US President Donald Trump has questioned the result of Brazil’s presidential run-off, saying it looked like a rigged election and offering no evidence for the claim.
“I didn’t take sides, but it looked like another rigged election,” he told reporters on October 26, a day after Lula da Silva defeated the right-wing senator Flávio Bolsonaro.
Trump said the way the vote had been tabulated looked bad to him and described the process as corrupt. He singled out the decision to keep polling stations open for two extra hours, which he called strange.
That order came from Supreme Federal Court (STF) Justice Cristiano Zanin shortly before voting was due to end at 5pm Brasília time. Zanin, who acted as Lula’s criminal defence lawyer before the President appointed him to the bench in 2023, cited transport failures and heavy rain.
Lula won the run-off with 51.79 per cent of the valid vote against 48.21 per cent, a margin of about 4.4 million votes, according to the Superior Electoral Court (TSE).
Bolsonaro has not conceded and said he would seek the annulment of the result. His Liberal Party (PL) acknowledged the outcome in a statement signed by its leader, Valdemar Costa Neto.
Trump insisted he had stayed out of the contest. He received Flávio Bolsonaro at the White House on May 26 and has repeatedly defended his father, Jair Bolsonaro, who is serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup after losing to Lula in 2022.
Brazilian Vice-President Geraldo Alckmin rejected the intervention as wrong and unfounded in an interview with Rede Vanguarda. He said one country does not interfere in another’s politics and that Trump had produced no proof, adding that Brazil’s electronic voting was a model for other countries.
In Brussels, senior EU officials congratulated Lula within hours of the declaration, before his rival’s legal challenge had been lodged.
The stakes for the European Union are commercial. Brazil is the largest economy in Mercosur, whose interim trade agreement with the EU has applied provisionally since May 1 and whose wider partnership agreement survived a Polish attempt to have it suspended by the EU’s top court in September.
Alckmin said trade talks with Washington were a priority for the incoming Government, noting that Brazilian exports to Europe had grown by more than 30 per cent in five months. Official figures put the rise at 30.7 per cent between May and September, against 1.6 per cent for exports to the United States.
Brazilian goods still face the 50 per cent US tariff imposed in August 2025 over Jair Bolsonaro’s prosecution, with a further 25 per cent levied in July on trade-practice grounds.
