On the night of last 4 October, Brazil’s left woke up to the scenario it had discredited for months. Far right senator Flávio Bolsonaro finished the first round in the country’s presidential election roughly two million votes ahead of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (47% to 45% of the valid votes). The polls that had shown the incumbent president comfortably ahead for most of the year had misled both his campaign and its supporters, and the Bolsonaro campaign moved quickly to turn surprise into destiny. Within days, Flávio was speaking about who would be his ministers and policy priorities as if the runoff were a mere formality.
The script was, in many ways, borrowed from Colombia. On 21 June, Abelardo de la Espriella won that country’s presidency by roughly 250,000 votes out of more than 25 million cast — 49.7 percent against Iván Cepeda’s 48.7 — in one of the highest-turnout elections in its history. The right has since sold that result as the opening act of a renewed regional tide that Brazil was bound to follow.
