Incumbent Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was reelected on Oct. 25 in a surprise defeat of his far-right rival who had promised to remove “environmental obstacles” in the Amazon rainforest.
Lula won 51.8% of valid votes. Flávio Bolsonaro, eldest son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is imprisoned after being convicted of attempting a coup d’état when he lost the previous election, won 48.2% of the vote. Flávio was favored to win after he got 2% more of the first-round votes on Oct. 4. However, neither candidate got more than 50% of the vote, triggering a runoff election. Lula was able to secure an additional 10 million votes in 20 days.
“This election was a defeat for denialism, a defeat for lies,” Lula said in his first speech after the election results.
“We are going to teach the world how climate policy is done, here in this country. This year is the first time we have managed to reduce deforestation for four consecutive years.”
Deforestation soared to its highest level in 15 years under Jair Bolsonaro’s government. Lula took office in 2023 pledging to end both legal and illegal deforestation by 2030. Since then, deforestation has gradually slowed to its lowest rate since records began in 1988, though the Amazon rainforest is still shrinking.
Between August 2025 and July 2026, around 333,500 hectares (824,000 acres) of forest were cut, an area equivalent to roughly 7,300 Olympic-size swimming pools cleared every day.
“The reduction in deforestation in recent years was fundamental, but we still need to go much further,” Carlos Nobre, a climate scientist at the University of São Paulo, said in a statement.
Lula won a majority in four Amazonian states, while Flávio had more than half of the votes in five.
In Manaus, the Brazilian Amazon’s largest city, the skies were covered in forest fire smoke for much of October. Lula gained more than 80,000 votes in Manaus between the first and second rounds, an 18.5% increase, while Flávio Bolsonaro saw a 2.5% increase.
At an Oct. 19 rally in Marabá, a city in southeastern Pará state, Flávio Bolsonaro promised “the largest land regularization Pará has ever seen” and an end to environmental regulations, without specifying which rules he would remove.
In 2019, as a senator, Flávio Bolsonaro also co-authored a bill to abolish the requirement for landowners to keep native vegetation on 80% of their property in forested areas of the Legal Amazon, 35% in the Cerrado savanna and 20% in the rest of Brazil. The bill was shelved the same year.
Lula is set to begin his fourth term on Jan. 5, 2027. Voters elected Flávio Bolsonaro’s far right Liberal Party to the most seats in both chambers of Congress.
Banner image: Incumbent Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in São Paulo, Brazil, after his election win. Image courtesy of Ricardo Stuckert.
