Brazil’s presidential election is going to a run-off after boost for right-wing Bolsonaro. What happens next?

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On Sunday, 4 October, 2026, Brazilians didn’t just vote against President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. They buried a political project that had been on life support for almost a decade.

That project is the Nova República, the “New Republic”. It was born in the mid-1980s from the debris of a 21-year military dictatorship, and written into the country’s 1988 Constitution. For a generation, Brazilians called it the democratic pact, and it rested on three commitments.

The first was social. The New Republic embraced pluralism and made Brazil’s diversity part of its national identity rather than a problem to be managed.

The second was institutional. In a fragmented multiparty system, no one governs alone, so consensus was the engine of policy. That consensus came from free and fair elections, but also from coalitions that let federal, state and municipal governments carry out a shared agenda, and a working balance among the president, Congress and the Supreme Court.

The third was about policy: keep the economy stable, use social programs to reduce one of the world’s starkest inequalities, and widen popular participation in politics.

For roughly 30 years, the pact held well enough. Its results were uneven, but they were real: hyperinflation tamed, tens of millions of Brazilians lifted out of poverty, and power transferred peacefully at least between the two main parties of that era, the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT) and the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira, PSDB).

Many on the left claim that the New Republic started to crumble with former left-wing President Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment in 2016. Her removal was allegedly plotted to preserve the elitist and corrupted structures that the new pact had not fixed.

But it was former president Jair Bolsonaro’s victory in the 2018 election that represented a frontal assault on each of Brazil’s democratic commitments. The now jailed politician presented himself as an outsider despite having spent 28 years in Brazil’s Congress, and put Christian nationalism in place of pluralism ahead in his agenda.

He recast the consensus-building system as elite corruption, and the coalition politics that had kept Brazil governable became, in his telling, the source of its rot. He promised to fix the economy by getting the State out of the way of businesses and individuals, all in the name of freedom.

Bolsonaro, however, delivered little. Once in office, he discovered he had to govern inside the pact he had campaigned against. Congress had to be bargained with, courts had to be obeyed, and governors had their own power bases. Those constraints help explain why so many of his voters felt let down.

It also helps explain why, after losing to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva the 2022 election, he plotted a coup to stay in power. A leader who cannot bend the rules may come to believe he has to break them.

After governing Brazil for two terms between 2003 and 2010, Lula returned to power in 2023 promising to save Brazilian democracy. Instead, his third term became the clearest proof that the New Republic could not be saved.

The institutional balance that had sustained the system was gone. Congress, which now controls a large share of the federal budget through earmarks, held the Presidency hostage, while the Supreme Court increasingly filled the vacuum by legislating from the bench.

Lula’s attempts to move his agenda forward stalled again and again. His economic record was respectable, but not transformative: decent growth and low unemployment that never translated into a visible improvement in most people’s lives.

Public security, consistently among voters’ top concerns, went largely unaddressed. In fairness, under Brazil’s division of powers most policing belongs to the states, and the federal government can only do so much.

But voters generally don’t care about the letter (or the spirit) of the Constitution. They want results.

Then there is Lula himself. At 80 years old and four decades in public life, he had become the most recognizable face of the New Republic. That made him a convenient target. Many Brazilians merged their frustration with the political system into frustration with Lula, and for some, into outright hatred.

So if Lula’s defeat is confirmed in the runoff to be held 25 October, and the odds of reversing this Sunday’s first-round results are slim, it will be more than a personal loss or a setback for the Workers’ Party, which has governed Brazil for nearly 18 of the last 24 years.

It will be the swan song of a political project that promised to build a new country out of authoritarian ruins and could never fully deliver what it promised: political stability, economic prosperity and social justice.

The frustration that decided this election is the frustration of that unmet promise.

None of this means that the 56 million Brazilians who voted for Flávio Bolsonaro, one of former president’s Jair Bolsonaro sons, reject democracy. Some do. They are nostalgic for a largely imagined past, when the middle class was stronger (and much smaller), when Christian family values prevailed, and when imposing order counted for more than the rule of law.

But the larger lesson of 4 October is different. Millions of Brazilians want a different kind of democracy: less pluralist, built on a different idea of what democracy is for. Above all, they no longer believe the New Republic can answer the challenges of the world they live in.

Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) famously observed that crisis comes when “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” Brazil now stands at that crossroads.

Unlike his father, Flávio Bolsonaro would take office with a rare alignment of political forces. Sunday’s results suggest his allies will hold close to a quarter of both the Chamber of Deputies, Brazilian Congress’ lower house, and the Senate, a solid base in a Congress where coalitions are rented rather than built. He would also be able to appoint four of the Supreme Court’s eleven justices during his term.

Jair Bolsonaro spent four years fighting the institutions. His son may get to reshape them.

Guilherme Casarões is an Associate Professor of Brazilian Studies at Florida International University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.