(Rio de Janeiro) Former left-wing head of state Lula saw his chances of winning in the first round of the Brazilian presidential election on October 2 grow, by widening the gap on current President Jair Bolsonaro in a poll released Thursday evening.
Posted at 9:56 a.m.
According to this opinion poll by the benchmark institute Datafolha, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (president from 2003 to 2010) is credited with 47% of voting intentions, against 45% last week.
His lead over Jair Bolsonaro thus increases from 12 to 14 points, the far-right president remaining stuck at 33%.
A victory in the first round is possible if a candidate obtains more than half of the votes cast (without draws or blanks).
With this count, Lula is rightly acclaimed by 50% of those interviewed by Datafolha who have chosen a candidate.
This score remains within the poll’s margin of error (+ or -2 percentage points), but it “gives favorable conditions for a victory in the first round” for the former turner-miller, Adriano Laureno told AFP. , political analyst at the consulting firm Prospectiva.
President Bolsonaro had however gradually narrowed the gap during the campaign, Lula’s advantage having shrunk from 21 points at the end of May to 11 points at the start of September.
But the former paratrooper “has made mistakes” lately, such as his visit to the United Kingdom for the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, which he took advantage of to hold an electoral rally in the middle of a grieving city of London.
Adriano Laureno also attributes Lula’s good score to “an effective campaign by his party for the useful vote”.
On Thursday, center-right ex-president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a longtime opponent of the left-wing icon, called for a vote “for democracy” without explicitly quoting Lula, but evoking “the person committed against poverty and inequalities.
Another strong symbol, Miguel Reale Junior, former Minister of Justice of Cardoso and above all author of the request for dismissal which led to the sidelining of ex-president Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016), runner-up to Lula , also called for voting for the left-wing candidate in the first round.
According to him, this would “prevent any act of desperation by Bolsonaro” who risks, he says, challenging the result of the polls in the event of a defeat in the second round on October 30.
He fears in particular an episode similar to the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 in the United States by supporters of Donald Trump.
On Wednesday, left-leaning politicians and intellectuals in Latin America issued a letter asking center-left candidate Ciro Gomes, currently in third place with 7% of voting intentions, to drop out of the race to facilitate a victory for Lula.