Brazilians vote on Sunday in a presidential runoff between President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro that final polls showed as a statistical tie, with both campaigns trying to reach the millions who stayed home in the first round.
Some 33.4 million adults didn’t vote on Oct. 4, an abstention rate of 21 percent and the highest for a general election since 1998, Euan Marshall reported for Al Jazeera. Voting is compulsory for most Brazilian adults. In a race this close, the people who skipped it could matter more than the people who changed their minds.
Mr. Bolsonaro, the son of the imprisoned former president Jair Bolsonaro, finished first in round one with 47 percent of the votes cast to Mr. Lula’s 45 percent. About 2.2 million ballots separated them, out of more than 158.7 million registered voters. Mr. Lula, a leftist, is seeking a fourth, nonconsecutive term, which no Brazilian president has won.
The pollster Quaest published a survey on Wednesday giving Mr. Bolsonaro 50.5 percent and Mr. Lula 49.5 percent, well inside the margin of error. Datafolha’s last poll, released Saturday, had Mr. Bolsonaro ahead 51 percent to 49 percent, according to The Rio Times, which Datafolha called a technical tie. In the Quaest poll, 52 percent of respondents said they would never vote for Mr. Bolsonaro and 47 percent said the same of Mr. Lula, whose rejection rate had fallen six points in a week.
The same survey gave Mr. Lula an edge among people who abstained or left their ballots blank in the first round: 40 percent backed him, against 36 percent for Mr. Bolsonaro. Voters for the eliminated candidates, nearly 8 percent of the total and many of them on the right, split 43 percent for Mr. Bolsonaro and 37 percent for Mr. Lula. That was closer than many analysts had expected.
Larissa Campelo, 30, a mother of one in Araraquara, in São Paulo State, voted for the center-right Aécio Neves in 2014 and for the center-left Fernando Haddad in 2018. She is staying home again.
“It’s my form of protest. I don’t want to dirty my hands with these candidates,” she told Al Jazeera. “This isn’t apathy.” She compared Brazilian politics to supporting a football team. “People are adopting their own pet politicians,” she said.
João Guilherme Bastos dos Santos, a director at the Democracy in Check Institute, a nonprofit research group, said polarization pushes people to vote against a candidate out of fear rather than for one. “That creates profound exhaustion,” he said. “The fighting seems to go nowhere.”
Political scientists said protest voters like Ms. Campelo may be a minority of the abstainers. Mayra Goulart of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro said many people simply don’t have “the headspace, time or resources to devote to politics.” Luciana Veiga, a professor at the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, said that people who move without transferring their registration, those with work or family duties on election day and those in remote areas far from polling stations all count as abstainers. “We cannot say that abstention is simply a political ‘no’ to voting,” she said.
Voting is optional for 16- and 17-year-olds, people 70 and older and those who can’t read or write, about 21 million people in all, Dr. Veiga said. Everyone else who skips without a reason faces a fine of up to 3.51 reais, less than a dollar, and can’t get a passport or apply for civil service jobs until it is paid.
Since the first round, Mr. Bolsonaro has promised new tax breaks, and he has made his father’s case central to his platform. Jair Bolsonaro is serving a 27-year sentence after his conviction over a coup plot. Mr. Lula has pointed to his push to end the six-day workweek and proposed free public transit on weekends and debt relief for small-business owners. Those measures “have much more of an effect on those who are uninterested in politics than on those who reject the candidates,” Dr. Goulart said.
History favors Mr. Bolsonaro. Since direct presidential elections returned in 1989, no candidate who trailed in the first round has won the second. “A historical observation is not a causal relationship,” Dr. Goulart said.
The two met in a final debate on Friday that stuck mostly to policy, questioning each other on the economy, infrastructure and regional development. On Saturday, the last day of campaigning, Mr. Lula wore a red hat and waved a Brazilian flag from a campaign truck to hundreds of supporters on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Al Jazeera reported.
Polls close at 5 p.m. Brasília time, and the Superior Electoral Court begins releasing results soon after, The Rio Times reported. Mr. Lula’s base is the northeast, and Mr. Bolsonaro’s is in the south and southeast.
“Look at whether turnout falls in either candidate’s bases,” Dr. Veiga said. “Any small movement makes a difference.”