Three weeks. That is all Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has to pull off something no Brazilian presidential candidate has managed since democracy returned in 1985: win a runoff after finishing second in the first round. On Sunday, Lula took 45% of the vote to Bolsonaro's 47%, a gap narrow enough to keep the race alive, but history is not on his side. So Lula is turning to an unlikely battleground: Brazilians over 70, for whom voting is optional rather than compulsory.

More than half of this group simply stays home on election day, and in 2022 abstention among older voters reached nearly 60%. At a polling station on the campus of the Pontifical Catholic University in São Paulo's Consolação neighborhood, the pattern was visible in real time on Sunday morning — among dozens of voters, only a handful were elderly. One woman, helped from a car by her son, was a rare exception. He declined to be interviewed but said he would vote for Lula "so that Trump doesn't get his hands into Brazil," a line that captures how sovereignty, inflamed by Washington's recent tariffs on Brazilian goods, has become a defining theme of the campaign.

The numbers explain Lula's urgency. A final Datafolha poll before the vote gave him an 11-point lead over Bolsonaro among older Brazilians, a reservoir of support that remains untapped if it stays home. In his last interview before the vote, on the streaming channel Flow, Lula appealed to them directly: "Don't think that just because you're 70 you shouldn't vote, because the law allows you not to. Brazil didn't stop because you turned 70, and neither did your needs.