Lula’s 51.76% win strengthens Brazil’s hand on IMO shipping pact

By Amara Osei

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s 51.76% runoff victory—more than half of votes cast—secured a fourth presidential term and gave Brasília a fresh mandate to revive the IMO Net-Zero Framework this year. Millions of Brazilians chose the candidate who finished second in the first round, but the runoff win strengthens Brazil at next month’s IMO climate talks in London.

Elissama Menezes, a Brazilian co-director of shipping-decarbonisation nonprofit Equal Routes, draws a parallel between the election and the IMO negotiations. Washington made its preferred Brazilian candidate clear; at IMO, the U.S. administration rejects the Net-Zero Framework, or NZF, a historic compromise built around carbon-intensity targets and carbon pricing.

The change removes a convenient line of attack. Brazil was one of the NZF’s main architects, and the agreement’s policy architecture carries Brazilian fingerprints. Until the election, critics could argue that the government behind that work might not survive; Menezes says that argument has now gone.

Climate action was central to the election campaigns, in Menezes’s reading. The result therefore signals political room for climate action, even as Washington presses the opposite position at IMO.

Lula’s four-year term also preserves his pledge to halt deforestation by 2030, following reductions during his current term, and Brazil’s international climate role after it hosted COP30 in Belém in 2025. The election therefore re-legitimises Brazil’s role at IMO and gives it a fresh mandate to carry the framework over the line this year.

Menezes frames the lesson as sovereignty. Brazilians were told, she argues, that their future depended on staying in Washington’s good graces, but they chose a leader who stands up to bullies. The IMO’s member states now face a similar choice between external pressure and ownership of the rules.

The commercial cost is clearer than the diplomatic choreography. NZF won backing from the vast majority of IMO member states when it was reached in April 2025, yet its planned adoption was delayed by one year after the United States deployed what Menezes calls “bully-boy” tactics just over a year ago.

Another postponement leaves fuel producers and shipowners without a stable investment signal for e-fuels, wind-assisted propulsion and other zero-emission technologies. Without one, projects stall and first movers carry the risk alone. That is awkward for ocean carriers financing zero-emission options, and for forwarders advising shippers on future fuel and carbon charges.

Delay also gives the growing LNG-fuelled fleet more time to emit short-lived methane, just as shipping must reduce it. It postpones revenue mechanisms designed to make the transition fair for countries least responsible for the problem. The cost is therefore both stalled projects and delayed burden-sharing.

The EU ETS for shipping and FuelEU Maritime help fill what Menezes calls the regulatory vacuum, but she argues they cannot replace a global standard alone. FuelEU’s steepest emission cuts do not arrive until the 2040s, leaving scope for business as usual in the near term.

FuelEU’s emission factors must also capture methane accurately; otherwise, Europe may tighten a rule while leaving a major pollutant undercounted. Europe should keep strengthening its regime in the interim, but a regional patchwork is no substitute for one global standard.

For carriers, that patchwork can turn one decarbonisation decision into several regulatory calculations. For shippers, it complicates consistent emissions reporting across trade lanes; for forwarders, it weakens the basis for advising customers on future fuel costs and carbon charges.

Europe helped secure the NZF agreement last year, yet some EU member states abstained when pressure intensified last October. The bloc should arrive in London united behind the framework it helped build, while other governments support what they agreed a year ago. Brazil’s election removes the excuse that its commitment might expire with a government.

Menezes’s conclusion is blunt: “Brazilians did not wait for anyone’s permission to choose their future and neither should the IMO.” It is a political argument, but the policy direction is plain: another failed London meeting would extend the investment pause, leave Europe carrying more of the regulatory load and delay methane controls and equitable revenue sharing.

Unless Brussels presents a united position and Washington drops its opposition, the NZF remains vulnerable to another postponement. The commercial trajectory is one more year of caution from fuel producers, shipowners and forwarders, not a decisive move toward lower-emission shipping.