Bolsonaro, Lula appear headed for runoff in historic Brazil election

Brazilians are headed to the polls again after neither of the country’s leading presidential candidates won more than 50% of the vote in Sunday’s historic election.

Former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had 48.1% of the first-round votes while his rival, incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, received 43.5%. The numbers were announced with 98.8% of the ballots counted late Sunday.

A second-round vote between da Silva of the leftist Workers’ Party and his far-right rival was a mathematical certainty, Brazil’s election authority announced late Sunday, and will take place on Oct. 30.

Nine other candidates lagged far behind the two front-runners.

People lined up to vote in numerous cities Sunday, having been promised they could cast their ballots, no matter what.

“I’ll wait three hours if I have to!” said 48-year-old health worker Fernanda Reznik. “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 da Silva’s Workers’ Party, 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. Both leading candidates had been accompanied by heavy security on the campaign trail.

“I want to try to make the country return to normality, try to make this country again take care of its people,” da Silva, who spoke to reporters after he voted in manufacturing town Sao Bernardo do Campo, said Sunday.

He had been taken down by a corruption scandal in 2018, barred from running for office or voting and serving time in prison. But the corruption conviction was overturned last year.

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“Four years ago, I couldn’t vote because I had been the victim of a lie in this country,” said da Silva, 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, boasted 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.”

Bolsonaro has come under heavy criticism for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which has taken the lives of more than 686,000 people in Brazil . Last October, 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 people because of the disproportionate impact the pandemic had on the native population. Last December, 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,” said voter Agatha de Carvalho, 24. “If he hadn’t done some of the things he did, some of those deaths could have been avoided.”

With News Wire Services