Río de Janeiro: The story behind this trend in Social Media today
08-10-2026
The social-media surge around Rio de Janeiro today centers on the state’s 2026 gubernatorial race. On election day, 4 October, state deputy Douglas Ruas of the PL finished first with 4,271,199 votes, or 49.27 percent of the votes then counted as validshort of the absolute majority needed to win in the first round. Former mayor Eduardo Paes of the PSD placed second with 3,706,984 votes (42.76 percent), and a runoff between them was expected. Anthony Garotinho of the Republicanos, a former governor, took third with 274,411 votes (3.17 percent), but his candidacy was already under challenge.Garotinho had been ruled ineligible by the regional electoral court because of a 2018 conviction for intentional administrative misconduct. He appealed to the Superior Electoral Court (TSE). After the vote, his side tried to withdraw that appeal. On 8 October the TSE rejected the withdrawal, upheld the rejection of his registration by a 5–2 vote, and ordered his ballots annulled rather than transferred to anyone else.Removing those votes shrinks the pool of valid ballots to roughly 8.39 million. Ruas’s unchanged total then equals about 50.88 percentroughly 74,000 votes above the new majority thresholdwhile Paes’s share rises proportionally but stays well below 50 percent. The gap between the two leaders remains more than 564,000 votes. The regional court must still retotalize the official result, after which Ruas is expected to be declared elected governor without a second round.The decision immediately dominated Brazilian feeds. Supporters treated it as a late first-round victory; critics called the outcome a technical twist that canceled a runoff voters had anticipated, and many posts framed the state as politically cursed or chaotic. The numbers and the legal sequence, not any new campaign event, are what drove the day’s conversation.