# Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva **Lula** is the Brazilian president who has now won the office four times — in 2002, 2006, 2022 and 2026 — with a prison term and a quashed conviction in the middle of that run. He matters to this wiki as the counterpart to [[Jair Bolsonaro]]: the figure the Brazilian right has twice failed to remove by election and once tried to remove by other means. ## The 2026 election Lula lost the first round. On **4 October 2026** he took **45.12%** of valid votes to **47.07%** for Senator [[Flávio Bolsonaro]], the former president's son, against polling that had shown him ahead. The runoff on **25 October 2026** reversed it. Lula won **51.78%** to **48.22%** — about 4.4 million votes — on the Superior Electoral Court's count with 99.98% of polling stations reporting; CBS reported the final share as 51.8% on a complete count. Flávio Bolsonaro did not concede and asked for the result to be annulled. It is a fourth term for a man who was imprisoned in 2018 under the car-wash corruption prosecutions, released after 580 days, and had those convictions annulled on jurisdictional grounds before running again. The sequence — imprisoned, freed, re-elected, re-elected again — is the one the wiki tracks on [[Democracies That Have Imprisoned Presidents]]. ## Why he matters here Two things make the 2026 result load-bearing for this wiki rather than just Brazilian news. **The exported playbook lost twice.** [[Stop the Steal]] travelled to Brazil in 2022 and ended in the 8 January 2023 storming of the three branches, a conviction and a 27-year sentence for Bolsonaro. In 2026 the family ran a candidate who was leading after the first round and still lost, then contested the count rather than conceding. The pattern repeats; the result does not change. **US pressure was on the other side.** The Trump administration treated Bolsonaro's prosecution as persecution and backed it with tariffs — a 50% IEEPA layer in 2025, then 25% and 12.5% Section 301 duties in July 2026 — and with sanctions on the judge who tried him. Lula answered with Brazil's reciprocity law and a WTO challenge. He won the election anyway. The trade and sanctions record is on [[Brazil]]. ## See Also - [[Brazil]] · [[Jair Bolsonaro]] · [[Flávio Bolsonaro]] · [[Alexandre de Moraes]] - [[Stop the Steal]] · [[Global New Right Network]] · [[Democracies That Have Imprisoned Presidents]] - [[Mercosur]] · [[Countries Hub]]