On New Year’s Day, the Workers’ Party’s (PT) Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took his third presidential oath of office, capping a two-year campaign and “phoenix-like” rise from a jail cell to Brazil’s Palácio da Alvorada. He did so in the face of a largely unregulated $19 billion spending spree and massive disinformation campaign by the far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro. Lula’s victory, though slim, unseated a Brazilian incumbent for the first time since the country’s 1985 democratic transition.

Lula’s win was decided in large part by religious voters. Brazil is 80 percent Catholic or Evangelical, and 59 percent of Brazilians said religion played an important part in their voting during the last election. Evangelicals have been a growing part of the electorate since the mid-2000s and maintained ties with Lula’s last administration, even administering federal assistance programs in cities like São Paulo. But those ties were tenuous: in 2018, Bolsonaro took 70 percent of the Evangelical vote while splitting the Catholic vote with Syrian Orthodox candidate Fernando Haddad.

This election, Lula fought to regain religious support, and his efforts paid off. He went into the second round of voting gaining ground among Evangelicals, with whom Bolsonaro previously led 66 to 28 percent. He reduced Bolsonaro’s 2018 margins in working-class areas such as Rio de Janeiro’s vote-rich Evangelical urban periphery, sometimes by as much as 10 percent. This despite last-minute controversies over abortion and Evangelicals’ role in transnational right-wing extremism leading to atrocities like the January 8 sacking of all three branches of government.