Thursday, October 27, 2022

Brazil's Lula widens lead slightly over Bolsonaro for Sunday vote -poll

Leftist presidential candidate Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has increased his lead slightly over his far-right adversary President Jair Bolsonaro six days ahead of their runoff in Brazil's divisive election, a Monday poll said.

Anthony Boadle Reuters
Flavia Marreiro Reuters
OCT 24, 2022
 
CREDIT: REUTERS/RICARDO MORAES

BRASILIA, Oct 24 (Reuters) - Leftist presidential candidate Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has increased his lead slightly over his far-right adversary President Jair Bolsonaro six days ahead of their runoff in Brazil's divisive election, a Monday poll said.

Lula leads by 52.0% of the votes against 46.2% for Bolsonaro, according to the AtlasIntel poll, inching forward from 51.1% to Bolsonaro's 46.5% in the previous poll two weeks ago.

The poll was completed before a shooting incident on Sunday involving Bolsonaro supporter and former Congressman Roberto Jefferson, which had the president's campaign worried about a negative impact on opinion polls, a senior aide said.

The changes for both candidates were less than the margin of error of one percentage point, but with the election to be decided on Sunday even a stable race at this point favors frontrunner Lula.

"The poll is good news for Lula," said AtlasIntel chief executive Andrei Roman.

Although the survey did not reflect the impact of Sunday's incident where the Bolsonaro supporter shot and wounded policemen as he resisted arrest, Roman said the president's recovery since the first-round vote on Oct. 2 has stalled.

Bolsonaro had begun to reduce Lula's lead to 3 or 4 percentage points thanks to a wave of new social spending in the final months of the election campaign with benefits calculated by Reuters to cost 273 billion reais ($52 billion) to the Treasury this year and next.

Pollster Romani, whose firm does daily tracking for clients, said Bolsonaro's upward trend was interrupted by a previous incident where the president suggested that Venezuelan immigrant teenagers were prostitutes, and had to later apologize.

The botched arrest of Jefferson on order from the Supreme Court for insulting one of its justices highlighted rising political violence in the election.

On Sunday, when federal police officers went to Jefferson's house, he opened fire on their car and threw stun grenades. Two officers were injured.

(Reporting by Anthony Boadle and Flavia Marreiro; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Alistair Bell)

Brazil’s Lula hopes Bolsonaro will accept defeat in presidential election if he loses

Former president and front-runner hopes Bolsonaro has ‘1 minute of common sense’ if he loses vote


Bala Chambers |25.10.2022


BUENOS AIRES

Brazil’s presidential front-runner Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said Monday that he hopes far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro can accept defeat if he loses in the election.

The two contenders will face off in a second-round runoff vote on Oct. 30 amid a highly charged political environment.

"I hope that if I win the election, he has one minute of common sense, (that) he phones me, accepting the results of the election," Lula told journalists in the country’s financial capital, Sao Paulo.
"This is how people have acted in Brazil since I was a candidate for the first time in 1989,″ he added.

Lula, who served as president from 2003 to 2010, also hit out at the former army captain’s behavior.

“And if Bolsonaro loses and gets angry, he wants to cry...I lost three elections. Every election I lost, I went home,” he said.

The former union leader went on to say that Bolsonaro needs "discord" and "friction" to operate at a time when Brazilians need peace.

In recent weeks, the polarization has increased between the candidates, with both having political ads banned.

In the first-round vote, many polls had predicted a clear first-round win for Lula, who garnered 48% of the vote to Bolsonaro’s 43%.

But with neither candidate securing more than 50% of the vote, a second round automatically kicked in, underscoring how tight the race remained.

For over a year, Bolsonaro has raised doubts over whether he will respect the results of the polls and has cast doubt over Brazil's electronic voting system without providing evidence, with rights groups suggesting he may contest the vote.

Last week, electoral authorities also clamped down on the spread of disinformation ahead of the second-round vote, passing a resolution to combat "disinformation that threatens the integrity of the electoral process."

Ahead of the runoff, AtlasIntel published a poll Monday placing Lula ahead with 52% to Bolsonaro’s 46.2%. According to the polling company, the data was captured between Oct. 18-22 from 4,500 respondents, with the survey containing a plus or minus 1% margin of error

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