How the election works
Brazil’s president is elected directly by the 156 million voters; there is no electoral college and no role for the legislature. A candidate needs more than 50% of the vote to be elected. If this does not happen in the first round, the top two candidates will go into a runoff election at the end of the month.
The leading candidates in 2022 are the incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, a rightwing populist, and the former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, a leftwinger who introduced radical anti-poverty measures during his two terms in office.
There are 11 candidates in all but only two others are likely to draw more than 2% of the vote: Ciro Gomes, a rival leftwinger who served as a minister under Lula, and Simone Tebet, a centrist senator.
In 2018, Bolsonaro won a second-round run-off against Fernando Haddad, the candidate of Lula’s Workers’ party. In that election Haddad had strong support in the north-east, while Bolsonaro’s vote was stronger in the south.
There are also elections for all seats in the lower house of Brazil’s parliament, and for a third of seats in the senate.
