Bolsonaro Outperforms Polls and Forces Runoff Against Lula in Brazil’s Presidential Election
The two political titans will face off again later this month in a race widely seen as a major test for one of the world’s largest democracies.
By Jack Nicas
Jack Nicas, The Times’s Brazil bureau chief, has covered the country’s presidential race since last year.
Oct. 3, 2022
Updated 1:01 p.m. ET
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RIO DE JANEIRO — For months, pollsters and analysts had said that President Jair Bolsonaro was doomed. He faced a wide and unwavering deficit in Brazil’s high-stakes presidential race, and in recent weeks, the polls had suggested he could even lose in the first round, ending his presidency after just one term.
Instead, it was Mr. Bolsonaro who was celebrating. While the challenger, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former leftist president, finished the night ahead, Mr. Bolsonaro far outperformed forecasts and sent the race to a runoff.
Mr. da Silva received 48.4 percent of the votes, and Mr. Bolsonaro 43.23 percent, with 99.87 percent of the ballots counted, according to Brazil’s elections agency. Mr. da Silva needed to exceed 50 percent to be elected president in the first round.
They will face off on Oct. 30 in what is widely regarded as the most important vote in decades for Latin America’s largest nation.
That is partly because of the starkly different visions the two men set forth for this country of 217 million people, and partly because Brazil faces a host of challenges, including environmental threats, rising hunger, a sputtering economy and a deeply polarized population.
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The former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, speaking after election results were announced on Sunday. Mr. da Silva and President Jair Bolsonaro will face each other in a runoff later this month.Credit...Victor Moriyama for The New York Times
But the election will also be widely watched in Brazil and abroad because it is seen as a major test for one of the world’s largest democracies. For months, Mr. Bolsonaro has criticized the nation’s electronic voting machines as rife with fraud — without any evidence — and has suggested that the only way he would lose is if the election is rigged.
Mr. Bolsonaro told reporters late Sunday that he “overcame the lies” in the polls and that he felt he now had an advantage in the second round. Even with the positive results, he also suggested there could have been fraud, saying he would wait for the military to check the results.
“Our system is not 100 percent ironclad,” he said. “There’s always the possibility of something abnormal happening in a fully computerized system.”
Mr. Bolsonaro had claimed for months that the polls were underestimating his support, using his enormous rallies as evidence. Yet, virtually every poll showed him behind. On Sunday, it was clear that he was right. He performed better in all of Brazil’s 27 states than what Ipec, one of Brazil’s biggest polling firms, had predicted a day before the election, exceeding the projections by at least 8 percentage points in 10 states.
Pollsters appeared to misjudge the strength of conservative candidates across the country. Governors and lawmakers supported by Mr. Bolsonaro also outperformed polls, winning many of their races on Sunday.
Cláudio Castro, the right-wing governor of Rio de Janeiro state, was re-elected in a landslide, with 58 percent of votes, 11 percentage points more than Ipec’s projection. At least seven of Mr. Bolsonaro’s former ministers were also elected to Congress, including his former environment minister, who oversaw skyrocketing deforestation in the Amazon, and his former health minister, who was widely criticized for Brazil’s delay in buying vaccines during the pandemic.
Antonio Lavareda, the president of Ipespe, another top polling company, defended his firm's research, pointing out that it had predicted Mr. da Silva would finish with 49 percent, versus the 48 percent he received.
Yet Ipespe also predicted Mr. Bolsonaro would receive 35 percent of the vote, more than 8 percentage points below his actual support. The poll’s margin of error was 3 percentage points. (That trend played out across the polls; they were nearly accurate on Mr. da Silva’s support, but far off on Mr. Bolsonaro’s.)
Mr. Lavareda speculated that many voters who had said they would vote for less popular candidates had switched to Mr. Bolsonaro — or that they had lied to the pollsters.
Outside Mr. Bolsonaro’s home in a rich, beachside neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, his supporters gathered to celebrate, dancing and drinking out of plastic cups of beer. Many were wearing the bright yellow jerseys of Brazil’s national soccer team, which has become a sort of uniform for many of Mr. Bolsonaro’s supporters.
(The president wore one to vote, over what appeared to be a flak jacket or protective vest.)
Still, over the next four weeks, Mr. Bolsonaro will have to make up ground on Mr. da Silva, who held the top spot on Sunday. The right-wing president is trying to avoid becoming the first incumbent to lose his re-election bid since the start of Brazil’s modern democracy in 1988.
At the same time, Mr. da Silva is trying to complete a stunning political revival that years ago had seemed unthinkable.
While Mr. da Silva ended the night as the front-runner, his speech to supporters took on a somber tone. But he said he welcomed the chance to now debate Mr. Bolsonaro one-on-one.
“We can compare the Brazil he built and the Brazil we built,” he said. “Tomorrow the campaign starts.”
A former metalworker and union leader with a fifth-grade education, Mr. da Silva led Brazil during its boom in the first decade of the century. He was then convicted on corruption charges after he left office and spent 580 days in prison. Last year, the Supreme Court threw out those charges, ruling the judge in his cases was biased, and voters have since rallied behind the man known simply as Lula.
The two men are the country’s most prominent — and polarizing — politicians. The left in Brazil views Mr. Bolsonaro as a dangerous threat to the nation’s democracy and its standing on the world stage, while the country’s conservatives see Mr. da Silva as an ex-convict who was a central part of a vast corruption scheme that helped rot Brazil’s institutions.
Mr. da Silva, 76, is pitching voters on a plan to raise taxes on the rich to expand services for the poor, including widening the social safety net, increasing the minimum wage and feeding and housing more people.
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Supporters of Mr. da Silva’s Workers’ Party reacting to election results in Brasília, on Sunday.Credit...Dado Galdieri for The New York Times
Mr. da Silva has built his campaign around broad promises for a better future, including a pledge that all Brazilians should be able to enjoy three meals a day. His rallies have also heavily leaned on his Everyman image, with plenty of references to beer, cachaça and picanha, Brazil’s most famous cut of meat.
Mr. Bolsonaro, 67, has made his campaign about protecting Brazil’s conservative traditions from what he says are threats from leftist elites. He has made his campaign slogan “God, family, homeland and liberty,” and he has vowed to fight against things like legalized drugs, legalized abortion, transgender rights and restrictions on freedom of religion and free speech.
Mr. Bolsonaro wants to further increase access to firearms, repeating in his stump speech that “armed people will never be enslaved.” One of his main accomplishments during his first term was soaring gun ownership.
Facing a wide gap in polls, Mr. Bolsonaro recently expanded social welfare for poor families, and he has pledged to continue those policies during his second term.
Mr. Bolsonaro has also said he wants to sell Brazil’s state-owned oil company, make it easier to mine in the Amazon rainforest and continue to reduce regulations on industry. Many businesses have welcomed Mr. Bolsonaro’s free-market approach, but it has led to soaring environmental destruction.
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Supporters of President Jair Bolsonaro cheering in Brasília, on Sunday.Credit...Dado Galdieri for The New York Times
The election could be consequential for the world’s largest rainforest. While Mr. Bolsonaro has said he would crack down on environmental violations, he has cut funding and staffing for the agencies tasked with enforcing environmental laws, while casting doubt on statistics that show the destruction of the forest during his first term.
Mr. da Silva campaigned on a promise to eradicate illegal mining and logging, and said he would push farmers to use areas of the forest that had already been cleared.
Mr. da Silva’s election would extend a string of leftist victories across Latin America, fueled by a wave of anti-incumbent backlash. If elected, six of the region’s seven largest countries will have chosen leftist leaders since 2018.
Mr. Bolsonaro’s first term has been marked by turmoil, including clashes with the courts, corruption scandals and a pandemic that killed more people than anywhere other than the United States. But it has been his suggestions that he won’t relinquish power if he is voted out that has alarmed many Brazilians and the international community.
Last year, Mr. Bolsonaro told his supporters there were three outcomes to the election: He wins, he is killed or he is arrested. He then added, “Tell the bastards I’ll never be arrested.”
Mr. Bolsonaro has questioned Brazil’s electronic voting machines for years, despite the fact that there has been no evidence of widespread fraud in the system since Brazil began using it in the late 1990s.
Four days before Sunday’s vote, his political party released a two-page document that claimed, without evidence, that some government employees and contractors had the “absolute power to manipulate election results without leaving a trace.” Election officials called those claims “false and dishonest” and “a clear attempt to hinder and disrupt” the election.
A day later, at the final debate before Sunday’s vote, Mr. Bolsonaro was asked directly if he would accept the election’s results. He did not answer.
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Inspecting, testing and sealing electronic voting machines in São Paulo, last month.
Inspecting, testing and sealing electronic voting machines in São Paulo, last month.Credit...Victor Moriyama for The New York Times
Flávia Milhorance and Manuela Andreoni contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro, and André Spigariol from Brasília.
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Jack Nicas is the Brazil bureau chief, covering Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. He previously reported on technology from San Francisco and, before joining The Times in 2018, spent seven years at The Wall Street Journal. @jacknicas • Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 3, 2022, Section A, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Brazil’s Election Pushes Political Titans to Runoff. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
