‘Everything was worth it’: Brazil’s LGBTQ+ left claims Lula’s comeback

Above: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s campaign rally on Avenida Paulista, São Paulo, 11 October 2026 — two weeks before election night, not the victory party. Photograph: Ricardo Stuckert / Lula Oficial, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The phone stayed up. On Sunday night in São Paulo, the federal deputy Erika Hilton filmed President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva kissing her on the cheek while the room behind them shouted. She posted the video with a caption that did the work of a headline: “Que emoção! Tudo valeu a pena.” What a feeling. Everything was worth it. To him, in the same room, she said something shorter. “Eu nunca duvidei, presidente.” I never doubted you.

Hilton, one of the best-known trans politicians anywhere, spent the count beside Lula and his allies. Metrópoles and Jornal Razão both reported the clip from her Instagram, @hilton_erika. It is not a poll. It is the sentence a visible part of Brazil’s LGBTQ+ left chose for the night the count turned.

Erika Hilton at the Chamber of Deputies seminar “Elas Querem Igualdade”, 14 March 2023. This is not a photograph of Sunday night; the victory video is on her Instagram. Photograph: Vinicius Loures / Câmara dos Deputados, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0). Cropped for publication.

The night it turned

There was plenty to doubt. On 4 October, in the first round, Flávio Bolsonaro finished ahead: 56,104,503 votes, 47.03% of valid ballots, to Lula’s 53,879,538 and 45.16%. BBC News Brasil called Sunday’s result the first time a presidential candidate in Brazil has overturned a first-round deficit.

The turn was visible while it was happening. G1 reported that Lula moved in front at about 8.26pm, Brasília time, with almost half the polling stations counted, and that the electoral court, the TSE, declared him elected at 9.08pm. With 100% of sections totalled, the figures G1 and the BBC both publish are the same. Lula, 64,256,232 votes, 51.79%. Flávio Bolsonaro, 59,826,041, 48.21%. A lead of 4,430,191 votes. Lula added 10,376,694 to his first-round total. A fourth term.

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By Monday, the LGBTQ+ magazine QX was leading its Brazil story with kisses in the São Paulo celebration, in a photograph by Photo Faga / Sipa USA / TT, and with the other half of the night: Flávio Bolsonaro had not conceded. QX reported that he said his lawyers would try to have the result annulled.

What they said when it was still in doubt

There is no official count of how LGBTQ+ Brazilians voted. Inventing one would be a fraud. What exists, on the record, is the afternoon before the number moved, and the posts that followed it.

In Brasília on Sunday, at a demonstration reporters called Ato da Virada, people who name themselves as part of the community were already speaking as if the result were about their safety. The student newsroom at CEUB, Agência de Notícias CEUB, published the interviews at 6.51pm, photographer Sophia Santos, before the court had anything to declare.

No governo Lula, se eu sofrer alguma violação, eu sei que vou ter um amparo civil e penal. Já com o outro candidato, eu sinto que o futuro é incerto para a gente.

Under a Lula government, if I suffer a violation, I know I will have civil and criminal recourse. With the other candidate, I feel the future is uncertain for us.

Gustavo Lee Minari. His profile photograph on Instagram, @fisiogustavolm, enlarged with AI for this article.

Gustavo Lee Minari, 25, a gay physiotherapist in Brasília, told the agency that. The student paper spelled his surname Liminari; on Instagram, @fisiogustavolm, his name is Lee Minari. His partner, Henrique Lopes, 26, a creative director, put the same fear in one line: a win for Flávio, he said, could “dar liberdade às pessoas de acharem que elas podem cometer violência contra a minha comunidade.” Give people the feeling they were allowed to be violent against his community. That was his biggest fear.

A few hours later Hilton’s caption was the other temperature of the same argument. Relief, filmed.

The outlets that had already picked a side

The organised press of this community did not wait for 8.26pm.

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On 1 October, before a ballot had been cast in the first round, Agência Diadorim published an editorial with the line it was willing to be quoted on: “Eleger Lula é vencer o autoritarismo anti-LGBTQIA+.” Electing Lula is how you beat anti-LGBTQIA+ authoritarianism. The piece is not a love letter. It says the Bolsonaro clan has used moral panic against the community as an organising tool, and it cites the Observatória platform for a number: since 2019, lawmakers from Flávio’s party, the PL, had introduced 285 anti-LGBTQIA+ bills in state assemblies and in Congress, more than three times the total from Republicanos, the next party on that list.

QX reported on Monday that ABGLT, the national LGBT association, had urged its Facebook followers to vote for Lula, precisely because of the gap between the two campaigns. The same piece said Aliança Nacional LGBTI+, on 24 October, rejected a remark in which Bolsonaro used Lula’s disability as a political attack. The group noted that he had apologised, and wrote that the apology did not end the need to think about what had been said.

The down-ballot result is part of why the night is being read as more than one man’s fourth term. QX, citing Diadorim, reported that at least 32 LGBTQ+ candidates were elected earlier this month: 13 to the Chamber of Deputies, 18 to state assemblies, and one to the legislature of the Distrito Federal. The comparable figure Diadorim gave for 2022 was at least 18.

A victory they described with an asterisk

Read the same Diadorim editorial to the end and the cheering stops being simple, which is the honest version of this story.

The agency wrote that Lula’s government has fallen far short of what the moment requires. The community is back inside the federal structure, it said, through a secretariat led by Symmy Larrat, and through the national LGBTQIA+ conference. The budget Planalto puts on the issue is small, depends on parliamentary amendments, and does not give existing programmes a national scale. In health, Diadorim wrote, trans people are still waiting for measures they have demanded for years. Supporting Lula, the editorial said, is not a decision to stop criticising him.

In August, Diadorim had already compared the 2022 programme with the re-election document. Specific pledges on comprehensive healthcare, staying in school, and recognition of gender identity were no longer set out in one block. What gained space was digital violence, hate crimes, and discrimination at work. The agency was careful: a change in the text is not proof that the older policies were dropped.

CEUB’s reading of the two plans, published on election day, matches that caution. Lula’s TSE programme, the agency wrote, does not list specific projects for people made vulnerable by sexuality or gender identity. It says those lives will be built into public policy, including the fight against LGBTphobia, without saying which actions. Flávio’s plan, the same story reported, contains no inclusion proposals for LGBTQIAPN+ people at all. Vibra looked at that silence, and at the family’s record, before the runoff.

On Sunday afternoon, before any of this was a victory, Valkyria Lounard, 28, a businesswoman and bartender who described herself to CEUB as a non-binary travesti, pansexual and demisexual, said the thing the editorials keep saying in plainer clothes. “O governo do Lula não me fornece um acesso pleno, mas ele também não me regride totalmente.” Lula’s government does not give her full access. It also does not push her all the way back.

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That is the win as this community’s own outlets, and the people they quoted, have actually described it. A result that keeps the door from being shut, secured by about four and a half million votes, on the night a deputy filmed a kiss and wrote that the years had been worth it. Diadorim has already named the next test. It is the budget, not the caption.