Brazil elections see Bolsonaro and Lula appear neck-and-neck in historic presidential contest

Brazil voted Sunday in a historic and highly contested election pitting the far right incumbent against a leftist former president.

As polls closed at 5 p.m. Brasilia time, incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro was neck and neck with leftist former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, his political nemesis. With 20.3% of votes counted, Bolsonaro had 47.9%, ahead of da Silva with 43.3%.

Da Silva needs more than 50% of the vote to beat Bolsonaro, out of an electorate divided among nine other candidates. But the others lag far behind the two frontrunners.

People were still lined up to vote in numerous cities, and they had been promised a ballot, AP reported. They did not seem inclined to go home without having cast one.

“I’ll wait three hours if I have to!” 48-year-old health worker Fernanda Reznik told AP. “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.”

Clad in a red T-shirt emblematic of the Workers’ Party of da Silva, Reznik said she had already been waiting 40 minutes at her voting spot in Copacabana.

Across the country, more than 156 million eligible voters saw the end of an election season infused with tension and violence, CNN reported. Both leading candidates had been accompanied by heavy security on the campaign trail.

“We don’t want more discord, we want a country that lives in peace,” Lula, 76, told reporters after he and his wife cast their votes, according to CNN. “This is the most important election. I am really happy.”

He had been taken down by a corruption scandal in 2018, barred from running for office or voting. The corruption conviction was overturned last year.

“Four years ago I couldn’t vote because I had been the victim of a lie in this country,” said Lula, who was president for two consecutive terms, from 2003 to 2011. “And four years later, I’m here, voting with the recognition of my total freedom and with the possibility of being president of the republic of this country again, to try to make this country return to normality.”

The 67-year-old Bolsonaro, for his part, emphasized that he had been to “practically every state in Brazil” during his 45-day campaign.

“The expectation is of victory today,” he said, adding later, “Clean elections, no problem at all.”

The same has not been said of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which has taken the lives of more than 686,000 people in the South American country. In October of last year, a group of Brazilian senators called for homicide charges against him and several associates for at least 300,000 of those deaths, the number of the total they said could be attributed to Bolsonaro’s lax approach to the scourge. They also considered adding genocide of Indigenous Peoples because of the disproportionate impact the pandemic had on the native population. In December 2021 the Brazilian Supreme Court ordered an investigation against the president for falsely linking COVID-19 vaccines with the development of AIDS.

Several federal health officials stepped down as the pandemic raged, some citing his approach.

“A lot of people died because of him during the pandemic,” voter Agatha de Carvalho, 24, told AP. “If he hadn’t done some of the things he did, some of those deaths could have been avoided.”

With News Wire Services