Brazil Candidates Make Final Campaign Pitches

Sao Paulo, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 28th Oct, 2018 ) :Brazil's presidential candidates made their final push for voters Saturday, with pitches that echoed the gulf between them: leftist Fernando Haddad held a "peace rally" in the favelas, while far-right frontrunner Jair Bolsonaro took to Twitter.

A day before a runoff 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 the "Tropical Trump," whose aggressive social media campaign has tapped into widespread anti-establishment rage.

Two final polls published Saturday gave Bolsonaro a lead of between eight and 10 percentage points, with around 55 percent of the vote.

Haddad has made up ground -- he trailed by as much as 18 points two weeks ago -- but it would take a truly dramatic surge for him to win at this point.

Haddad is standing in for ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a popular but controversial politician who was barred from running while serving a 12-year jail term for corruption.

The Workers' Party candidate insisted in an emotionally charged rally that he can still pull off a comeback.

"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.

Amid the sea of frenzied supporters, Emerson Santana, 44, told AFP: "We're going to win.

"Democracy is going to win, not authoritarianism. We don't want another dictatorship."