Brazil votes in tense election: Bolsonaro vs Lula
Brazil’s most polarised election in decades looks to be heading into a deciding vote in four weeks time with left-wing challenger Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva having the edge over right-wing incumbent Jair Bolsonaro.
With 90.3 percent percent of voting machines counted, Lula had 47.1 percent of valid votes, compared with 44.3 percent for Bolsonaro, the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) reported on its website.
If no candidate wins more than half the votes, excluding blank and spoiled ballots, the two will face off in a second-round vote in four weeks.
There were long queues at polling stations that closed at 5pm (20:00 GMT).
About 156 million people were eligible to vote.
The frontrunner da Silva, popularly known as Lula, said he is running for president “to get the country back to normal” after four years under President Bolsonaro’s rule.
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“We don’t want more hate, more discord. We want a country at peace,” said the 76-year-old ex-president, who is seeking a comeback after leading Brazil from 2003 to 2010. “This country needs to recover the right to be happy.”
In Brasilia, Ricardo Almeida, 45, voted wearing the yellow-and-green colours of Brazil’s flag. “I voted for [Bolsonaro] because of his Christian faith, his defence of family values, and his conservative politics,” he said.
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Recent opinion polls have given Lula a commanding lead. The last Datafolha survey published on Saturday found 50 percent of respondents who intended to vote said they would choose Lula versus 36 percent for Bolsonaro.
The polling institute interviewed 12,800 people with a margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points.
Bolsonaro has hinted he may refuse to accept defeat, stoking fears of an institutional crisis or post-election violence. A message projected on Rio de Janeiro’s Christ the Redeemer statue ahead of the vote read: “Peace in the Elections”.
Bolsonaro voted in Rio and said he expected to win the election in Sunday’s first round, despite his poor showing in polls. The former army captain does not trust the pollsters, saying their results do not correspond with the support he sees at his campaign events.
“If we have clean elections, we will win today with at least 60 percent of the votes,” Bolsonaro said in a video posted on his social media. “All the evidence we have is favourable to us. The other side has not been able to take to the streets, has not campaigned, has no acceptance, no credibility.”
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Al Jazeera’s Monica Yanakiew, reporting from Rio de Janeiro, said “many people are asking if Lula will win today or whether there will be a second round on October 30th”.
Like several of its Latin American neighbours coping with high inflation and a vast number of people excluded from formal employment, Brazil is considering a shift to the political left.
Presidents Gustavo Petro of Colombia, Gabriel Boric of Chile and Pedro Castillo of Peru are among the left-leaning leaders in the region who have recently assumed power.
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