The Law Is Sovereign: What the Church Asks When Brazil’s Losing Candidate Refuses to Concede

On Sunday night, Brazil’s electoral court declared Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva the winner of a presidential race he had trailed three weeks earlier. Before the night was out, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro said it was “impossible to recognize the results” and asked for the vote to be annulled, blaming a Supreme Court justice who kept the polls open two extra hours. Most of the American coverage since has weighed what the result means for Washington and for Brazil’s markets. The Church asks a question that sits underneath both: what makes the verdict of an election binding, and what do the judges, the winner, and the loser each owe the election?

The News Story

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won Brazil’s presidential runoff on Sunday, October 25, defeating right-wing Senator Flávio Bolsonaro and securing a fourth, non-consecutive term. With all ballots counted, Brazil’s electoral court reported that Lula took 51.8% of the vote to Bolsonaro’s 48.2%, a margin of nearly 4.4 million votes. The Superior Electoral Court called the race shortly after 9 p.m. Brasília time. Bolsonaro refused to concede and said he would ask for the result to be annulled.¹

The outcome reversed the first round on October 4, when Bolsonaro led Lula 47% to 45%, a gap of about 2.2 million votes. According to the Associated Press, it is the first time since military rule ended in 1985 that the first-round runner-up has won Brazil’s presidency. Bolsonaro carried São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Paraná and Rio Grande do Sul, though by smaller margins than in the first round, Fox News reported, while Lula won the North and Northeast by wide margins. Minas Gerais, a bellwether state, moved from a 5-point Bolsonaro lead to a near tie.²

The dispute centers on the final minutes of voting. Three minutes before polls were due to close at 5 p.m., Supreme Court Justice Cristiano Zanin ordered them to remain open for two more hours. Both campaigns had asked for an extension. Lula’s campaign cited buses that failed to run in São Paulo and Salvador, cities that lean toward him; Bolsonaro’s campaign cited heavy rain in the south, where he is stronger. Reuters reported that the electoral authority paused a count that had already begun publishing early returns. AP reporters saw polling stations in Brasília and Rio de Janeiro close shortly after the original deadline, and it is unclear how many stations stayed open.³

CBS News reported that in Bahia, a state electoral judge said at least 75 public buses were kept in municipal garages on election day and ordered the arrest of Salvador’s mobility secretary, Pablo Souza. Salvador’s mayor, Bruno Reis, a Bolsonaro ally, blamed trade unionists for placing Workers’ Party materials on transit vehicles.⁴

Bolsonaro allies noted that Zanin was once Lula’s lawyer. Bolsonaro accused the court of “changing the rules of the game in the middle of the game” and told reporters, “It’s impossible to recognize the results of the election in the context of these things that happened,” according to the AP. He also argued that some polling stations could not reopen in time, costing him votes.⁵

In his victory speech, Lula, 80, called the result “a defeat for denialism and lies” and said Brazil “will not accept being anyone’s backyard.” He acknowledged that he will govern alongside a Congress that Fox News and Al Jazeera describe as among the most conservative in recent memory, and said he would work with the legislature voters chose. He takes office January 5, 2027.⁶

The race carried a strong U.S. dimension. Flávio Bolsonaro is the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who was sentenced to 27 years in prison for plotting a coup after losing to Lula in 2022. The Trump administration imposed 50% tariffs on some Brazilian goods last year and sanctioned judges involved in that case, including Justice Alexandre de Moraes. President Trump said Sunday he was watching the election but did not endorse a candidate. Al Jazeera’s roundup of reactions included no statement from the White House. The leaders of Mexico, Canada, Chile, Bolivia and Panama congratulated Lula, while Donald Trump Jr. criticized the voting extension.⁷

Investors had favored Bolsonaro. Before São Paulo markets opened Monday, an exchange-traded fund tracking Brazilian stocks fell as much as 16% in Japanese trading, Business Today reported, citing Bloomberg.⁸

Catholic Social Teaching Analysis

Three Minutes Before Five

On Sunday afternoon, three minutes before the polls were due to close, Justice Cristiano Zanin of Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court ordered the polls to be kept open for two more hours.⁹ Both campaigns had asked for more time. Lula’s people pointed to buses that never left their garages in Salvador and São Paulo, and a state judge in Bahia later ordered the arrest of Salvador’s mobility secretary over at least 75 of them. Bolsonaro’s people pointed to the rain soaking the south.¹⁰ The order came so late that some polling stations had already shut down. At one in Rio de Janeiro, the voting machines had been switched off and could not be turned back on.¹¹

A few hours later the electoral court called the race. Lula won by nearly 4.4 million votes, the first candidate since the end of military rule to finish second in the first round and still take the presidency.¹² Flávio Bolsonaro, whose father is serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup after the last election, answered that it was “impossible to recognize the results of the election” and asked for them to be annulled.¹³

With these results, there are two complaints in the air this morning. One says a judge changed the rules in the middle of the game. The other says a candidate is refusing the verdict of more than 120 million voters. Both are, at their core, claims about the rule of law. On that topic, the Church has a good deal to say.

Whose Verdict It Is

Start with who decides the results of an election. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church is direct: “The subject of political authority is the people considered in its entirety as those who have sovereignty.” The people hand the exercise of that sovereignty to the representatives they freely elect, and they keep the prerogative “to assert this sovereignty in evaluating the work of those charged with governing and also in replacing them.” Democracy, with its procedures for verification, “allows and guarantees its fullest application.”¹⁴

Pope Leo XIII, writing in 1881, added a point that gives a ballot more weight than most of us give it. When a people chooses its ruler, he wrote, “the ruler is designated, but the rights of ruling are not thereby conferred.”¹⁵ Authority comes from God. The voters settle who will carry it. The Catechism puts the second half in nearly the same words: “the choice of the political regime and the appointment of rulers are left to the free decision of the citizens.”¹⁶ That’s why the Church takes the count so seriously. An election is how a free people answers a question God has left in their hands.

On Sunday, Brazilians answered that question. A candidate who calls the answer of the citizens impossible to recognize, before any court has heard his complaint, sets his own judgment above theirs.

The Law Is Sovereign

Pope St. John Paul II stated the Church’s position on democracy in Centesimus Annus. The Church values it “inasmuch as it ensures the participation of citizens in making political choices, guarantees to the governed the possibility both of electing and holding accountable those who govern them, and of replacing them through peaceful means when appropriate.” Then comes the condition the Church places on it: “Authentic democracy is possible only in a State ruled by law.”¹⁷ Two paragraphs earlier he spelled out what that means. Each power should “be balanced by other powers and by other spheres of responsibility which keep it within proper bounds. This is the principle of the ‘rule of law’, in which the law is sovereign, and not the arbitrary will of individuals.”¹⁸

The law is sovereign. That sentence cuts in two directions this week, and each deserves a deeper look.

When a Judge Moves the Clock

St. Thomas Aquinas asked whether a law should be changed every time something better comes along, and he said no. “Custom avails much for the observance of laws,” he wrote, and so “when a law is changed, the binding power of the law is diminished, in so far as custom is abolished.” Human law “should never be changed, unless, in some way or other, the common weal be compensated” for that loss, either by a very great and evident benefit or by real necessity.¹⁹

I can’t rule on Brazilian electoral law from here, and I won’t pretend to. Thomas allows exactly the kind of necessity the court cited. If buses were deliberately kept off the road to stop people from voting, keeping the polls open protected the vote, and a judge in Bahia thought the bus problem serious enough to order an arrest.²⁰ However, Thomas also names the cost such a decision carries, and Brazil is paying it now. A rule changed three minutes before the deadline, applied unevenly, by a justice who was once the winner’s lawyer, spends public trust even when it is lawful.²¹ The judges who made that call owe Brazil a full public accounting: how many stations reopened, how many ballots came in after five, and why the order came when it did. The Compendium says that in a democracy “political authority is accountable to the people.”²² Courts are part of that authority.

When a Candidate Refuses the Count

The same law binds the man who lost. It gives him remedies, and he is free to use them. Asking a court to review the extension is lawful. Refusing in advance to recognize the result, and demanding that the whole election be annulled over a two-hour window his own campaign also requested, puts the will of one candidate in the place where the Compendium puts the law.²³

The Compendium warns that “an authentic democracy is not merely the result of a formal observation of a set of rules but is the fruit of a convinced acceptance of the values that inspire democratic procedures.”²⁴ Anyone can game a procedure: an official who keeps buses in the garage or a candidate who says a result can’t stand. What holds a democracy together is that the people inside it actually believe the voters get the last word. Brazil has already seen what happens when a losing side stops believing it. Jair Bolsonaro was convicted of plotting a coup after his 2022 defeat.²⁵ His son owes his supporters a different example.

Lula, for his part, showed the right posture in one sentence on Sunday night. He faces a Congress that Fox News called one of the most conservative in Brazil’s history, and he said, “I do not choose the Congress,” promising to work with the one the voters elected.²⁶ A winner who accepts a legislature he didn’t want and a loser who accepts a president he didn’t want are doing the same thing. Both are letting the people, and the law, be sovereign.

What I’d Watch

Watch whether Bolsonaro’s challenge goes to a courtroom or to the street. Watch whether the electoral court publishes how many stations reopened and how many ballots were cast late. Watch the Bahia bus investigation and whoever it finds responsible. And watch Washington, which sanctioned Brazilian judges last year; whatever it says this week will tell Brazilians whose verdict it thinks this is.²⁷

And, as always, pray. Pray for President Lula, that he governs for the whole country and not only for the half that elected him. Pray for Senator Bolsonaro, that he finds the humility a defeat asks of a man. Pray for Justice Zanin and the judges of the electoral court, that they act in the open. And pray for the people of Brazil, home to more Catholics than any other nation on earth, that the Lord will bless his people with peace (Psalm 29:11).

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This story turns on the rule of law: the people choose who governs, and authentic democracy needs a law that binds the judges, the winner and the loser alike.

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Notes

1. ↑ “Lula Is Declared Winner of Brazil’s Election as Bolsonaro Rejects Results,” Associated Press via Santa Fe New Mexican, October 25, 2026, santafenewmexican.com; “Lula Wins Fourth Term as Brazil’s President, Beating Flávio Bolsonaro in Runoff,” Associated Press via CBS News, October 26, 2026, cbsnews.com; “Lula Holds Off Far Right with Victory in Brazil Presidential Election,” Al Jazeera, October 26, 2026, aljazeera.com.
2. ↑ Associated Press, “Lula Is Declared Winner”; David Unsworth, “Incumbent Leftist Lula da Silva Wins Fourth Term as Brazil’s President,” Fox News, October 25, 2026, foxnews.com; Associated Press, “Lula Wins Fourth Term.”
3. ↑ Associated Press, “Lula Is Declared Winner”; “Brazil’s Election Left Hanging as Judge Extends Vote After Polls Close, Sparking Chaos,” Reuters via South China Morning Post, October 26, 2026, scmp.com; Al Jazeera, “Lula Holds Off Far Right.”
4. ↑ Associated Press, “Lula Wins Fourth Term.”
5. ↑ Associated Press, “Lula Is Declared Winner”; Associated Press, “Lula Wins Fourth Term”; Al Jazeera, “Lula Holds Off Far Right.”
6. ↑ Associated Press, “Lula Wins Fourth Term”; Al Jazeera, “Lula Holds Off Far Right”; Unsworth, “Incumbent Leftist Lula da Silva Wins Fourth Term”; Associated Press, “Lula Is Declared Winner.”
7. ↑ Associated Press, “Lula Is Declared Winner”; Al Jazeera, “Lula Holds Off Far Right”; Associated Press, “Lula Wins Fourth Term”; “World Reacts to Lula’s Victory in Brazil’s Presidential Election,” Al Jazeera, October 26, 2026, aljazeera.com.
8. ↑ “Brazil Markets Face Sell-Off as Lula Stuns Investors with Election Win,” Business Today, October 26, 2026, businesstoday.in.
9. ↑ Associated Press, “Lula Is Declared Winner”; Reuters, “Brazil’s Election Left Hanging.”
10. ↑ Associated Press, “Lula Is Declared Winner”; Associated Press, “Lula Wins Fourth Term.”
11. ↑ Associated Press, “Lula Wins Fourth Term”; Associated Press, “Lula Is Declared Winner.”
12. ↑ Associated Press, “Lula Is Declared Winner.”
13. ↑ Associated Press, “Lula Is Declared Winner”; Al Jazeera, “Lula Holds Off Far Right.”
14. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 395, vatican.va.
15. ↑ Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter Diuturnum: On the Origin of Civil Power (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, June 29, 1881), no. 6, vatican.va.
16. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 1901, vatican.va.
17. ↑ Pope John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Centesimus Annus: On the Hundredth Anniversary of Rerum Novarum (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, May 1, 1991), no. 46, vatican.va.
18. ↑ Pope John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, no. 44.
19. ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 97, a. 2, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, in New Advent, newadvent.org.
20. ↑ Associated Press, “Lula Wins Fourth Term.”
21. ↑ Associated Press, “Lula Is Declared Winner”; Associated Press, “Lula Wins Fourth Term.”
22. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 408.
23. ↑ Associated Press, “Lula Is Declared Winner”; Al Jazeera, “Lula Holds Off Far Right.”
24. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 407.
25. ↑ Associated Press, “Lula Is Declared Winner”; Al Jazeera, “Lula Holds Off Far Right.”
26. ↑ Al Jazeera, “Lula Holds Off Far Right”; Unsworth, “Incumbent Leftist Lula da Silva Wins Fourth Term.”
27. ↑ Al Jazeera, “Lula Holds Off Far Right.”

Books Cited

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• Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition (Doubleday / Image, 2003)
• St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Latin-English edition, Complete Set (Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic, 2012)