Bolsonaro is a Liberal Party senator and the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro. He has refused to recognize the results and said they should be annulled. The electoral court has treated the count as final and declared Lula the winner. He is due to begin his new term on January 1, 2027.

Lula came from behind to win. In the first round, Bolsonaro beat him by 2.2 million votes, and polls had the two level going into the runoff. Early returns on Sunday night pointed the same way: with 14.57% of votes counted, Bolsonaro led 50.05% to 49.95%. No candidate who finished second in a first round had gone on to win the runoff since Brazil returned to democracy.

Turnout was 80.79%. Public transport disruptions on election day led the electoral court to keep polls open two extra hours, until 7 p.m. local time. Both candidates had asked for the extension, with the strongest push coming from Lula's campaign. Among Brazilians voting in Germany, Lula took almost 80% of the vote.

More than 156 million registered voters had to choose between two very different programs. Lula ran on continuing his government's social policies. Bolsonaro campaigned on austerity, privatization and public security. The result keeps Brazil, Latin America's largest economy at $2.6 trillion, under a left-of-center government. Mexico also has a left-leaning government, while right-wing candidates allied with President Donald Trump have been gaining ground elsewhere in the region.

Lula was born poor in the northeastern state of Pernambuco and moved to São Paulo with his family as a small child. He went to work in the auto industry and joined the metalworkers' union in the industrial belt around the city. In the late 1970s, in the last years of the military dictatorship, he became the union's president and led a wave of strikes from 1978 to 1980. He helped found the Workers' Party. He lost presidential races in 1989, 1994 and 1998, then won in 2002 with 52 million votes, or 61.3% of the runoff vote.

He was reelected in 2006 and served eight years before his chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff, took office in 2011. His governments launched the Bolsa Família cash-transfer program in 2003, and by 2010 it had enrolled 12.4 million low-income households. The minimum wage rose from 200 reais to 510 reais, and 13 million jobs were created.

Rousseff was impeached in 2016 during a corruption investigation that also implicated Lula. He spent 580 days in prison. The Supreme Court later annulled his convictions over concerns about the impartiality of the judge who convicted him.

Lula is nearly 81. That puts him among the oldest presidents in the Americas, along with Trump and Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega.