Brazil’s Bolsonaro and Lula battle it out for top job
Brazil is on tenterhooks as voters are due to decide in the coming hours if the world’s fourth-largest democracy should continue to be led by the far-right incumbent or whether to vote a left-wing former president back in.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from the Workers’ Party beat President Jair Bolsonaro from the Liberal Party by five percentage points in the first round, four weeks ago.
But the run-off could be close-fought.
The winner will be sworn in in January.
Voters from both sides of the political divide have endured an anxious four weeks since the first round.
Jair Bolsonaro won more votes than opinion polls had predicted but his main rival Lula fell short of the 50% of valid votes needed to win outright.
While opinion polls are predicting a narrow win for Lula, many voters say they do not trust the polls after they underestimated the strength of support for President Bolsonaro.
With the final result up in the air, the president and his rival have been courting those Brazilians who cast their first-round ballots for one of the eight other candidates who did not make it into the run-off.
Ellen Monielle is a 23-year-old student and climate activist from the city of Natal in north-east Brazil – a Lula stronghold.
Even though many of her peers pressured her to vote for Lula, she backed Leonardo Péricles four weeks ago instead.
Monielle, whose mother is indigenous and whose father is black, says that she was excited to see a black man from Natal running for president and was thrilled that he chose a black woman as his running mate, adding: “I saw myself represented by them.”
But when Péricles got less than 0.1% of the votes, she decided to switch her allegiance to Lula.
Rather than an endorsement of the 77-year-old Workers’ Party candidate, hers is a vote against President Bolsonaro.
Agencies