Here’s Who Will Win Brazil’s Presidential Election

Don’t let the polls fool you. The runaway favorite in Brazil’s Sunday presidential election isn’t retired paratrooper and dictatorship nostalgist Jair Bolsonaro, or his closest rival, former Sao Paulo mayor and left-wing Workers Party stand-in Fernando Haddad. Both front-runners, who look poised to win the first round and then square off in a runoff later this month, pale before their cumulative 79 percent rejection index: Forty-two percent said they would never cast a ballot for Bolsonaro while 37 percent would never vote for Haddad.

That’s a landslide for repudiation and it says plenty about the state of play in Brazil’s combustible democracy, where tribes eclipse political parties and talk of redemption trumps any coherent conversation about the reforms the country so badly needs. “In a polarized scenario, one side’s win is another’s loss,” said Marcelo Cortes Neri, an economist who tracks welfare and equality at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro. “Brazil needs to reduce risk, not provoke more, and that means someone with equilibrium in government.”