"Liar, former prisoner, traitor to the country!"
The two main protagonists of the presidential election went in quick succession during the last televised debate on Thursday, September 29.
Left-wing ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and far-right outgoing head of state Jair Bolsonaro, favorites for Sunday's presidential run in Brazil, exchanged hateful remarks, calling each other a "liar" and "corrupt".
The first minutes of this debate – which tens of millions of viewers attended for more than three hours on the TV Globo channel – gave rise to violent passes of arms, three days before the most polarized election in history. recent from Brazil.
>> To discover - Long format: Lula against Bolsonaro
Lula like Bolsonaro came out of their hinges and had to be called to order several times by the mediator.
The tension then dropped a notch, but few concrete proposals were made by the seven candidates present (out of the 11 in the running), during a debate judged to be of a low level by the commentators.
From his first speech, Jair Bolsonaro, 67, accused Lula, 76, of having been the leader of a gang of "thieves", when the left ruled the country from 2003 to 2016, while calling him a "liar" and a "traitor to the fatherland".
An allusion to the Petrobras corruption scandal, for which the former trade unionist was imprisoned for 18 months in 2018 and 2019, before seeing his convictions overturned by the Supreme Court.
Neymar's support for Bolsonaro
"It's ugly to see a President of the Republic lying constantly," retorted Lula, who in turn accused him of corruption.
"How can you look in the mirror, when we see what happened under your government?", He declared, citing in particular suspicions of embezzlement of Flavio Bolsonaro, eldest son of the president.
"The people will send you home on October 2!", Launched Lula, to whom the polls predict a possible victory on Sunday.
According to the latest opinion poll published by the Datafolha institute shortly before this third televised debate, the ex-unionist retains a comfortable advantage over Bolsonaro, with 48% of the voting intentions against 34%.
Lula's Workers' Party (PT) is campaigning for Brazilians for the "useful vote" to give their votes to the old lion of Brazilian politics in this first round, with the support of singing stars like the singer Anita.
>> To read - Presidential in Brazil: on TikTok, Neymar shows his support for Jair Bolsonaro
But Jair Bolsonaro got strong support on Thursday: Brazilian soccer superstar Neymar, who openly declared his preference in a video posted on TikTok.
Asked about his environmental policy, much criticized by environmentalists, the far-right president replied: "We have not heard of forest fires in the Amazon, apart from those that usually take place".
But official data collected by satellite by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) showed Brazil recorded more fires in the planet's largest rainforest in less than nine months than in all of 2021. .
Fake news
AFP's fact-checking cell found several false information during Thursday evening's debate.
To defend himself from accusations of delays in the purchase of vaccines against Covid-19 in Brazil, President Bolsonaro said that "no country in the world had purchased a vaccine in 2020", while several countries had started to immunize their population by the end of that year.
Lula, for his part, affirmed that he had been "cleared in 26 trials", but his convictions were quashed for irregularities, without the merits being analysed.
>> To read: In Brazil, violence plagues the general elections
During the two previous televised debates, President Bolsonaro had suffered a shower of criticism after his sexist attacks on one of the journalists who interviewed him.
After a performance deemed disappointing by commentators during the first debate – he had notably failed to defend himself against accusations of corruption launched by Jair Bolsonaro – Lula had not taken part in the second debate, citing an already very busy schedule.
The electoral campaign on radio and television ended this Thursday at midnight, but meetings and the distribution of leaflets will remain authorized until Saturday evening, the day before the election.
With AFP
Discover the webdoc devoted to the presidential election in Brazil © Graphic studio France Médias Monde
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