Far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro has won the first round of election, but failed to secure the 50-percent of valid votes needed to win outright.
He will face the left-wing Workers’ Party candidate, Fernando Haddad, in the second round on 28 October after he failed to win the ballots required to avoid a runoff.
Bolsonaro secured 46.93% of votes – with 94% of all votes counted.The second-placed candidate, the leftist Workers’ party Fernando Haddad, won 28% of the vote, according to Brazil’s superior electoral court, the TSE. Behind him came the Democratic Labor party’s Ciro Gomes with 12.5%.
Those results mean Bolsonaro, who received more than 46 million votes, and Haddad will face off for the presidency on 28 October in a second round vote.
“The next few weeks are just going to be crazy … the country is just going to divide even more,” predicted Monica de Bolle, the director of Latin American Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
After first round result, Jubilant Bolsonaro followers gathered outside his beach-side home in western Rio de Janeiro on Sunday evening to celebrate the result with fireworks and barbecue.
Many of those present wore T-shirts emblazoned with Bolsonaro’s image and the slogan “É melhor Jair acostumando!” – a play on the politician’s name that roughly translates as: “You’d Bolso get used to it!”
Mr Bolsonaro said that he was certain that if there had not been “problems” with the electronic voting system used in Brazil, he would have won outright.
“I am certain that if this hadn’t happened, we would have known the name of the president of the republic tonight,”
He did not specify what he thought those “problems” were.
Brazil’s electoral authorities have said the vote went ahead peacefully and without any major problems.
>Juthy Saha
