On 25 October, 101-year-old Celia de Oliveira Soares cast her vote in the second round of Brazil's presidential election, despite having not voted for nearly a decade. Relatives helped her into a wheelchair and drove her to a nearby school to ensure far-right candidate Flávio Bolsonaro did not prevail. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.
Soares clung to the banister as she climbed two flights of stairs to the polling booth. Inside, she keyed the number "13" – representing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – into an electronic voting machine and pressed confirm. "I like Lula. I really do!" she said. "I don't like Bolsonaro or his father. So the efficient thing to do was go out and vote."
Soares is one of more than 1 million elderly people who missed the first round on 4 October – which Lula lost – but decided to vote in the runoff. Never since the return of democracy in the 1980s had a first-round loser bounced back, but Lula did just that. After his shock revival, elderly voters have been hailed as the election's unsung heroes – including by Lula himself.
At his 81st birthday party last week, Lula shed tears while describing his gratitude to the elderly people who helped him clinch a historic fourth term. "I honestly think it was the most powerful and human image I've ever seen during an election," Lula said of viral pictures showing voters in their 80s, 90s and 100s being carried into polling centres by relatives or carers, some on stretchers or in wheelchairs.
In north-east Brazil, 114-year-old retiree Josefa Pereira da Conceição went to vote wearing a red T-shirt emblazoned with Lula's face and the slogan "Strength of the people".
Election experts are still crunching the numbers to fully understand how Lula pulled off his unprecedented fightback, finding 10.3m extra votes between the first and second rounds. Explanations include a sharp increase in welfare benefits on the eve of the vote; an extraordinary digital mobilisation involving a pro-Lula WhatsApp group that grew from 50,000 to nearly 11m members in less than a month; and a student-led street rebellion in which millions of citizens protested across Brazil.
Some believe elderly people were also crucial, noting how 1.4 million of the 3 million extra voters who took part in the second round after skipping the first were over 70. Pre-election polls suggested such voters were more inclined to vote for Lula.
Speaking at Lula's victory celebration, former minister Simone Tebet called the result a cross-generational triumph. "It is possible to resist fascism – all you need to do is mobilise society," Tebet declared. "Young people hit the streets and golden-agers saved our democracy." Political journalist José Roberto de Toledo said there was concrete evidence of higher turnout among older voters in the runoff, particularly those aged 60 to 79. Voting is only mandatory in Brazil for those aged 18 to 69.
"The images [of elderly people voting] aren't misleading: they reveal a phenomenon that isn't just an isolated case. It's not some made-up story or a staged example. It really happened – and it was a movement you can measure statistically," Toledo said. That said, Toledo believed the swing to Lula was explained mostly by fear, not age. Voting data suggested many people who backed Lula in the runoff had previously voted for Bolsonaro's rightwing adversaries, hoping to protest against Lula's Worker's party (PT), which has governed for nearly 18 of the last 24 years.
In the runoff, faced with a straight choice between Lula, a familiar and predictable figure even for detractors, and Bolsonaro, who represented a leap into the unknown, many preferred the former. "A protest vote in the first round [became] a safety vote or a lower-risk vote in the second – even if it wasn't a happy vote," said Toledo.