REMATCH

Brazil Presidential Race Heads for Runoff as Bolsonaro Beats Expectations

Incumbent Bolsonaro was expected to fall to Lula, his leftist challenger, but clung on to enough of the vote to ensure a second round.

Brazil’s presidential race will be sent to a runoff vote later this month after neither of the top two candidates secured more than 50 percent of the vote on Sunday, surprising analysts who had for weeks been forecasting the downfall of President Jair Bolsonaro. His leftist challenger, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, collected 48.1 percent of the electorate on Sunday, while Bolsonaro hung onto 43.5 percent, with more than 98 percent of the votes counted. “This tight difference between Lula and Bolsonaro wasn’t predicted,” a professor of political science at the Federal University of Pernambuco told the Associated Press. Da Silva, a former shoe-shine boy and factory worker universally known as “Lula,” led the country of more than 210 million people from 2003 to 2010. He left office with an approval rating that hovered around 90 percent but was briefly felled by corruption charges that saw him spend 580 days behind bars. (The charges were vacated by the Supreme Court last year.) His “rise from the ashes,” as Lula has dubbed it, is now set to drag out for weeks, with the second-round vote set to take place Oct. 30.