Walkers, Wheelchairs and Ballots: Brazil's Elderly Carry Lula to Victory

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is heading into a fourth term, and Brazil's oldest voters are getting much of the credit. More than 1 million people who sat out the 4 October first round, which Lula lost, turned up for the runoff and cast a ballot. Of the 3 million extra voters who took part in round two, 1.4 million were over 70, according to election experts still crunching the numbers. Voting is compulsory in Brazil only for people aged 18 to 69, so turnout among the very old is entirely voluntary.

Lula teared up at his 81st birthday party while thanking the voters who shuffled into polling stations on walkers and in wheelchairs. He described the viral images of people in their 80s, 90s and 100s voting as the most powerful and human he had ever seen during an election. In north-east Brazil, 114-year-old retiree Josefa Pereira da Conceição wore a red T-shirt printed with Lula's face and the slogan Strength of the people.

No first-round loser had bounced back to win since democracy returned in the 1980s. Lula did exactly that, picking up 10.3m votes between the two rounds. Explanations include a sharp rise in welfare benefits just before the vote, a pro-Lula WhatsApp group that exploded from 50,000 members to nearly 11m in under a month, and street protests led by students.

Celia de Oliveira Soares, a 101-year-old great-grandmother in Rio de Janeiro, had not voted in nearly a decade. Relatives helped her into a wheelchair, drove her to a nearby school and watched as she clung to the banister up two flights of stairs to the polling booth. There she keyed 13, Lula's number, into the machine. I like Lula. I really do, she said, adding that she did not like the Bolsonaros, so voting was the efficient thing to do.

Journalist José Roberto de Toledo said the surge in older voters is no staged story, it is a movement you can measure statistically. But he argued the swing to Lula was mostly about fear rather than age, with earlier protest voters settling on the familiar Lula as the lower-risk choice in the runoff. He pointed to Flávio Bolsonaro's authoritarian-sounding vow to re-democratise the country, which stoked fears he wanted to be emperor of Brazil. At Lula's victory celebration, former minister Simone Tebet claimed young people hit the streets while golden-agers saved democracy.

Soares, who has lived through four coups, 16 presidential elections and four Lula wins, predicted Flávio Bolsonaro would flee abroad. Her granddaughter Poliana corrected her: he has already gone. He must have gone to the US, then, the centenarian guessed, correctly. Flávio's father, former president Jair Bolsonaro, is serving a 27-year sentence for plotting to seize power after losing the 2022 election to Lula.