[Stire] Brazil votes in tense, historic election with Lula against Bolsonaro

[REFLX]

Brazilians were voting on Sunday in a highly polarized election that could determine if the country returns a leftist to the helm of the world’s fourth-largest democracy or keeps the far-right incumbent in office for another four years.

The race pits incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro against his political nemesis, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. There are nine other candidates, but their support pales to that for Bolsonaro and da Silva. Voting stations opened at 7 a.m. ET.

Recent opinion polls have given da Silva a commanding lead.

Agatha de Carvalho, 24, arrived to her local voting station in Rio de Janeiro’s working class Rocinha neighborhood shortly before it opened, hoping she could cast her vote before work, but found 100 others were already lined up. She said she would vote for da Silva, and called Bolsonaro “awful.”

“A lot of people died because of him during the pandemic. If he hadn’t done some of the things he did, some of those deaths could have been avoided,” she said.

Bolsonaro’s administration has been marked by incendiary speech, his testing of democratic institutions, his widely criticized handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and the worst deforestation in the Amazon rainforest in 15 years.

But he has built a devoted base by defending traditional family values, rebuffing political correctness and presenting himself as protecting the nation from leftist policies that infringe on personal liberties and produce economic turmoil.

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