Brazil: Flavio Bolsonaro leads Lula, runoff on 25 October

In Brazil, the first round of the presidential election was held on Sunday 4 October 2026. With almost all the ballots counted, Senator Flavio Bolsonaro leads with about 47% of the vote, ahead of the outgoing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, credited with about 45.1%. The two men will meet in a runoff, set for 25 October 2026.

Aged 45, a senator for the Liberal Party, Flavio Bolsonaro is the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, sentenced to twenty-seven years' imprisonment for an attempted coup d'état and placed in detention, who had named him as candidate after his own conviction. On the night of the vote the son said he was "very satisfied" and hailed "a vote of confidence for change," declaring that "Brazil can take no more." The outgoing president called the result "unexpected" and warned: "The match is about to begin. We are in extra time, and that is where we will win over the Brazilian people."

The ballot carried an entire family into the institutions. Former first lady Michelle Bolsonaro and Carlos Bolsonaro, the candidate's brother, were elected to the Senate; the youngest son, Jair Renan, 28, sits in the Chamber, while the mother, Rogéria, narrowly failed. The Liberal Party took nineteen of the fifty-four Senate seats up for election, raising its total to twenty-eight out of eighty-one, and becomes the leading party in the Chamber of Deputies. A conservative majority thus strengthened opens the prospect of an amnesty law in favour of Jair Bolsonaro. During the campaign, a controversy over Our Lady of Aparecida, patroness of Brazil, inflamed the battle for the Catholic electorate.

What the Church has always taught

Scripture leaves no doubt as to the origin of power: "there is no power but from God" (Rom. XIII, 1). Leo XIII drew from it the constant doctrine: civil authority, whatever the form of the regime and whoever exercises it, comes from God and is ordered to the common good and to respect for the divine law (Immortale Dei, 1885). The State is therefore not an end in itself: like man, it owes God the worship due to Him. Pius XI recalled this in proclaiming the social kingship of Christ: cities and those who govern them are bound to acknowledge publicly the reign of Christ the King (Quas Primas, 1925). No ballot box creates authority; it only designates the hand to which it is entrusted, for a time and for an end.

The measure

An election can change who governs; it does not change Him before whom every ruler will answer. Whoever prevails on 25 October will hold his power from God and will render an account of it, not to a clan or a dynasty, but to the common good and the eternal law. It is by this measure, and not by the advantage of a family or the resentment of a people, that a vote is weighed.

One point touches the faith more closely. The patroness of Brazil, Our Lady of Aparecida, was dragged into the electoral dispute. The Mother of God is not a party banner. The honour rendered to her belongs to the worship governed by the first commandment, not to a calculation to capture an electorate. To make her serve a campaign, on one side or the other, is a disorder: souls are owed to God, and not the saints to the ballot box.

Sources. Epistle to the Romans XIII, 1 (Vulgate); Leo XIII, encyclical Immortale Dei (1 November 1885); Pius XI, encyclical Quas Primas (11 December 1925); Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the first commandment.