Bolsonaro vows to save Brazil as voting begins
Brazil began voting on Sunday in a divisive presidential run-off election whose front-runner, far-right former army captain Jair Bolsonaro, is vowing to rescue the country from crisis with a firm grip.
Bolsonaro who has tapped deep anti-establishment anger but repulsed part of the electorate with his denigrating remarks about women, gays and blacks faces leftist Fernando Haddad, a former Sao Paulo mayor.
Bolsonaro had an eight- to 10-point lead going in, according to two final opinion polls released on Saturday, which gave him about 55% of the vote.
And while Haddad has made up ground he trailed by as much as 18 points two weeks ago it would take a dramatic surge for him to win.
“This thing is going to turn around,” Haddad told thousands of supporters at his final campaign rally on Saturday.
Bolsonaro made his own final pitch on social media, the only place he has campaigned since an attacker stabbed him in the stomach at a rally last month, sending him to hospital for three weeks. “God willing, [it] will be our new independence day,” Bolsonaro tweeted.
Coming on the heels of a punishing recession and staggering corruption scandal, the Latin American giant’s elections have thrown up a spectacular cast of characters, even by the standards of these divisive, antiestablishment times. Bolsonaro outrages a large part of the electorate and many outside the country with his overtly misogynistic, homophobic and racist rhetoric.
He once told a legislator he opposed that she “wasn’t worth raping;” he has said he would rather see his sons die than come out as gay; and he commented after visiting one black community that they “do nothing they’re so useless I doubt they can procreate”.
But an even larger portion of voters reject Haddad and the tarnished legacy of his party.
Haddad is standing as a surrogate for jailed former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who led Brazil through the boom years of 2003 to 2010.
Da Silva remains the country’s most popular politician, despite being accused of masterminding the massive pilfering of state oil company Petrobras. But the hugely divisive Workers’ Party founder was barred from running because he is serving a 12-year prison sentence.
Bolsonaro is unabashedly nostalgic for Brazil’s brutal military dictatorship (1964-1985) and has been accused of authoritarian tendencies.
“I’m not very enthusiastic, because I don’t really like either candidate,” Elias Chaim, an engineering student and music producer, said at a polling station in Rio de Janeiro.
“But I want to vote Haddad, because Bolsonaro’s discourse of hate and intolerance is a risk for our country.”