On Oct. 25, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, won an unprecedented fourth term, defeating the far-right senator Flávio Bolsonaro with 51.79 % of the vote, a margin of nearly 4.4 million votes. For the 80-year-old Lula, who had trailed his opponent by 2.2 million votes in the first round of elections just three weeks earlier, the victory was a remarkable comeback.

Brazil is the largest country and economy in Latin America, and the contest had become a test of whether the region’s rightward shift could be stopped. Lula’s victory interrupted that drift and dealt a setback to President Donald Trump’s ambition to build a hemisphere of governments aligned with his politics. Yet interpreting the result as a triumph for the left would be a mistake.

Consider the first round of the elections in Brazil: more than 33 million Brazilians did not vote in the first round, an abstention rate of 21.08 %, the highest for a presidential election first round since 1998. Millions more cast blank or invalid ballots. Voting is optional for Brazilians aged 16 and 17 and for those 70 or older, but the scale of abstention points to a broader problem of political alienation. The high rejection rates for both candidates suggest that, for many voters, the election was not about electing a president but to ensure his opponent is not elected.

Flávio, whose father and former president Jair Bolsonaro is serving 27 years in prison for crimes against democracy, won the first round, with 2 million more votes than Lula, and his Liberal Party’s formidable showing in Congress in early October shocked the liberal world. He ran as his father’s proxy. He promised to pardon his father and his accomplices and to carry forward his political legacy.

The new expectations of Lula’s children

It seemed puzzling that Lula needed such a dramatic comeback to win re-election when unemployment in Brazil stood at 5.3 %, near a historic low. The International Monetary Fund projected that Brazil would become the world’s eighth-largest economy in 2027. Poverty in the country had fallen substantially during Lula’s third term, while real wages rose and........

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