Brazil on Sunday faces a crossroads.
After months of pitches to voters, the nation will decide one of Latin America’s most important elections in decades, picking between the two biggest names in modern Brazilian politics and their polar visions for the country.
The choice for Brazilians is whether to give President Jair Bolsonaro a second term, emboldening and empowering him to carry out a far-right mandate for the nation, or whether to bring back former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and return Brazil to a leftist track.
Yet the stakes are far higher than simply a contest between the left and the right.
The election carries major consequences for the Amazon rainforest, which is crucial to the health of the planet. Mr. Bolsonaro has gutted the agencies tasked with protecting the forest, leading to soaring deforestation, while Mr. da Silva has promised to eradicate illegal logging and mining.
Brazil’s economy, once the world’s sixth largest, has flatlined over the past decade. Mr. Bolsonaro pledges to pursue deregulation and privatization to try to jump-start activity, while Mr. da Silva has made his central pitch about feeding and housing the poor, whose numbers have climbed during the pandemic.
The vote is a test of the enduring strength of the right-wing populism that swept across many countries in recent years. Mr. Bolsonaro is one of the biggest remaining faces of that movement, but he is trying to withstand a recent clear shift to the left across Latin America.
And then there is the concern for the health of one of the world’s biggest democracies. Mr. Bolsonaro has spent years attacking Brazil’s democratic institutions, including a sustained effort to undermine its voting system, leading millions of Brazilians to lose faith in the integrity of their nation’s elections.
Now, much of the country is wondering: If the president loses the election, will he accept it?
After Mr. da Silva led in the first round of voting earlier this month, many polls suggest the race has narrowed. The two men have split this country of 217 million people nearly down the middle, with many voters on each side viewing the choice as an existential one for the nation.
“We have a population completely divided between two worlds,” said Malu Gaspar, a political columnist for O Globo, one of Brazil’s biggest newspapers. “So I have a lot of anticipated frustration that this is the most important election of our time, and yet we will come out of it with a lot of more problems than when we went in.”
The close race, high stakes and deep polarization have led to an ugly campaign. Misinformation has soared in recent weeks, with supporters of Mr. da Silva accusing Mr. Bolsonaro of being a cannibal and a pedophile, while Mr. Bolsonaro’s supporters have called Mr. da Silva a gang leader, a communist and a Satanist who wants to close the nation’s churches.
Election officials have tried to intervene, ordering posts and videos off the internet that they say are false. Those efforts have slowed the deluge of misleading information, but they have also become their own controversy, drawing a swell of complaints of unfair refereeing, particularly from Mr. Bolsonaro and his allies.
André Spigariol contributed reporting from Brasília.
