Brazilian voters backed Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, a left-wing former President, over the incumbent and right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro by a narrow margin in the first round of elections on Sunday. With 97% of the vote counted, Lula—as the former President is universally known—got 47.9% of the vote to Bolsonaro’s 43.7%.
Because neither candidate won a majority, the contest will go to a run-off on Oct. 30.
For most of 2022, polls had suggested no candidate would win more than 50% of the vote and the contest would go to a second round—as has happened in all of Brazil’s elections for the last two decades.
In recent weeks, however, Lula had extended his lead by a wide enough margin that many experts had predicted he might even win outright in the first round. Bolsonaro had told his supporters not to believe the polls though, and Sunday’s results show he significantly outperformed expectations.
That means that the battle between Bolsonaro and Lula—already one of the most polarizing political clashes in Brazil’s modern history—will continue for weeks. Both are bombastic, divisive figures with sharply divergent visions for the country of 200 million people. And the second round in Latin America’s largest democracy is now set to be unexpectedly competitive.
Lula, a 76-year-old former union leader, has seen his Worker’s Party tarnished by a vast corruption scandal over the last decade. But he remains Brazil’s most widely beloved political leader. Lula has promised to rebuild public services for poorer Brazilians, address inequality, and return the economy to the boom times of his 2003-2010 presidency—a tall order in current global economic conditions.
Bolsonaro, 67, had pledged to continue his relaxation of the country’s gun laws and environmental regulations, and fight against so-called liberal “gender ideology.” Bolsonaro has faced a series of scandals involving alleged abuses of power since taking office in 2019, including attempts to intervene in the federal police and high profile clashes with Brazil’s supreme court.