BUENOS AIRES
Brazil’s presidential front-runner Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said Monday that he hopes far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro can accept defeat if he loses in the election.
The two contenders will face off in a second-round runoff vote on Oct. 30 amid a highly charged political environment.
“I hope that if I win the election, he has one minute of common sense, (that) he phones me, accepting the results of the election,” Lula told journalists in the country’s financial capital, Sao Paulo.
“This is how people have acted in Brazil since I was a candidate for the first time in 1989,″ he added.
Lula, who served as president from 2003 to 2010, also hit out at the former army captain’s behavior.
“And if Bolsonaro loses and gets angry, he wants to cry…I lost three elections. Every election I lost, I went home,” he said.
The former union leader went on to say that Bolsonaro needs “discord” and “friction” to operate at a time when Brazilians need peace.
In recent weeks, the polarization has increased between the candidates, with both having political ads banned.
In the first-round vote, many polls had predicted a clear first-round win for Lula, who garnered 48% of the vote to Bolsonaro’s 43%.
But with neither candidate securing more than 50% of the vote, a second round automatically kicked in, underscoring how tight the race remained.
For over a year, Bolsonaro has raised doubts over whether he will respect the results of the polls and has cast doubt over Brazil’s electronic voting system without providing evidence, with rights groups suggesting he may contest the vote.
Last week, electoral authorities also clamped down on the spread of disinformation ahead of the second-round vote, passing a resolution to combat “disinformation that threatens the integrity of the electoral process.”
Ahead of the runoff, AtlasIntel published a poll Monday placing Lula ahead with 52% to Bolsonaro’s 46.2%. According to the polling company, the data was captured between Oct. 18-22 from 4,500 respondents, with the survey containing a plus or minus 1% margin of error
