By Brendan O’Boyle and Leticia Fucuchima
BRASILIA/SAO PAULO, Oct 18 (Reuters) – Brazilian supporters held rallies for presidential candidates on Sunday as leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and right-wing Senator Flavio Bolsonaro prepared for their first televised debate with just one week left in the campaign.
Pro-Bolsonaro crowds wearing Brazil’s national colors of yellow, green and blue packed Paulista Avenue in Sao Paulo’s financial center, where the candidate addressed the crowd.
Lula supporters wearing red, symbolic of his Workers’ Party, filled Brasilia’s plaza of government buildings and students backing the president protested against Bolsonaro in Rio de Janeiro.
Polls show a close race for the October 25 runoff, with Bolsonaro holding a slight advantage after finishing nearly 2 percentage points ahead of Lula in the election’s first round on October 4.
Both candidates hope to engage the 33 million voters who stayed home in the election’s first round, equal to about one in five eligible voters.
The debate in Sao Paulo is scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. (2300 GMT) and air on broadcaster Band. The last debate in the election’s first round was canceled at the last minute when Lula and Bolsonaro pulled out.
Once a hallmark of Brazilian democracy following the end of the country’s 21-year military dictatorship in 1985, televised presidential debates have lost relevance as leading candidates have increasingly chosen to stay away.
Flavio Bolsonaro is the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup after losing his reelection bid to Lula in 2022. The younger Bolsonaro has said his father’s trial was a “farce” and has promised to seek amnesty for him if elected president.
“There are seven days left until we free Brazil from (Lula’s) Workers’ Party. And you will see Jair Messias Bolsonaro placing the presidential sash on his son,” Bolsonaro told the crowd in Sao Paulo.
In a post on X, Lula said that anyone who voted for his opponent would get his father and brothers as a “bonus gift.”
“Would you go through a pandemic with that family again?” he wrote.
TENSE FINAL DAYS
A dispute over whether Meta’s platforms, which include Facebook and Instagram, treated the two candidates equally has injected new tension into the campaign’s final days.
Lula’s coalition said his Instagram account and posts were restricted, and local newspaper Folha de S.Paulo reported internal Meta messages that acknowledged those restrictions and said the platform had recommended Bolsonaro’s profile and WhatsApp channel to users.
Meta said it had experienced global technical glitches but denied any political bias. “Any suggestion that Meta favors one side is false,” the company said.
(Reporting by Brendan O’Boyle and Leticia Fucuchima; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Deepa Babington)
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