Brazil’s two presidential candidates will compete with each other in a runoff vote after neither got enough support to win Sunday’s election, The Associated Press reported.
The runoff election is the second round in the polling process in which voters pick their single candidates.
With 99.9% of the votes counted, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had 48.4% support and President Jair Bolsonaro had 43.2%. As neither won, the second-round vote will take place on October 30.
Silva, a Left-wing candidate, was poised to win according to opinion polls, Reuters reported. On Sunday, he led by 10-15 percentage points against Bolsonaro, a far-Right candidate.
Carlos Melo, a political scientist at the Insper business school, said that the extreme Right has a strong footing in Brazil. He also said that Silva’s victory in the runoff vote was unlikely.
Bolsonaro had questioned the integrity of Brazil’s electronic voting system without evidence and suggested he might not concede if he lost.
He told reporters that there is “a desire for change” among the population, hard hit by the economic crisis and high inflation, AP reported. “But certain changes can be for the worse,” he added.
Bolsonaro has been surrounded by controversies ever since he became the president of Brazil in 2017. His mishandling of the Covid-19 crisis – during which more than 6 lakh citizens died – and lack of measures to prevent rampant deforestation in the Amazon rainforest are among the reasons he has received flak from several quarters.
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