Bolsonaro and Lula hold final rallies before Brazil election

Lula greets supporters as he leads a silent march in Sao Paulo yesterday.

Brazilian leftist leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva maintains a solid lead going into today’s presidential race against far-right incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro and is within sight of an outright victory, a fresh poll showed yesterday. Brazil’s most polarised election in decades will decide whether to return to power a former president who spent time in jail on corruption convictions or a right-wing populist who has attacked the voting system and threatened to contest defeat. A CNT/MDA poll published yesterday said that Lula would win 48.3% of the valid votes, putting him statistically within reach of taking half of the votes, which would avoid a bruising run-off. The poll has a margin of error of 2.2 percentage points. If no one among the 11 candidates gets more than 50% of votes, excluding blank and spoiled ballots, the two front-runners – almost certainly Lula and Bolsonaro – would go to second round vote on October 30. The MDA poll commissioned by the national transport lobby CNT shows Bolsonaro has chipped away at half of Lula’s lead, which is now down to 7.9 percentage points point (44.2% for Lula and 36.3% for Bolsonaro). Two other major pollsters Datafolha and IPEC have projected Lula winning outright. Bolsonaro, a former army captain who spent 28 years as a Congressman, was swept into office in 2018 on a wave of conservative sentiment and opposition to Lula’s Workers Party. Yesterday he closed his re-election campaign with two rallies by motorbike supporters in Sao Paulo and Joinville, Santa Catarina state. Lula’s Workers Party, meanwhile, booked space on Sao Paulo’s main Paulista Avenue on Sunday night to celebrate victory by the 77-year-former union leader and party founder. Yesterday’s final campaign rallies saw supporters just kilometres apart. Bolsonaro led one of his trademark motorcycle rallies from the north side of Sao Paulo to the city’s Ibirapuera park, grinning and waving at the head of a battalion of bikers decked out in black leather and the yellow and green of the flag. About 5km from there, Lula held his own rally on the economic capital’s main avenue, Avenida Paulista, gathering a sea of red-clad supporters waving banners. Brazil’s electronic voting system, which Bolsonaro has repeatedly criticised as vulnerable to fraud without providing evidence, allows the national electoral authority, the TSE, to quickly tally results within hours after polls close at 5pm (2000 GMT). The head of the TSE, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, called on Brazilians by Twitter to celebrate the country’s democracy by turning out to vote “in peace, security and harmony, respect and freedom”. Due to Bolsonaro’s attacks on the voting system and the prospect of conflict, the TSE has invited an unprecedented number of international observers to this year’s election. Bolsonaro has repeatedly signalled he could challenge an election loss, saying “only God” can remove him from office and alleging, without evidence, rampant fraud in Brazil’s electronic voting system.

Bolsonaro greets supporters during a motorcade on the eve of the presidential election in Sao Paulo.