This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Latin America’s largest democracy was on tenterhooks on Sunday as 147 million voters went to the polls to elect Brazil’s next president, with a far-right populist leading what some call the most critical race for power in Brazilian history.

Eve of election polls gave Jair Bolsonaro, a pro-dictatorship former paratrooper, a lead of at least 15 points over his closest rival, the Workers’ party (PT) candidate Fernando Haddad, with 40% of intended votes to Haddad’s 25%.

“I’m feeling confident we’ll get this done this today – it’ll be a first round win,” Bolsonaro, who survived a near-fatal assassination attempt last month, predicted as he arrived to vote in Rio de Janeiro wearing a blue Ralph Lauren jacket that concealed a bulletproof vest.

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In a Trumpian election-eve broadcast Bolsonaro, 63, told his 7 million Facebook followers: “Let’s make Brazil Great! Let’s be proud of our homeland once again!”

Haddad, the former São Paulo mayor running in the place of jailed former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, struck a less triumphant note as he arrived to vote. “I’m a democrat … and in a democracy you celebrate the will of the people, whatever the result,” the 55-year-old told reporters.

Bolsonaro, who has promised to conquer corruption and wage an iron-fisted crackdown on crime, goes into the election with the wind in his sails, although polls suggest he will fall short of the majority needed to avoid a second-round runoff on 28 October. Polls give Bolsonaro a slight advantage over Haddad in that showdown.

The growing sense that a pro-torture, pro-gun populist notorious for his hostility to black and gay people, indigenous communities and the left could win has left progressive Brazilians in a deep funk.

“I feel breathless,” said historian Heloísa Starling.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Brazilian socialist presidential candidate Fernando Haddad talks to media after casting his ballot at a polling station in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on Sunday. Photograph: Marcelo Chello/EPA

“We are living through a moment where the past is no more, but the future hasn’t yet arrived. This produces such anguish. It’s as though we are trapped in a hole in time where the past doesn’t help us, but we don’t know what lies ahead either.”

Some are so alarmed they are discussing exile if Bolsonaro, who paints himself as a Trump-style outsider despite having spent nearly half of his life in politics, is elected.

“We have doubts about whether we would stay in the country,” admitted one Rio civil servant, who declined to be named for fear of losing his job, as he arrived to vote for Haddad at a polling station in the city’s Glória neighbourhood on Sunday morning.

Lucilea Lacerda, a 42-year-old teacher who was also there to vote Haddad, said she was also dreading a Bolsonaro presidency.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Supporters of candidate Jair Bolsonaro, of the Social Liberal Party in Brazil’s general election outside the Embassy of Brazil in London. Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

“He’s everything that is bad – racist, homophobic, misogynist. I feel very apprehensive. I never imagined a scenario like this. I never imagined that he could lead.”

But Bolsonaro followers are rooting for a politician they hope can foil the return of Lula’s PT, a party many blame for leading Brazil into its deepest recession and worst corruption scandal.

“He is someone who will clean up this mess. I believe in him,” said Wilsa Bezerra, a 51-year-old chemist as she cast her vote at the Glória polling station.

“He’s not sexist. He’s not homophobic. People follow fake news,” Bezerra insisted.

Paulo Barbosa, a 74-year-old pensioner, said he had also backed Bolsonaro and believed Brazil needed a leader with “energy and fight” – like British prime minister Theresa May, he suggested. “Brazil is in the hands of criminal gangs,” Barbosa complained.

Brian Winter, the editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly magazine, said the drama-filled election was in many ways about nostalgia.

Bolsonaro supporters were looking back longingly to 1984, the tail-end of Brazil’s 21-year military dictatorship “and a time when Brazilians could still walk on the streets without fear”.

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Haddad voters meanwhile pined for 2004, the early Lula years of economic boom, expanded social programs and a period when Brazil’s poor “did arguably better than at any other point in Brazil history.” Winter added: “At some level it is a referendum on which was the better year for Brazil.”

On Saturday Haddad indeed pledged to bring back the “golden years” of Lula’s 2003-2011 presidency. Bolsonaro would return Brazil to the “years of lead” as the most repressive period of Brazil’s 1964-1985 dictatorship is known, he suggested.

Starling, the co-author of Brazil: A Biography, said she was disturbed at the prospect of seeing Bolsonaro’s “authoritarian group” in power but would be glad to see the back of such an anger-filled election.

“There has been no political debate, no proposals. It has been a campaign above all about negative emotions, sad passions: resentment, hatred, fear, violence, intimidation. This is such a sad election.”﻿