Crowds backing and opposing both Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Flávio Bolsonaro took to streets nationwide on Sunday, seven days before the vote, as the two candidates prepared for their first in-person exchange before a national television audience.
Thousands of attendees dressed in yellow, green, and blue gathered along Paulista Avenue in São Paulo's financial district, where Flávio Bolsonaro took to the stage to address the assembled crowd. Crowds dressed in red — the colour associated with the Workers' Party — gathered at the government plaza in Brasília, while university students held demonstrations against Bolsonaro in Rio de Janeiro.
Polling data ahead of the October 25 runoff places the contest within a narrow margin, with Flávio Bolsonaro — whose father, Jair Bolsonaro, previously held the presidency — carrying a modest lead built on a gap of roughly two percentage points over Lula when voters cast ballots in the opening round on October 4. About one in five eligible voters stayed away from the first round, and drawing those 33 million non-participants back to the ballot box has become a stated priority for both campaigns.
Broadcast network Band is carrying the debate, with the São Paulo session set to begin at 8 p.m. local time — 2300 GMT. A debate scheduled as the final event of the first electoral round did not go ahead after both Lula and Bolsonaro chose not to take part. Televised presidential debates in Brazil, long viewed as a fixture of the democratic era that followed the end of military government in 1985, have seen their prominence diminish as front-running candidates have grown more inclined to skip them.
Analysts anticipate that the face-off between Senator Bolsonaro and President Lula will take on a pointed, adversarial tone. Sharp divisions between camps aligned with Bolsonaro and those backing Lula have shaped the direction of Brazilian politics across roughly the past ten years.
Supporters of Bolsonaro have called for Lula to face imprisonment over corruption allegations tied to the Workers' Party, while those aligned with Lula have argued that Bolsonaro's conviction and imprisonment on coup-related charges were warranted. Vera de Sousa, a demonstrator in São Paulo, called for the president's removal from office.
At the São Paulo gathering, protesters hoisted an oversized inflatable depicting Lula dressed as a prisoner. At the Brasília gathering, crowds called for Bolsonaro's imprisonment and displayed an effigy portraying the former president with bloodied hands. At the Brasília gathering, a Lula supporter named Sonia Maria expressed concern that an opposition victory at the polls would leave the country in a deeply troubled position, adding an apology for the bluntness of her words.
A corruption verdict handed down against Lula led to 580 days of detention across 2018 and 2019, though a court subsequently set aside that ruling after finding procedural and investigative irregularities in how the case had been handled. A Brazilian court handed Jair Bolsonaro a prison term of 27 years, having found him responsible for orchestrating an attempt to overturn the 2022 election result that ended his presidency in favour of Lula. A medical condition has placed him under house arrest while the custodial portion of his sentence runs its course.
Flávio Bolsonaro has characterised his father's trial as a sham and stated that, should he win the presidency, he would pursue a pardon on his behalf, adding that voters had one week remaining to remove the Workers' Party from power. Addressing the gathering in São Paulo, Jair Bolsonaro told those present that they would witness him placing the presidential sash on his son.
Lula took to X to suggest that voters backing his opponent would, in effect, gain the rival's father and brothers as part of the arrangement — a remark that drew attention as the campaign neared its final days, coinciding with a separate dispute over whether Meta's platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, had treated both candidates even-handedly.
Folha de S.Paulo, a Brazilian newspaper, cited internal Meta communications showing that restrictions had been placed on the Instagram account and posts belonging to Lula's camp, with those same documents indicating the platform had been directing users toward Bolsonaro's profile and WhatsApp channel. Meta reported widespread platform disruptions on a global scale, while its spokesperson issued a statement pushing back on assertions that the company's systems operate with any partisan tilt.
A demonstration targeting Meta's São Paulo headquarters was being organised by civil society groups for Monday, with the event's coordinators citing what they described in a press release as the company's alleged involvement in Brazil's electoral affairs.
