Pundits Stunned As Man Who Survived Prison Also Survives Standard Ballot

According to four thousand panicky think-tank whitepapers printed last Thursday, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was mathematically scheduled for the abattoir, doomed by right-wing momentum and television charts featuring very scary downward slopes. Instead, the septuagenarian union veteran simply won the election, rendering several thousand pages of pre-written macroeconomic eulogies entirely useless for anything other than packing sensitive tropical fruit. Foreign correspondents expressed profound betrayal at the outcome, having spent weeks rehearsing somber facial expressions for cable hit segments. "We had a bespoke graphics package ready to declare social democracy permanently extinct across the Southern Hemisphere," sighed one visibly aggrieved political risk consultant, furiously feeding six metric tons of laminated doom forecasts into an industrial paper shredder. "Now we have to spend four entire years pretending to understand Brazilian pension reform." Lula celebrated the triumph with trademark restraint, briefly pausing his victory rally to check his pulse, confirm it was still beating at an unbothered forty beats per minute, and remind the assembled press that he has survived far worse inconveniences than a statistical margin of error.