Despite souring voters, Lula would still beat the competition

Lula during a rally with supporters. Photo: Ricardo Stuckert/PR

A new Quaest poll shows that 55 percent of Brazilian voters believe President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva does not deserve to be given a new term in the 2026 election, compared to 42 percent who said he does.

However, Lula still beat all other potential candidates when respondents were asked to pick from lists of names — a statement to the president’s enduring popularity and the strength of incumbency bias in Brazil.

Out of the country’s five macro-regions, only in the Northeast did a majority of respondents say Lula deserves another term. The President fared the worst in the Southeast, Brazil’s wealthiest and most populated region, where only 33 percent said he deserves another term, against 63 percent saying he does not.

Lula performs significantly better with women, with 45 percent of them saying he deserves another term, compared to only 38 percent of men. He also performed better with poorer and less educated Brazilians.

Among those who voted for Lula in 2022, 74 percent said he deserves another term, compared to 6 percent among those who voted to re-elect former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro.

Conversely, when presented with different potential candidates for the 2026 presidential election, Lula performed the best, with 47 percent saying they would consider voting for him, compared to 39 percent for the second place, Jair Bolsonaro, who is barred from running for public office due to a Superior Electoral Court decision that convicted him of abuse of power.

Former First Lady Michelle Bolsonaro appears next with 33 percent. Meanwhile, 28 percent of voters would consider voting for São Paulo Governor Tarcísio de Freitas.

Despite the former First Lady performing better than Mr. Freitas, all remaining questions consider the governor the Bolsonaro-anointed candidate for 2026. In this scenario, 46 percent of respondents said they would vote for Lula, and 40 percent for Mr. Freitas. The difference exceeds the poll’s margin of error of 2.2 percentage points.

The poll interviewed 2,045 people between May 2 and 6.

Last month, Quaest disclosed a poll leaning towards right-wing presidential hopefuls, leaving out Rio de Janeiro Governor Cláudio Castro, a close ally of the former president, and Eduardo Leite, the governor of the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. Quaest CEO Felipe Nunes said at the time that Mr. Freitas was the best positioned in the competition for the Bolsonaro legacy.