Lula and Bolsonaro go to the second round in Brazil

() — The Brazilian presidential race will have a second round, reported this Sunday the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) of Brazil.

Incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro of the Liberal Party fared better than recent polls predicted and will face the main opposition candidate, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party, in a runoff election on October 30.

Bolsonaro, elected in 2018 as an outsider who catalyzed the anti-Workers’ Party wave among Brazilian voters, obtained 43.2% of the valid votes with 99.61% of the votes counted, eight points more than the last poll from Datafolha on Saturday. Lula received 48.3% of the votes, two or three points less than expected by the polls.

To be elected without going to the second round, a candidate needed to obtain 50% plus one of the votes in Brazil.

“I always thought we would win this election. And I wanted to say that we are going to win this election. This is (the second round) just an extension for us,” Lula said at a press conference after the results.

“We have a second lap ahead where everything is the same again, the time [de propaganda en la televisión] for each side is the same. And now we are going to better show the Brazilian population, especially the most affected class, the consequence of the policy of ‘stay at home, then we will see the economy,'” Bolsonaro said in his post-result press conference.

The current Brazilian far-right president, who habitually discredits the Brazilian electoral system and threatens on different occasions not to accept its results, managed to defeat Lula in the southeastern states, the most populous in the country.

Simone Tebet, from the Brazilian Democratic Movement, was the third candidate in the election with 4.1% of the valid votes and Ciro Gomes, from the Democratic Labor Party, received 3.05% of the votes.

Gomes told a news conference after the results that he is “deeply concerned” about Brazil’s political polarization. “I have never seen a situation so complex, so challenging, so potentially threatening to our fortunes as a nation,” he said.

More than 123 million Brazilians lined up to vote in the world’s fourth largest democracy. Another 32 million abstained from voting. According to the president of the TSE, Alexandre de Moraes, the long lines were due to the new biometric votes and a higher than expected turnout.