Brazilians cast ballots Sunday in a divisive presidential runoff election whose frontrunner, far-right former army captain Jair Bolsonaro, is vowing to rescue the country from crisis with a firm grip. Bolsonaro - who has tapped deep anti-establishment anger, but repulsed many with his denigrating remarks about women, gays and blacks - faces leftist Fernando Haddad, a former Sao Paulo mayor.
Bolsonaro had an eight- to 10-point lead going in, according to two final opinion polls published Saturday, which gave him about 55 percent of the vote.
While Haddad has made up ground - he trailed by 18 points two weeks ago - it would take a dramatic surge for him to win. "Democracy is at risk, individual freedom is at risk," Haddad, 55, warned after casting his ballot at a school in Sao Paulo, thronged by supporters clutching red and white roses - who briefly scuffled with opponents banging pots and pans in protest.
Bolsonaro, 63, voted at a military academy in Rio de Janeiro, ducking in through a side door to avoid the waiting crowd. Wearing an army-green jacket, he left with a double thumbs-up, saying only that he could not make a statement for security reasons. On Saturday, he made his final pitch to voters on social media, the only place he has campaigned since an attacker stabbed him in the stomach at a rally last month, sending him to the hospital for three weeks.
"After decades, Brazil finally has a chance to elect a president who truly represents Brazilians' values," he tweeted. Bolsonaro outrages a large part of the electorate - and many outside the country - with his overtly misogynistic, homophobic and racist rhetoric.
He once told a lawmaker he opposed that she "wasn't worth raping;" he has said he would rather see his sons die than come out as gay; and he commented after visiting one black community that they "do nothing - they're so useless I doubt they can procreate."
But an even larger portion of voters reject Haddad and the tarnished legacy of his Workers' Party. The Latin American giant's election comes on the heels of its worst-ever recession, a staggering multi-billion-dollar corruption scandal and a year of record-setting violent crime.