Share and Follow
Key events
Tom Phillips
The future of one of the world’s largest democracies and the Amazon rainforest was on a knife edge as Brazil held its most important election in decades and its far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, battled to cling to power amid claims that security forces were engaged in a pro-Bolsonaro voter suppression campaign.
Polls on the eve of the election had showed Bolsonaro trailing his leftist rival, the former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, by a margin of four to eight percentage points, although first-round polls had underestimated support for the incumbent. Lula won the recent first round by about 6 million votes but fell just short of the overall majority that would have guaranteed him an outright win.
“For many people, this will be a very special day in Brazil’s history,” Lula told reporters as he voted in São Bernardo do Campo, the industrial city where the former union leader began his political career in the 1970s.
Tens of millions of progressive Brazilians were hoping he was right as they turned out to vote against a radical right-wing president whom they accuse of catastrophically mishandling the coronavirus pandemic and wreaking havoc on the environment and Brazil’s international reputation.
Read Related Also: Where Is Susan Winters’ Husband Gregory Brent Dennis Now?
Welcome
Hello and welcome to our live coverage of the results in Brazil’s run-off elections. My name is Helen Sullivan and I’ll be bringing you the latest as it happens. If you have questions or see news you think I may have missed, you can find me on Twitter here.
With 156 million voters, Brazil is one of the world’s largest democracies and this is its most important election in decades, with progressives hopeful that Jair Bolsonaro will be unseated by leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in what would be one of the greatest political comebacks in history.
This is the second and final round of voting after Lula, who had, according to polls, been expected to win an outright majority won the first round but failed to secure an overall majority. Bolsonaro’s support was stronger than anticipated and, as reports emerge of the notoriously Pro-Bolsonaro highway police setting up road blocks in Lula strongholds, there are very real fears that the far-right incumbent could keep his position.
Polls put Lula, as he is known, ahead of Bolsonaro by four points. A former union leader who lost three presidential elections before finally winning in 2002, the now 77-year-old leftist led the country for eight years before leaving office with approval ratings above 80%.
Bolsonaro’s botched handling of the pandemic has led to almost 700,000 deaths in Brazil and under his watch, deforestation in the Amazon rose to its highest levels in 15 years.
We will have more on the candidates, the run-off campaign and will bring you the results live as they come in.
