How close is the race between Jair Bolsonaro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva?

The Economist’s poll-of-polls for Brazil’s presidential election

Updated October 11th, 2022:
On days without polls, we calculate our average by extrapolating trends in recent surveys. A previous version of our average let this extrapolation veer too far from the latest polls. We have adjusted the way we combine polls to prevent such discrepancies. We have also published a guide to how our model works, to explain what went wrong.
On October 2nd, almost 120m Brazilians voted in the first round of their presidential elections. Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing populist who has been president since 2019, did better than expected. For months the polls had given his rival, the former leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, commonly known as Lula, a double-digit lead. In the end Lula garnered 48% of the vote, while Mr Bolsonaro won 43%. They will now go to a run-off on October 30th.
While Lula’s campaign is focused on convincing Brazilians they were better off when he was president, and that Mr Bolsonaro is a threat to democracy, Mr Bolsonaro has tried to cast Lula as a radical socialist and himself as Brazil’s saviour. Both candidates have concentrated their campaigns in the richest, most populous states of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais. Mr Bolsonaro has implied he is unlikely to accept the result if the election goes against him.

Highlights of our recent Brazilian election coverage

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Round two polling

Individual polls
Average with 95% confidence interval
Jan2022 Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct 40 50 60
Round one Round one Round two Round two Oct 30th Oct 30th Bolsonaro 48% Bolsonaro 48% Lula 52% Lula 52%
Lula and Mr Bolsonaro were the only candidates to win more than 5% of the vote. Lula hopes to inherit most votes of Ciro Gomes, a centre-left former state governor, while Mr Bolsonaro is banking on voters of all stripes changing their minds as stimulus spending makes the economy seem brighter. Women, who prefer Lula, and evangelicals, who favour Mr Bolsonaro, will play a decisive role in the final result.

Round one polling

Individual polls
Average with 95% confidence interval
Jan2022 Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct 10 20 30 40 50
Round one Round one Oct 2nd Oct 2nd Bolsonaro 38% Bolsonaro 38% Lula 49% Lula 49% Gomes 5% Gomes 5% Tebet 5% Tebet 5%

The candidates

Jair Bolsonaro
Jair Bolsonaro
Liberal Party
Jair Messias Bolsonaro is a former army captain and backbench politician who rode a wave of popular discontent about corruption, crime and the economy to win Brazil's presidential election in 2018. His government’s modest economic triumphs, including pension reform, were overshadowed by rampant deforestation in the Amazon and a disastrous response to the covid-19 pandemic. His right-wing base includes farmers, gun-owners and evangelical Christians, and his support is highest in the agricultural western states.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
Workers’ Party
Lula is a former union leader who governed Brazil from 2003 to 2010. His left-wing Workers’ Party (PT) government channelled the fruits of a commodities boom into social programmes; he left office in 2010 with more than 80% approval and still has high support in Brazil’s poor northeast. But a corruption scandal involving the PT tainted his legacy. He spent a year and a half in jail on bribery convictions, which were later overturned by the Supreme Court. (He maintains his innocence.)