SAO PAULO, Brazil — Leftist front-runner
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s lead over right wing
incumbent Jair Bolsonaro remains steady at six percentage points ahead of
Brazil’s October 30 presidential runoff election, according to a poll released
Friday.
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Lula has 53 percent
of the vote to 47 percent for Bolsonaro, the Datafolha institute found, the
same numbers as its last poll on October 7.
The figures exclude
voters who plan to cast blank or spoiled ballots — five percent of respondents,
Datafolha found.
The margin of error
for the poll, which was based on interviews with 2,898 people Thursday and
Friday, was plus or minus two percentage points.
The latest numbers
came as a battle brewed in
Brazil over pollsters, which largely underestimated
Bolsonaro’s support in the first-round election on October 2.
Datafolha, for
instance, had found Bolsonaro trailing Lula by 14 percentage points on the eve
of the first round.
In the event, the
incumbent finished just five points shy: 48 percent to 43 percent.
Bolsonaro cried
foul after the election, accusing polling firms of trying to muzzle his
popularity.
“We beat the lie,”
he said.
Federal police
reportedly opened an investigation into polling firms Thursday at the request
of Bolsonaro’s justice ministry over alleged “criminal practices.”
Competition
regulators, meanwhile, opened a separate investigation into whether the firms
had carried out an “orchestrated action” to “manipulate” the elections.
However, the head
of the
Superior Electoral Tribunal, Judge Alexandre de Moraes, ordered the
investigations halted late Thursday, saying they were “usurping” electoral
officials’ authority.
The probes “appear
to show an intent to satisfy (Bolsonaro’s) will,” wrote Moraes, instructing
electoral officials to open an investigation of their own into a possible
“abuse of power.”
Bolsonaro hit back
at Moraes, who doubles as a Supreme Court justice and is a frequent target of attacks
from the president.
“The polling firms
are going to keep lying. How many votes are they dragging to the other side?
People generally vote for whoever’s in the lead,” Bolsonaro said.
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