Polls close at 17.00 BRT, 20.00 GMT, with first results expected within the hour.
Brazil’s president is elected purely by the popular vote. A winning candidate needs one more vote than 50% of votes cast; there is no role for the parliament and no electoral college.
Because no candidate achieved 50% in the first round on 4 October, the two leading candidates go into a runoff. One of them is Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva , the incumbent leftwing president, commonly known as Lula. The other, and the leading candidate in the first round, is Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of the far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro.
Bolsonaro senior is serving a 27-year prison sentence for plotting a failed coup attempt after he lost to Lula in the 2022 election, but has endorsed his son and hopes to be released if he wins. Bolsonaro junior is a lawyer and former senator from Rio.
In 2022, Lula beat Jair Bolsonaro in the second round, with an electoral base concentrated in the north-east of the country, while Bolsonaro led in the south. But on that occasion Lula entered the second round as the leading candidate from the first round, and won the bellwether state of Minas Gerais, north of Rio de Janeiro. In the first round of the 2026 election, Bolsonaro beat Lula in Minas Gerais by 48.43% to 43.33%.
Never, since the return of democracy to Brazil in 1985, has the first round runner-up managed to turn the game around and win the second vote. But Lula’s campaign has been buoyed by massive, student-led anti-Bolsonaro protests after the first round and hopes to stage a historic fightback on Sunday.
Lula is already the longest-serving president in Brazil’s modern history, serving two terms from 2003 to 2010, before returning to office in 2023. He will turn 81 on Tuesday. Bolsonaro is 45.
