Financial Times-Brazil: Bolsonaro’s supporters reject polls – He comes in second

Supporters of Jair Bolsonaro are rejecting the bad news that polls bring about the Brazilian elections, the Financial Times notes in its report.

More specifically and according to the publication, Communications Minister Fabio Faria could not contain his irritation at last week’s polls that showed current President Jair Bolsonaro coming in second, while former President Lula da Silva is leading by 10 percentage points.

“Enough with the absurd polls. The moment of truth is coming,” said the minister. He – like many supporters of the right-wing president – believes that the country’s pollsters favor the former President.

For many months, polls had given Lula the lead, who appeared to garner 45 percent of the electorate’s support, with Bolsonaro at 35 percent. Recent opinion polls have given Lula a support rate of around 47%. If one of the two candidates does not secure more than 50% in the first round, on October 2, then there will be a second at the end of the month.

Voters of the Brazilian president, however, believe that these polls do not reflect the real wishes of Latin America’s largest democracy. For them, as noted, the fact that the President has the ability to organize actions and events in which tens of thousands of people participate is proof of his supremacy.

It should be noted that Bolsonaro himself said last week that he believes he will win from the first round of the election. If he doesn’t win, “something unusual will have happened,” he said. These comments raise concerns that if he loses, he will challenge the outcome of the election, just as American President Donald Trump did after the 2020 election. “The people want our government to continue. These polls are insignificant,” he said.

For their part, the few polling companies in the country (Datafolha, IPEC and Quaest) seem to defend both their methodology and their accuracy.

“Political supporters are like football fans… Supporters of both Lula and Bolsonaro complain about the poll results, just like football fans do when the referee blows a foul. But there is no basis in their argumentation that the polls are inaccurate”, says the founder of Quaest Felipe Nunes.

For his part, José Eustáquio Diniz Alves, a researcher specializing in demographic issues and who worked at the Institute of Geography and Statistics of Brazil, warns that what could affect the accuracy of the polls has to do with the 2020 census being postponed .

“The postponement of the 2020 census jeopardizes the accuracy of the polls, as neither the country’s official statistical authority nor anyone else in Brazil knows the reality, precisely, of Brazil’s population profile,” he points out. “For example, Lula has a higher rate of vote intention in low-income populations, while Bolsonaro in high-income populations.”

In fact, to question the accuracy of the polls, Bolsonaro’s supporters invoke another factor. More specifically, they claim that many voters are ashamed to admit that they intend to vote for Bolsonaro, with the phenomenon being called “envergonhado”.

Mr. Felipe Nunes of Quaest claims that the opposite is true, that is, Lula Da Silva’s supporters are the ones who are ashamed to admit that they will vote for him as his name was linked to a huge corruption scandal that rocked Brazil in 2014 with 2017.

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