These are the keys to understanding the first electoral round in Brazil

Brazil held this Sunday the most polarized presidential elections of its last decade. With 99.7% of the votes counted, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva obtained 48.34% of the valid votescompared to 43.28% of President Jair Bolsonaro, who aspires to his re-election.

Some of the keys to election day:

Lola and Bolsonaro will be measured in the ballot

The election for the Presidency of Brazil will be defined on October 30after neither of the two candidates obtained more than 50% of the valid votes in the elections this Sunday.

Both candidates will have three weeks to dispute the vote of 8% of the voters who supported the center-right Simone Tebet, the Labor Party member Ciro Gomes and a dozen candidates who did not exceed 1%.

Bolsonaro, better than expected

The leader of the Brazilian extreme right, who aspires to his re-election, obtained a more favorable result than that projected by all the polls of voting intentions. With 99% of the votes counted, Lula obtained only 5 percentage points more than his main antagonist.

The polls, however, until yesterday pointed to a difference between the two candidates of around 15 percentage points, since Bolsonaro did not exceed 36% of the valid votes in demographic surveys.

Bolsonaro does not question the polls

After the results of this Sunday, Bolsonaro questioned the reliability of the opinion polls, but remained silent on the legitimacy of the electronic voting system, which he has questioned on countless occasions.

the head of state has raised the specter of fraud against the country’s current electoral system and even asked Congress to introduce the printed vote, despite the fact that there has been no complaint against the electronic ballot box since its implementation in 1996.

Bolsonarismo flexes muscle

In addition to the good result of the Army reserve captain, Bolsonarism gave a show of force this Sundayafter the election of important allies of the president both for the Congress and for the regional governments.

Some of its candidates won in the first round the governments of important states, such as Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia and Paranáwhile his former minister Tarcísio Gomes de Freitas surprised by getting his pass to the second round against Lula’s candidate, Fernando Haddad, in Sao Paulo, the largest electoral college in the country.

The highest abstention since 1998, and similar to that of 2018

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Election day was also marked by abstention. The percentage of voters who did not appear at the polls in the first round of the presidential elections is the oldest since 1998according to data from the Superior Electoral Court (TSE).

Of the 156 million Brazilians called to the polls, 32.6 million did not appearwhich represents an abstention of 20.94%, compared to 20.3% registered in 2018, when Bolsonaro was elected.