Bolsonaro, Lula neck-and-neck in polarized Brazil election

With 91.6% of votes counted, da Silva had 47.3%, ahead of Bolsonaro with 44.2%

Brazil’s top two presidential candidates were neck-and-neck late Sunday in a highly polarized election that could determine if the country returns a leftist to the helm of the world’s fourth-largest democracy or keeps the far-right incumbent in office for another four years.

The race pits incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro against his political nemesis, leftist former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. There are nine other candidates, but their support pales to that for Bolsonaro and da Silva. With 91.6% of votes counted, da Silva had 47.3%, ahead of Bolsonaro with 44.2%, according to the electoral authority.

It appears increasingly likely neither of the top two candidates will receive more than 50% of the valid votes, which exclude spoiled and blank ballots, which would mean a second round vote will be scheduled for Oct. 30.

Recent opinion polls have given da Silva a commanding lead — the last Datafolha survey published on Saturday found a 50% to 36% advantage for da Silva among those who intended to vote. It interviewed 12,800 people, with a margin of error of two percentage points.

Fernanda Reznik, a 48-year-old health worker, wore a red T-shirt — a color associated with da Silva’s Workers’ Party — to vote in Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana neighborhood, where pro-Bolsonaro demonstrators often congregate, and had been waiting in line for 40 minutes.

“I’ll wait three hours if I have to!” said Reznik, who no longer bothers talking politics with neighbors who favor Bolsonaro. “This year the election is more important, because we already went through four years of Bolsonaro and today we can make a difference and give this country another direction.”

Bolsonaro’s administration has been marked by incendiary speech, his testing of democratic institutions, his widely criticized handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the worst deforestation in the Amazon rainforest in 15 years.