The former left-wing head of state is back for a third term.
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva wins the second round of the presidential election in Brazil this Sunday with 50.83% of the vote, in an extremely polarized climate.
Until the end of the count, the two candidates were neck and neck.
His victory was very close, with a difference of just under two million votes (out of more than 156 million voters).
The final result is expected later tonight.
🇧🇷🗳️ At almost 95% of ballots counted, Lula still hasn't reached 51% of the vote.
Nobody would have bet on such a narrow victory a month ago.
pic.twitter.com/nsUK8mQhxx
— mathieu gallard (@mathieugallard) October 30, 2022
Will the outgoing president accept the verdict of the ballot box?
If the final results confirm his failure, Jair Bolsonaro would become this Sunday the first president not to be re-elected for a second term since the return to democracy in 1985.
Lula, an ex-metal worker who has become a key figure in Brazilian politics for four decades, is making a spectacular comeback after experiencing disgrace in prison, then the cancellation of his convictions for corruption.
Lula wanted to "restore peace between Brazilians", after an ultra-polarized campaign that cut the country in two.
Even before the end of the count, the leader of the Insoumis, Jean-Luc MĂ©lenchon, congratulated the new left-wing president.
#Lula won.
People's #Brazil and the poor become the priority.
Police and judicial conspiracies, jail and media bombardment failed.
— Jean-Luc Melenchon (@JLMelenchon) October 30, 2022
A stormy campaign
After a stormy campaign, more than 156 million Brazilians were called to elect their president this Sunday in a ballot with an uncertain outcome.
Brazil found itself cut in two: in a climate under high tension, the duel between the left and the extreme right proved particularly bitter, so great is the cleavage between the two candidates, and the economic and social context tense in the country.
If the polls had been predicting for months a third term for the former left-wing head of state Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (2003-2010), the far-right outgoing president Jair Bolsonaro, 67, believed in a breakthrough of last minute, after his unexpected score in the 1st round: 43% against 48% for Lula.
Because Bolsonaro had benefited from a dynamic between the two towers, when the left seemed a little stunned.
Thus, the gap between the two candidates seemed to narrow, according to the latest polls published on Saturday.
Read alsoPresidential in Brazil: 5 minutes to understand the issues of the election
The campaign has been particularly violent in recent weeks.
Accusing each other of lying, Bolsonaro and, to a lesser extent Lula, fueled the disinformation machine, which worked like never before in Brazil.
No violent incident has marred the vote of the 156 million Brazilians called to the polls.
But this second round was marked by a lively controversy around the filtering dams of the federal road police which held back the voters.
especially in the poor regions of the northeast, Lula's electoral stronghold.
On social networks, many videos showed monster traffic jams or buses carrying voters stuck in roadblocks.
Social networks - the sole source of information for the majority of the 170 million Brazilian users - have conveyed an unprecedented mass of false information.
The real concerns of the population have, for the most part, been neglected (inflation, unemployment, poverty or hunger, from which 33 million Brazilians suffer).