Gabriela Leoncio has been waiting for the chance to free Brazil from Jair Bolsonaro for four years. On Sunday that chance came.
“It’s been a joke-slash-tragedy,” the restaurant host, 29, said of the president’s tumultuous far-right administration as she cast her vote against him in her country’s most important election in decades.
Leoncio, who was sporting a bright red T-shirt, cap and earrings celebrating the leftwing frontrunner, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said she was optimistic her candidate would prevail when 156 million Brazilians chose their new leader.
“One phase is coming to an end and another phase, of change and hope, is beginning,” she enthused as voters filed into the polling station near Augusta Street in São Paulo, where Lula had held his final campaign event the previous afternoon.
Other voters voiced similar confidence that Bolsonaro’s presidency, during which Amazon devastation skyrocketed, millions were plunged into poverty and Covid killed more than 685,000 Brazilians, was finally coming to an end.
“Today is a day of hope,” said Eduardo Horderle Peruzzo, 35, a historian, after casting his vote for Lula.
Mariana Moga de Moura Silva, 38, a singing teacher, came wearing a sticker featuring Lula’s portrait and slogan: “Hope will defeat fear”.
She voiced disgust at the “vile words” Bolsonaro has used to describe women and perplexity that many continued to support the rightwing populist who retains the support of about a third of voters. “I feel a mix of nausea and anger when I hear him speak,” she said.
She was convinced Lula would emerge victorious when the results are announced on Sunday evening, but polls suggest the election is on a knife-edge.
Lula has the support of between 50% and 51% of voters, meaning he is tantalisingly close to securing the overall majority of votes he needs to avoid a 30 October run-off with Bolsonaro, whom the polls give 36% or 37%. But observers believe it is possible Lula will fall just short.
“If someone tells you they know what’s going to happen … they’re either a trickster or they don’t know what’s going on,” said Fábio Vitor, the author of a book about the politics of Brazil’s armed forces.
Lula, who was Brazil’s president from 2003 to 2010, insisted on the eve of the vote that he was confident of winning outright but would hit the streets to celebrate even if a second round was needed in four weeks’ time.
“I feel great hope that this election will be decided tomorrow, but if it isn’t we’ll have to behave like a football team when a match goes to extra time. We’ll rest for 15 minutes and then we’ll get back out onto the pitch to score the goals we didn’t score in normal time,” he told reporters.
Earlier in the day thousands of elated Lula supporters packed onto Augusta Street to catch a glimpse of their leader and toast the astonishing political revival of a politician who only three years ago was in jail on corruption charges that were later quashed.
“He is the exit route from the nightmare we are living through,” said Juliano Medeiros, the president of the Socialism and Liberty party ( PSOL), one of the leftist groups in Lula’s coalition.
João dos Santos, 56, an activist from the Front for the Struggle for Housing, said he was convinced Bolsonaro’s days were numbered. “He belongs to the past and he will go down in history as the worst president the world has ever seen, a genocidal being who thinks only of himself and his family.”
Danilo Lima, 45, an electrician, accused Bolsonaro of plunging Latin America’s biggest democracy into political chaos and international isolation. “Brazil is a brothel without a pimp. This nonsense has to stop,” he said. “Any Brazilian who votes for Bolsonaro has worms in their head.”
Yet many citizens do continue to support the far-right radical, who has insisted he would win on Sunday despite all major polling firms predicting his defeat.
“There’s no doubt in my mind. It’ll be a win in the first round. He’s the best thing for this country,” said Wellington Moreira Costa, 73, a retired military officer, as he voted in the working class outskirts of Rio.
“He has done an excellent job,” agreed Micheline Delolmo, 42, a pharmacist, as she waited to vote with a Brazilian flag, the patriotic symbol of Bolsonaro’s movement, draped over her shoulders.
Bolsonaro’s ally Donald Trump urged Brazilians in a video message to re-elect “one of the great presidents of any country in the world”. “He’s done an absolutely incredible job,” Trump said.
As he prepared to vote, Lula’s biographer and friend Fernando Morais begged to differ.
The bestselling author said Bolsonaro had made an international mockery of Brazil and was so confident of a Lula victory that he had made a bet with his barber. If Lula didn’t triumph on Sunday, he would shave off the beard he has treasured for 50 of his 76 years.
Morais saw unequivocal signs that Bolsonaro’s power was ebbing away. Even wealthy members of the agricultural sector, one of the president’s key support bases, were abandoning a politician known for his foul-mouthed tirades and divisive rhetoric.
“I have relatives linked to agribusiness who were radically against Lula and are going to vote for Lula now,” the writer said. Why? Because they think Bolsonaro is mad, he said.