Bolsonaro refuses to recognise Lula’s victory and says he will seek to annul the election

Senator Flávio Bolsonaro announced on Sunday night that he does not recognise President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s victory in Brazil’s presidential runoff and will seek to have it annulled, arguing that the extension of voting hours ordered by a Supreme Federal Court judge was irregular. Lula won with 51.78% of valid votes against 48.22%, a margin of some 4.4 million votes.

“It is impossible to recognise the result of the election in the context in which these things happened. We are going to ask for these elections to be annulled,” Bolsonaro said in Brasília at around 10.40 p.m., taking no questions. “I will not accept the rules of the game being changed in the middle of the game,” he added. The Liberal Party candidate described the decision as “a disgrace” and said it caused a “total breach of equality” between voters in different states. He also alleged that his party’s monitors had been removed from the vote-tallying room, without presenting evidence.

At 5.01 p.m., when polls were due to close, Supreme Court Judge Cristiano Zanin ordered voting extended until 7 p.m. nationwide at the request of Lula’s coalition, which reported a lack of buses to carry voters in cities such as São Paulo and Salvador. Zanin later clarified that the extension applied only where polling stations were still open and that votes from those already closed would be counted normally. It was the first time voting hours in a presidential election had been extended nationwide. Bolsonaro’s campaign had also asked the electoral courts to extend voting in municipalities in several states affected by rain.

Bolsonaro referred to Zanin as “Lula’s lawyer”: the judge defended the president in the Lava Jato cases before Lula appointed him to the Supreme Court. There is no record yet of the campaign having filed a formal challenge. According to the Brazilian press, Supreme Court President Edson Fachin called for respect for the election result and said the country needs peace.

In 2022, Jair Bolsonaro, the candidate’s father, also failed to publicly recognise his defeat by Lula, although he authorised the start of the transition. On January 8, 2023, a week after the inauguration, thousands of his supporters stormed the seats of the three branches of government in Brasília. The former president was sentenced to 27 years in prison for plotting a coup. Lula will begin his fourth term on January 1.