The second round of Brazil’s presidential campaign began yesterday after right-wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro outperformed polling and robbed leftist former Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of an outright victory in the first round of voting.
The unexpectedly solid showing by Bolsonaro on Sunday dashed hopes for a quick resolution to the deeply polarized election in the world’s fourth-largest democracy.
With 99.9 percent of electronic votes counted, Lula had taken 48.4 percent of votes versus 43.2 percent for Bolsonaro. As neither got a majority of support, the race goes to a runoff vote on Oct. 30.
Photo: AFP
The race has proven tighter than most surveys suggested, revitalizing Bolsonaro’s campaign after he said that polls could not be trusted. If he pulls off a comeback, it would break with a wave of victories for leftists across the region in the past few years, including Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Mexico.
Adding to tensions in Brazil, Bolsonaro has made baseless attacks on the integrity of Brazil’s electronic voting system and said he might not concede if he loses. On Sunday night, he sounded confident victory was within reach and avoided criticism of the voting system.
“I plan to make the right political alliances to win this election,” he told journalists, pointing to significant advances his party made in the Brazilian National Congress in the general election.
Photo: AFP
Bolsonaro’s right-wing allies won 19 of the 27 seats up from grabs in the Brazilian Senate, and initial returns suggested a robust showing for his base in the lower house.
Sunday’s surprising result, which added to pressure on Lula to tack to the center, led bankers and analysts to expect a boost for Brazilian financial markets yesterday.
Lula put an optimistic spin on the result, saying he was looking forward to another month on the campaign trail and the chance to debate against Bolsonaro head-to-head.
However, inside his campaign there was clear frustration that he had fallen short of the narrow majority forecast in some polls, along with weak results in state races outside of his party’s traditional northeastern stronghold.
“There was a clear movement of votes in the southeast, beyond what the surveys and even the campaign managed to detect,” a campaign source said on condition of anonymity, because of the sensitivity of the matter.
Support for distant third and fourth-place finishers also fell short of surveys, suggesting some of their backers might have shifted to Bolsonaro when it came time to vote.
Centrist Brazilian Senator Simone Tebet, who got 4 percent of votes, and center-left former lawmaker Ciro Gomes, who got 3 percent, said on Sunday night that they would announce decisions about endorsements in the coming days.
With the momentum in Bolsonaro’s favor, Lula might need all the help he can get.
“Clearly Bolsonarismo was underestimated,” said Brazilian Senator Humberto Costa, a compatriot of Lula’s Workers’ Party.
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