President Donald Trump responded to the controversial presidential election result in Brazil by stating that the entire process was a “bad looked” that looked like “another rigged election” in South America. The result generated controversy thanks to a last minute court order unilaterally issued by a Supreme Court judge who previously worked as a personal attorney for leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who defeated right-wing Flávio Bolsonaro in Sunday’s runoff.
“Elections have to be indisputable and it looked very bad to me,” Trump told reporters outside the White House on Monday. He added, “I thought it had a very bad look, the way it was tabulated,” and “It looked like another rigged election, frankly.”
Earlier on election day, when asked about the contest, he said, “I don’t want to get into that subject, but we are monitoring.”
Trump had previously described Flávio Bolsonaro’s first-round performance as “a great victory. Close, but a very big victory. Incredible, actually,” and predicted “a very close election.” The U.S. State Department prepared a statement recognizing the outcome, as has been customary, but held it back after Flávio Bolsonaro declined to concede and called for annulment.
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All told, Lula received approximately 51.79 percent of valid votes, about 64 million total, to Bolsonaro’s 48.21 percent, or about 59 million votes. This gave Lula a margin of victory of roughly 4.4 million votes.
The runoff featured an unprecedented last-minute change in voting hours. Polls were scheduled to close at 5 p.m. Brasília time, though around 5:01 p.m. — after initial partial counts had begun appearing — Supreme Federal Court Justice Cristiano Zanin ordered voting extended until 7 p.m. nationwide.
Zanin, who had served as Lula’s personal attorney in corruption cases related to Operation Car Wash and was appointed to the court by Lula in 2023, acted on a request from Lula’s campaign citing reduced public transportation in cities including São Paulo and Salvador. Flávio Bolsonaro’s campaign had separately sought extensions in certain southern and southeastern municipalities affected by rain, but only after Lula’s request was made.
Zanin’s order notably applied only to polling stations whose electronic voting machines had not yet been closed, as machines already finalized could not be reopened. Election monitors and administrators from multiple regions expressed confusion among both poll workers and voters. Some locations had already printed ballot reports and shut down before receiving the order, leaving late-arriving voters unable to cast ballots.
Following the result, Bolsonaro announced that he is not recognizing the result and called for further review. “It is impossible to accept the election results given the circumstances under which these events unfolded. We will take legal action and seek to have the election annulled,” Bolsonaro said outside his campaign headquarters in Brasília.
He described the events as “not normal” and “unacceptable,” stating that “a Supreme Court justice — for the first time in history, a former lawyer for Lula — signed a decree at the request of a former business partner and changed the rules of the game midway through the game.” Bolsonaro added that he would “never know how many votes I might have received in a state where polling stations weren’t reopened.”
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[ H/T Trending Politics ]
