Brazil election live: counting begins in second round as fears grow over voter suppression

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Luiz In?cio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, became the country’s first working-class president in 2002.

Lula stepped down after two terms in 2010 with approval ratings close to 90%. But the following decade saw the Workers’ party (PT) he helped found embroiled in a tangle of corruption scandals and accused of plunging Brazil into a brutal recession.

His apparently irremediable downfall was cemented in 2018 when he was jailed on corruption charges and barred from running in that year’s election, which Bolsonaro went on to win. Lula’s 580-day imprisonment seemed a melancholy end to a fairytale life that saw him rise from rural poverty to become one of the world’s most popular leaders.

But Lula was freed in late 2019 and his convictions were quashed on the grounds that he was unfairly tried by S?rgio Moro, a rightwing judge who later took a job in Bolsonaro’s cabinet.

Lula, who first sought the presidency in 1989, announced his sixth presidential run in May, vowing to beat Bolsonaro by staging “the greatest peaceful revolution the world has ever seen”.

Voting has closed in Brazil, where it is early Sunday evening.

Results will start coming in quickly, and we are likely to know the winner within hours – or at around midnight in Rio de Janeiro.

Brazil’s electronic voting system means that ballots are counted quickly (and accurately).

The future of one of the world’s largest democracies and the Amazon rainforest was on a knife edge as Brazil held its most important election in decades and its far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, battled to cling to power amid claims that security forces were engaged in a pro-Bolsonaro voter suppression campaign.

Polls on the eve of the election had showed Bolsonaro trailing his leftist rival, the former president Luiz In?cio Lula da Silva, by a margin of four to eight percentage points, although first-round polls had underestimated support for the incumbent. Lula won the recent first round by about 6 million votes but fell just short of the overall majority that would have guaranteed him an outright win.

“For many people, this will be a very special day in Brazil’s history,” Lula told reporters as he voted in S?o Bernardo do Campo, the industrial city where the former union leader began his political career in the 1970s.

Tens of millions of progressive Brazilians were hoping he was right as they turned out to vote against a radical right-wing president whom they accuse of catastrophically mishandling the coronavirus pandemic and wreaking havoc on the environment and Brazil’s international reputation.

Hello and welcome to our live coverage of the results in Brazil’s run-off elections. My name is Helen Sullivan and I’ll be bringing you the latest as it happens. If you have questions or see news you think I may have missed, you can find me on Twitter here.

With 156 million voters, Brazil is one of the world’s largest democracies and this is its most important election in decades, with progressives hopeful that Jair Bolsonaro will be unseated by leftist Luiz In?cio Lula da Silva in what would be one of the greatest political comebacks in history.

This is the second and final round of voting after Lula, who had, according to polls, been expected to win an outright majority won the first round but failed to secure an overall majority. Bolsonaro’s support was stronger than anticipated and, as reports emerge of the notoriously Pro-Bolsonaro highway police setting up road blocks in Lula strongholds, there are very real fears that the far-right incumbent could keep his position.

Polls put Lula, as he is known, ahead of Bolsonaro by four points. A former union leader who lost three presidential elections before finally winning in 2002, the now 77-year-old leftist led the country for eight years before leaving office with approval ratings above 80%.

Bolsonaro’s botched handling of the pandemic has led to almost 700,000 deaths in Brazil and under his watch, deforestation in the Amazon rose to its highest levels in 15 years.

We will have more on the candidates, the run-off campaign and will bring you the results live as they come in.