Brazil’s Senator Flavio Bolsonaro and President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva traded barbs in their first face-to-face presidential debate on Sunday in a contentious back-and-forth just one week before the election’s run-off.
Polls before the debate suggested Bolsonaro, the son of former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, would enter the October 25 vote as the favourite after finishing nearly two points ahead of Lula in the election’s first round earlier this month.
But surveys have also shown a narrowing race, and Lula has expressed confidence he can be the first candidate since Brazil’s return to democracy in the 1980s to finish second in the first round and go on to win the election.
The debate, which allowed the candidates to tensely move about the stage and interact with each other with limited moderation from the host, turned quickly into a heated exchange of corruption accusations and personal attacks.