brazil's president won a fourth term and the first person he kissed on camera was a trans congresswoman. i'm framing it.

Erika Hilton in the Chamber of Deputies, April 2024. Photo: Zeca Ribeiro / Câmara dos Deputados, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via Erin in the Morning, The Advocate (from Them), PBS NewsHour and Al Jazeera

Brazil spent Sunday night deciding whether to give the presidency back to a Bolsonaro. It didn't. And by Monday the clip from the celebration that had traveled furthest was not a speech. It was Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, freshly reelected, leaning in to kiss Erika Hilton on the cheek.

Hilton, a trans member of Brazil's Chamber of Deputies, was standing next to him in the crowd filming a selfie video. In it she shouts, in Portuguese, what both Them and Erin in the Morning translate as "that's my president," followed by a line telling him she never doubted him. Erin in the Morning notes that a cheek kiss reads friendlier in Latin America than it might in the U.S. Fair. It still made the internet cry.

how the runoff went

Lula beat Flávio Bolsonaro, the senator son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, with 51.8% of the vote to 48.2%, according to the count reported by the AP via PBS NewsHour and by Al Jazeera. It is his fourth term. It is also, the AP reports, the first time since Brazil's military dictatorship ended in 1985 that the candidate who came second in the first round went on to win the presidency: Bolsonaro had led the Oct. 4 first round. Bolsonaro refused to concede and asked for the results to be annulled, the AP reported, pointing to a two-hour extension of voting.

who erika hilton is

Hilton was one of the first trans people elected to Brazil's National Congress, in 2022, and she was not a backbencher on this campaign; Them describes her as having played a prominent role in it. Her own race this month was not close. Brazil's electoral court shows her taking 1,596,472 votes for federal deputy in São Paulo, the second-highest total in the state, which we wrote about when it happened.

On Monday night she was in a lighter mood. In a post that passed 67,000 likes, she wrote that Flávio Bolsonaro had accepted his defeat, then asked, more or less, whether his party now planned to take orders from a jail cell. His father is serving a 27-year sentence for attempting a coup, the AP and Erin in the Morning both report. Reader, she had the votes to say it.