Bolsonaro challenges Brazil runoff after court extends voting

Federal Police agents found Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro on Monday morning near his father’s home in Brasília and told him he had 24 hours to hand over his passports. The order, signed the night before by Supreme Federal Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, barred the senator from leaving Brazil. It came hours after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was declared the winner of the presidential runoff with 51.8 percent of the vote.

Outside campaign headquarters in Brasília on Sunday night, Bolsonaro had already rejected that result. Standing with allies, he said the runoff could not stand and that he would go to court to nullify it.

“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. We are not here to play games. I will not accept that this rule was changed mid-game - once again - by Lula's friends on the Supreme Court,” he said.

The concrete trigger was a two-hour extension of voting ordered at 5:01 p.m. by Supreme Court Justice Cristiano Zanin. Zanin is a former lawyer for Lula. He is not a member of the Superior Electoral Court. Bolsonaro described the sequence in plain terms.

“What happened today was not normal. It was, in fact, unacceptable. 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. At 5:01 p.m., Justice Zanin - who is not a member of the Superior Electoral Court - bypassed the specialized electoral court system and decided to extend voting hours by two hours,” he said. He added that the move produced “a complete breakdown of equality among Brazilians in different cities and states” and that he would never know how many votes he might have received where stations were not reopened.

The record shows the extension request began with Lula’s Workers’ Party over transport complaints, particularly in Bahia and in São Paulo city. Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party later joined that request. The Superior Electoral Court clarified that the extra hours applied only to polling stations still open; votes at stations already closed would be counted as usual. Court president Kassio Nunes Marques instructed regional courts to keep open stations running until 7 p.m. Those facts do not erase the institutional problem Bolsonaro named: a justice with a prior professional tie to one candidate, sitting outside the specialized electoral court, rewrote closing time after voting had already begun to end.

Lula’s margin was reported as nearly 4.4 million ballots in one account, and as about 64 million votes to about 59 million, or 51 percent to 48 percent, in others. It was Lula’s fourth non-consecutive term. No Brazilian presidential candidate had previously won a first round and then lost a runoff under the post-1988 system; Lula flipped a first-round deficit of around 2.2 million votes in three weeks. Those numbers are real. They do not settle whether a mid-afternoon rule change by a former campaign lawyer satisfies equal treatment of voters across states and cities.

The passport order arrived the same night the results were proclaimed. Moraes tied it to two pending Supreme Court matters. The first examines alleged money laundering involving lawyer Willer Tomaz through betting companies and payment platforms. The court last week ordered the freezing of up to 6 billion reais in assets linked to Tomaz, suspended his business activities, and lifted bank, tax, and foreign-exchange secrecy. Federal Police flagged transactions of almost 130 million reais between March and May 2025 in accounts linked to the lawyer and said the senator appeared with a “master” user profile on an Alcazar Holdings account. Tomaz’s defense rejected the accusations and challenged the scale of the freezes. The order also bars Bolsonaro from contact with Tomaz.

The second investigation, assigned to Justice André Mendonça, concerns fundraising for the film “Dark Horse” about Jair Bolsonaro. Police have asked for a 90-day extension for financial examinations and international cooperation. Legal experts note that travel bans and passport seizures are precautionary measures, not findings of guilt. From February 1, 2027, Flávio Bolsonaro will be without public office for the first time in more than twenty years; he did not run for Senate reelection. Under a Supreme Court doctrine set in March 2025 and complemented in May 2026, alleged crimes committed in office remain with the court even after officials leave their posts.