Brazil's presidential candidates made their final push for voters Saturday with pitches that summarised the gulf between them: leftist Fernando Haddad held a "peace rally" in the favelas while far-right front-runner Jair Bolsonaro reached out on Twitter.
On the last day before a run-off that will decide who leads Latin America's biggest country for the next four years, Brazilians are deeply divided -- though the clear favorite is Bolsonaro, an ex-army captain nicknamed "Tropical Trump" whose aggressive social media campaign has tapped into widespread anti-establishment outrage.
Supporters of Jair Bolsonaro sing Brazil's national anthem during a campaign rally. Source: AAP
Haddad, who is standing in for ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva -- the popular politician was barred from running while serving a 12-year prison term for corruption -- insisted in an emotionally charged rally that he can still pull off a come-from-behind victory.
"This thing is going to turn around," Haddad, 55, told a crush of thousands of white-clad supporters in the largest shantytown in Sao Paulo, a city he formerly served as mayor.
"Brazil still remembers," he added -- a pointed reference to Bolsonaro's outspoken nostalgia for the military regime that ruled Brazil with an iron fist from 1964 to 1985.
Haddad is promising voters a return to the golden years under Lula, who slashed poverty while presiding over an economic bonanza from 2003 to 2010 -- before the economy went bust and his Workers' Party, along with most of the political class, got bogged down in the slime of several massive corruption scandals.
Bolsonaro, 63, meanwhile harks back to a different past: the efficient, if brutal, military dictatorship.
He once said a female lawmaker he opposed was "not worth raping."
And he has gone out of his way to denigrate gay and black people.
Incendiary rise
The incendiary rhetoric only appears to have boosted his numbers.
He won the first-round election on October 7 with 46 per cent of the vote.
And in a final opinion poll published Thursday, he led Haddad by 56 per cent to 44 - though that was a narrower gap than the week before when Bolsonaro had an 18-point lead.
Running for the formerly minor Social Liberal Party, Bolsonaro is, according to many political analysts, a symptom of the crises ailing Brazil since the Workers' Party's 13 years in power came crashing to an end with the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016.
Among those crises: Brazil's economy shrank nearly seven per cent during its worst-ever recession, from 2015 to 2016; the multi-billion-dollar Petrobras scandal has left voters disgusted with the seemingly bottomless corruption of politicians and business executives; and there is widespread outrage over violent crime, in a country that registered a record 63,880 murders last year.
Outgoing President Michel Temer. Source: AAP
Outgoing President Michel Temer, himself implicated in corruption, is set to leave office on January 1 as the most unpopular president in Brazil's modern democracy.
Vowing to restore order with a firm hand, Bolsonaro has ridden a wave of widespread exasperation among Brazil's 147 million voters.
"He's capitalized on the very strong current of discontent with the Workers' Party and corrupt politicians in general," says David Fleischer, a political scientist at the University of Brasilia.
"He has successfully sold himself as an anti-establishment candidate," despite the fact that he has been in Congress for 27 years.
Turn to 'fascism'?
Haddad, who was education minister under Lula, has struggled to unite opposition to Bolsonaro, despite mounting warnings that the former army officer would endanger democracy.
Former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva with Fernando Haddad, Brazil's Workers' Party presidential candidate. Source: Getty Images
The most recent came in an "International declaration against fascism in Brazil," signed by a long list of ex-world leaders, public intellectuals and celebrities who condemned Bolsonaro's "xenophobic, racist misogynist and homophobic values."
The ideologically mixed group of signatories included former presidents Francois Hollande of France and Vicente Fox of Mexico, American actor Danny Glover and ex-US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.
Bolsonaro has only doubled down in recent days, vowing to "cleanse" Brazil of leftist "reds" - including both Lula and Haddad, who he said "will rot in jail."
He has waged his campaign almost entirely from social media, after being knifed in the stomach by an attacker at a campaign rally in September.
Rejecting Haddad's calls to debate, saying his doctors advised against it, he has waged an all-out war on Facebook, where he has eight million followers.
A woman with the words "Not him" written in Portuguese on her forehead during a protest against Jair Bolsonaro. Source: AAP
Haddad, whose campaign slogan is to make Brazil "happy again" - as in Lula's poverty-fighting golden days - ultimately ended up pulling his mentor's image from his campaign ads.
Bolsonaro has, crucially, done a better job convincing the business world that he is the face of real change for Brazil's troubled economy, tapping US-trained liberal economist Paulo Guedes as his top economic advisor.
But he would have to govern with a divided and discredited Congress, in which the Workers' Party remains a major force.
