The United States suspended consular services in Brazil on Friday and Australia closed its embassy in Brasília, citing security threats two days before the first round of Brazil’s presidential election on Sunday.
The U.S. Embassy said in a statement on Thursday that consular services would stop starting Friday, and it advised American citizens who needed assistance to stay away from the embassy, consulates and other diplomatic facilities. Australia then shut its embassy in the capital. Neither government described the threats in detail.
The precautions landed at the tail end of a tense campaign. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his main challenger, Flávio Bolsonaro, both skipped the final televised debate this week, and the broadcaster scrapped it. Mr. Lula instead appeared on a popular podcast with millions of YouTube subscribers. Mr. Bolsonaro said he was protesting what he called “censorship” by the electoral court. The same evening, police ruled out a bomb threat outside the Supreme Court.
The race itself is close. A Quaest poll published on Monday gave Mr. Lula 39 percent to Mr. Bolsonaro’s 34 percent in the first round, with a head-to-head second round tied at 42 percent each. Mr. Lula, 80, is seeking a fourth nonconsecutive term. Mr. Bolsonaro, 45, is a senator and the son of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president now in prison.
Beneath the campaign, the economy is doing the arguing. Never before have so many Brazilians held jobs, yet eight out of 10 families are in debt, and paying it off eats a third of household budgets, according to official data. Mr. Lula points to unemployment at a historic low of 5.3 percent, falling inequality and controlled inflation. Half of Brazilians nonetheless tell pollsters the government is doing a bad or very bad job, and that the economy is getting worse.
The August figures are stark: 82 percent of households carry debt, one-third have missed at least one payment and 12 percent say they will not be able to pay what they owe. Most of the borrowing sits on credit cards, with the central bank’s benchmark rate at 13.75 percent even after several cuts. Mr. Lula recently complained to his finance minister that banks issue multiple cards to customers already behind on payments.
The government has answered with a rush of measures in the campaign’s final stretch. Nine days before the vote, Mr. Lula banned all online betting, citing families’ economic and mental health; last year, after finding that a quarter of Bolsa Família welfare recipients were gambling, his government blocked social assistance money from being spent on digital betting sites. His administration has also started three programs to renegotiate personal and business debts with banks at discounts of up to 90 percent. The third, announced last Friday, goes further than the first two: the government buys families’ old debts itself, then negotiates with the financial institutions.
Then there is the timing. The monthly Bolsa Família payment will rise 15 percent in mid-October, between the first and second rounds. The package of pre-election measures totals more than 200 billion reais, about $38 billion, according to the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo, adding pressure on public debt that already stands near 82 percent of gross domestic product, with a fiscal deficit of 9 percent.
Mr. Bolsonaro promises sweeping cuts to public spending, lower taxes, a restored fiscal cap and a return to privatizations, while saying he would preserve aid to the most vulnerable, without detailing how the books would balance. Mr. Lula, who dined with 700 business leaders last week, has promised cuts of his own but says he will not touch the social agenda. “Devoting public money to education, health, and the fight against poverty is investment, not spending,” he said. His government has even built a website, The Market of Lies, to rebut the opposition’s economic claims with data and short videos.
Voting begins on Sunday morning. If neither man wins a majority, the two meet again in a runoff, with the debt figures, and the embassies’ doors, still waiting on the result.