Leftist Luis Inacio Lula da Silva on Sunday defeated President Jair Bolsonaro in an election runoff that marked a stunning comeback for Lula
After a divisive campaign that saw two bitter rivals on opposite sides of the political spectrum go head to head, Lula won 50.9% of the votes.
It is a stunning comeback for a politician who could not run in the last presidential election in 2018 because he was in jail and banned from standing for office.
He had been found guilty of receiving a bribe from a Brazilian construction firm in return for contracts with Brazil’s state oil company Petrobras.
Lula spent 580 days in jail before his conviction was annulled and he returned to the political fray.
“They tried to bury me alive and here I am,” he said, kicking off his victory speech.
Brazil’s election authority called the race for former leftist leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva shortly before midnight saying the result was “mathematically defined.”
The final tally gave former president Lula 50.9 percent of the vote to Bolsonaro’s 49.1 percent, with a gap of more than 2 million votes between them.
About 124 million Brazilians voted in the 2022 presidential election, or nearly 80 percent of the more than 156 million eligible.
