Brazil Votes Sunday With Lula and Bolsonaro Level
Brazilians go to the polls on Sunday in a first round that polling suggests is effectively tied between the incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who is eighty, and Flávio Bolsonaro, with twelve other candidates standing. If nobody clears 50% the top two go to a runoff on 25 October. Both front-runners snubbed Thursday’s televised debate, which was then cancelled altogether.
The debate collapsed after electoral court and Supreme Court rulings created what the broadcaster called legal uncertainty, with Mr Bolsonaro citing “censorship imposed by the electoral court” — an argument about the referee rather than the race, and a familiar one in Brazil since 2022. Police separately ruled out a bomb threat outside the Supreme Court after arresting a man who tried to climb the fences and threw a backpack onto a bus stop; it contained only personal belongings. A fourth term for Lula would extend a project built on social programmes that lifted millions out of poverty but which has been repeatedly stained by corruption findings, including the eighteen months he served over a coastal property from a firm caught in the Car Wash investigation. A win for Flávio Bolsonaro would return his father’s movement to power rather than merely to contention. The stakes reach past Brazil: it is Latin America’s largest economy and a swing vote between Washington and Beijing. Watch the first-round margin.