Analysis | Opinion. This piece argues one side of a contested question. It is not a news report.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was declared the winner of Brazil’s presidential runoff on Sunday night, defeating Flávio Bolsonaro 51.79% to 48.21% with 99.99% of polling places counted, according to Superior Electoral Court figures published by G1. Three weeks earlier, Flávio had led the first round, 47.03% to 45.16%, according to the same official count.
The comeback was historic. It was the first time since 1989 that a first-round runner-up won a Brazilian presidential runoff. But the case that this election was stolen does not rest on ballots or voting machines. It rests on who changed the rules on Election Day, and who benefited.
Lula’s former lawyer rewrote Election Day
On Sunday afternoon, Supreme Federal Court Justice Cristiano Zanin extended voting nationwide by two hours, to 7 p.m. Brasília time, G1 reported. The order followed petitions from Lula’s coalition over bus shortfalls in at least nine states. The count, already under way, was paused.
Zanin later narrowed the order to polling stations that were still open, so stations that had already closed did not reopen, according to G1. Voting in a country of continental size was run under shifting instructions in real time.
Flávio’s campaign had asked for far less: extra time only in rain-hit cities in Minas Gerais, Rio Grande do Sul, Paraná, São Paulo and Santa Catarina, G1 reported. The remedy that took effect was national, matching the scale of the petitions from Lula’s side rather than the targeted relief Flávio sought.
Who is Cristiano Zanin?
Zanin is no neutral referee in Lula’s story. He was Lula’s personal defense lawyer in the Car Wash corruption cases and won the annulment of his client’s convictions. Lula nominated him to the Supreme Court in June 2023, and the Senate confirmed him 58 to 18, Reuters reported.
The ties are also personal. Zanin’s wife is the daughter of Roberto Teixeira, a longtime friend of Lula’s, Reuters reported via UOL. In the United States, a president’s former defense lawyer extending polling hours after petitions from that president’s campaign would be treated as a scandal.
Flávio said he cannot recognize the result and will seek to have it annulled, according to G1 and O Globo. He said a Supreme Court justice changed the rules of the game mid-vote and that equal treatment across states broke down.
He also alleged that his party’s monitors were removed from the electoral court’s secure vault room after the decision, InfoMoney reported. That allegation comes from the Bolsonaro campaign and has not been independently confirmed.
The candidate the court put back on the ballot
Lula could run at all only because the Supreme Court cleared his path. On March 8, 2021, Justice Edson Fachin annulled Lula’s convictions on jurisdictional grounds, according to the court, not on the evidence. The full court upheld that ruling 8 to 3 the next month, Agência Brasil reported.
Lula had already spent 580 days in jail. Two weeks after Fachin’s ruling, a court panel found that former Judge Sergio Moro had been biased against him, AP reported. Lula’s critics call that outcome a technicality, not an exoneration.
2022: a referee with power over speech
Lula’s 2022 win over Jair Bolsonaro was the tightest since Brazil returned to democracy: 50.9% to 49.1%, a margin of about 2 million votes, AP reported. In the final stretch of that race, the electoral court took sweeping power over what voters could see online.
On Oct. 20, 2022, ten days before the runoff, the Superior Electoral Court adopted Resolution 23.714. It let the court’s president extend removal orders to identical content without a new vote, gave platforms two hours to comply, or one hour near the vote, and set fines of up to 150,000 reais per hour.
The resolution also allowed platforms to be suspended for up to 24 hours. The New York Times summed it up in a headline: “To Fight Lies, Brazil Gives One Man Power Over Online Speech.”
That man was Justice Alexandre de Moraes, then the electoral court’s president. The court voted 4 to 3, at the Lula coalition’s request, to block the Brasil Paralelo documentary “Quem mandou matar Jair Bolsonaro?” until Oct. 31, after the runoff, Gazeta do Povo reported. Moraes voted with the majority.
The court also demonetized right-wing channels. It granted Lula rights of reply against Jovem Pan and barred the network from repeating certain claims about his cases, with a fine of 25,000 reais per repeat, Folha reported.
Jovem Pan then told its on-air staff not to call Lula a thief, Poder360 reported. One side of a presidential race had its critics’ words policed by a court in the campaign’s final days.
Challenge the count, pay the price
After the 2022 runoff, Bolsonaro’s coalition argued that some voting machines had malfunctioned and that their votes should be voided. Moraes rejected the challenge on Nov. 23, 2022, and fined the coalition 22.9 million reais, about $4.3 million, for bad-faith litigation, The Guardian reported.
Moraes also ordered an investigation of Liberal Party president Valdemar Costa Neto, the electoral court said. The message to any losing side was plain: question the process and pay for it.
Jair Bolsonaro was barred from office until 2030 in June 2023, AP reported. In September 2025 he was sentenced to 27 years and 3 months in the coup-plot case, and he began serving it in November 2025, Reuters reported. His son ran in his place.
Washington noticed
A House Judiciary Committee report in April 2024 published dozens of translated orders from Moraes and the electoral court and said Brazil sought to censor more than 300 accounts, including Jair Bolsonaro’s. Months later, Moraes ordered X suspended nationwide, The Guardian reported.
In July 2025, the Treasury Department sanctioned Moraes under the Global Magnitsky Act. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent accused him of “an unlawful witch hunt” and of “politicized prosecutions—including against former President Jair Bolsonaro,” according to Treasury. Those sanctions were lifted on Dec. 12, 2025.
Stolen without touching a ballot
None of this requires a single altered vote. An election can be taken through the rules: who is cleared to run, what voters may hear, which challenges get punished, and who may change polling hours once the day is under way. In Brazil, those decisions ran through a handful of judges, one of them Lula’s former lawyer.
With 99.99% of polling places counted, Lula’s margin was about 4.4 million votes. Flávio Bolsonaro says he will fight to annul it. The strongest version of the case against this result does not claim the machines lied. It asks why the winner’s former lawyer was allowed to change the rules while Brazilians were still voting.
