Brazil’s right-wing parties won control of the Senate on Sunday, their strongest showing since the country returned to democracy in 1985, as voters also pushed the presidential race into a runoff between conservative Senator Flavio Bolsonaro and incumbent socialist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
More than 125 million Brazilians voted — nearly 79 percent of the country’s 158.7 million registered electorate. Bolsonaro, of the Liberal Party (PL), won the first round of the presidential contest but fell short of the 50-percent threshold needed for an outright win. He and Lula will meet in a runoff on October 25.
Voters also chose regional governors, members of the Chamber of Deputies, and two-thirds of the Senate’s 81 seats. The PL posted its best legislative result in party history and is set to become the largest party in both chambers of Congress when new lawmakers are sworn in this February.
Senate Shifts Right
According to Jovem Pan, the PL grew its Senate bloc from 15 to 28 seats — a full third of the chamber. Combined with allied parties, the right will hold 49 of 81 Senate seats come February, against 27 lawmakers on the left and five centrists. That gives the right three-fifths control of the chamber.
Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT) held onto its nine Senate seats, keeping it in second place for total senators.
Poder 360 notes that ordinary legislation in the Senate requires 41 votes, constitutional amendments require 49, and impeachment proceedings — including against Supreme Court justices — require a two-thirds majority. The incoming right-wing majority clears the bar for standard legislation and sits right at the threshold for constitutional changes.
Lower House Record
In the Chamber of Deputies, the PL has reportedly secured 121 of 513 seats, while a leftist coalition of the PT, the Communist Party of Brazil, and the Brazilian Green Party collectively holds 88. Full results from the Superior Electoral Tribunal are still pending because final seat allocation depends on electoral quotients set by local law.
Even so, the PL is set to hold the largest single-party bloc in the Chamber since Brazil’s 1988 constitutional reform, surpassing the 108-seat record set by the Brazilian Democratic Movement in 1990.
The two top vote-getters nationwide were both PL conservatives: Nikolas Ferreira of Minas Gerais, with over 3.1 million votes, and Lucas Pavanato of São Paulo, with just over 3 million. Ferreira was censored by the electoral tribunal last week after posting a video criticizing Lula’s remarks about girls being
