Brasília last November after being convicted in September 2025 of leading a plot to overturn the 2022 election. The elder Bolsonaro had already been declared ineligible to run until 2030 for abuse of political power.

His son’s 2026 campaign leaned heavily on the family’s visual language, and above all on the yellow Seleção shirt. Flávio called it “Bolsonaro’s jersey” as Brazil competed at the 2026 World Cup, according to an Al Jazeera long piece on how the national kit became political fashion across Latin America.

One in five won’t wear the shirt

That claim is itself a measure of how much ground football has lost as a shared national language. A study by the Sports Administration League at Ibmec University found that one in five Brazilians would not wear the Brazil shirt for political reasons, cited by Yahoo Sports in its reporting on the controversy around this year’s kit. The yellow jersey has been drifting into party politics since 2015, when supporters of the rising far right began wearing it at protests. By his 2018 and 2022 campaigns, Jair Bolsonaro was urging voters to go to the polls in the shirt.

The other side has pushed back. Lula voters have been reclaiming the kit by adding red elements or wearing it unmodified, in what the Al Jazeera piece called an effort to show that “Brazil belongs to Brazilians, not to the Bolsonarista right”.

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A red away kit that never arrived

Lula’s new government inherits a football culture that for much of 2026 looked like an extension of the campaign. Rumors earlier in the year that the Brazilian Football Confederation would introduce a red away kit for the World Cup drew immediate political fire, with the Bolsonaro camp framing a color change as a left-wing takeover. The confederation publicly denied the plan and kept yellow and green as the primary design.

Flávio Bolsonaro has told supporters he will pursue a legal annulment of the vote through the courts, which have so far not accepted the challenge. Lula is due to be inaugurated for a fourth term in January 2027.

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