Brazil election: Lula has slight lead on Bolsonaro as voters poised to choose between ‘democracy and barbarism’

Brazilian voters will choose their next president on Sunday in the country’s most significant election since the return of democracy in the 1980s, with the result set to have a profound impact on the world’s ability to fight climate change.

The contest pits far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro against former left-wing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, two populists who represent very different visions of a country now bitterly divided along regional, religious, class and racial lines. Lula beat Bolsonaro by over six million votes in a first round earlier this month, but fell just short of outright victory, forcing a run-off.

A former army captain who has dragged the far right from the fringes to the centre of Brazilian politics, Bolsonaro in four years in power has stoked culture wars, declared open season on the Amazon rainforest by stripping it of most state protections and made a series of threats against the country’s judiciary while buying off congress in an orgy of corruption.

Lula, who served two terms in office between 2003 and 2010 and has been the frontrunner all race, has framed the contest “as a choice between democracy and barbarism” and has united behind him many former opponents from the traditional political class in a bid to eject the far right from power.

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Final polls give Lula a small but consistent lead, with Bolsonaro’s campaign hampered by revelations in the media that his economics team is studying ways to repair the huge fiscal damage caused by reckless pre-electoral spending by decoupling the minimum salary and pensions from inflation. That would leave millions of poorer Brazilians less well off and the reports have been seized on by Lula’s team and incorporated into its final media blitz.

With his campaign emitting signs of creeping desperation even though still only a few points behind, Bolsonaro spent the last week claiming there is a conspiracy to sabotage his candidacy, fuelling fears he plans to contest the result if defeated on Sunday. He provoked a new crisis with the electoral court that oversees the election, attacking it for refusing to investigate his team’s unsubstantiated claim that radio stations are not playing his campaign slots as required.

“This unbalances the democratic process,” the president said after cutting short a campaign trip to return to Brasília for emergency meetings in what appeared an attempt to raise tensions in the race’s final days. Rumours had even swirled that Bolsonaro had wanted to use the latest unproven accusations to demand a postponement of the election.

Instead he took his complaint over the supposedly missing radio slots to the supreme court. In return the supreme court justice, Alexandre Moraes, who also heads the electoral court, has ordered an investigation into whether Bolsonaro’s campaign’s unfounded allegations about the radio spots constituted an electoral crime “with the goal of disrupting the second round of the election in its last week”. The two men have previously clashed over Bolsonaro’s unfounded claim that Brazil’s electronic voting machines are vulnerable to fraud.

Lula responded to his rival’s latest efforts to throw Brazil’s democratic process into confusion by mocking him. “It is his right to cry, to lash out, like someone who knows he is going to lose the election,” he said in a radio interview on Thursday. Celebrating his 77th birthday this week, the former union leader is now close to completing one of the most remarkable comebacks in Brazilian political history. When Bolsonaro became Brazil’s first democratically elected far-right leader four years ago, Lula was excluded from the race, sitting in jail following a corruption conviction that was later annulled. Victory on Sunday would represent a personal vindication for a politician who is intensely conscious of his historic role as Brazil’s first-ever working-class president.

Lula’s previous two terms were marked by an economic boom and the elevation of tens of millions out of poverty. But the country remains deeply divided over his legacy because of the corruption scandals that came to mark his Workers Party’s 13-year stint in power, which ended in an economic bust and the ejection of his hand-picked successor Dilma Rousseff from the presidency following an impeachment trial in 2016. Since then, anti-Workers Party sentiment has become a key driver of the far right’s emergence as a major force in Brazilian politics.

For the first time in the six presidential elections he has contested, Lula is now facing a rival populist whose personal appeal to large swathes of Brazilian society can match his own. It has produced a race in which each candidate’s high disapproval rating has been closely monitored as key to the outcome.

In order to disarm suspicion towards him and his party, Lula has already vowed to serve only one term if he wins on Sunday and has warned his party that his eventual administration “will not be a Workers Party government, it will be the government of the Brazilian people”. Before then, he might have to see off the threat from a rival preparing to contest his defeat and a military which has silently acquiesced to his efforts. But even if Bolsonaro quits office, his legacy will be a political scene transformed with the hard right now a major force in congress and holding a string of important state governorships.