At exactly 19h18m, Sunday 28 October, the Electoral Superior Tribunal, TSE, minister Rosa Weber stated that Jair Bolsonaro, candidate for the “Brazil above all, God above all of us” coalition was mathematically elected president of Brazil. The new president is to take office next January first, for the period from 2019 to 2022.

At that precise time and with 94.44% of votes counted, Minister Rosa Weber said that Jair Bolsonaro had obtained 55.205.640 votes, equivalent to 55.54% of cast votes, while Fernando Haddad from the Coalition People happy again, had obtained 44.193.523 votes, equivalent to 44.46% of cast ballots.

Based on these numbers, candidate Jair Bolsonaro was effectively at that moment, mathematically president elect of Brazil.

Summing up Sunday's election the TSE president said that the runoff took place in the most absolute normality and transparency with the expected situations of the electoral process in a country with continental dimensions such as Brazil. Ms Weber also mentioned that there were 147,3 million Brazilians registered to vote in the first round and the runoff, with 454,400 electoral circuits in the 26 states of the Federation and the Federal District.

Ms Weber also released abstention provisional numbers in the second round of the election and at the moment of making them public: 25.834.712, equivalent to 21.07% of the electorate. In the first round abstentions reached 29.941.171 or 20.33%. It was also mentioned that 4.658 of electronic voting machines had to be replaced this Sunday which is a number slightly higher than that of the first round, 4.099.

The TSE president then thanked all participants in the electoral process and had special words for all those voters who turned out as protagonists of the major party of our democracy. Likewise with the OAS Observers mission and international visitors who followed the electoral process both in the first and second rounds.

Another member of the TSE, Minister Dias Toffoli followed but with a more incisive speech criticizing all those unfair and dishonest attacks against the Electoral Justice during the process and called upon the president elect, as his first action, to swear responsibility and abidance to the Constitution since it is a moment of union, serenity and to combat radicalism and intolerance.

Attorney General Raquel Dogde pointed out that the Brazilian society had much advanced during the long electoral process which is a precious legacy that the president elect is receiving from the people and he must learn to honor. Dodge also underlines that Brazilian institutions are strong, and reaffirmed the independence and autonomy of the Public Prosecution which remains at the service and interests of society, underlining its constitutional role with the new government.

Finally the Public Security minister, Raul Jungmann said that the election runoff has been of a memorable peacefulness and the storm of fake news from the first round was not repeated in the second round on 28 October”. </s> SAO PAULO/BRASILIA (Reuters) - Brazil’s presidential election will go to a second-round runoff between right-wing Congressman Jair Bolsonaro and leftist rival Fernando Haddad, pollster Datafolha projected, based on an analysis of initial results from Sunday’s vote.

With 87 percent of voters counted, Bolsonaro has won 47 percent of valid ballots, far more than Haddad’s 28 percent but not enough to clinch the race with a majority of first-round votes, according to Datafolha. </s> Baku. 28 October. REPORT.AZ / Thousands of polling stations have opened early this morning in Brazil in within the second round of presidential elections, Report informs citing the RIA Novosti.

In total, 147.3 million people have the right to vote. Moreover, voting is mandatory for those whose age is 18-70 years, but the penalty for non-attendance is symbolic - about one dollar.

The first round of elections was held on October 7. Then the winner has not been determined, and two candidates are in the second round according to the results of voting— right-wing candidate from the Social Liberal Party Jair Bolsonaro and the candidate of the left Worker’s Party Fernando Hadded. The first scored 46%, while the second-29.3%. </s> United States President Donald Trump appears set to gain a soulmate and admirer after Mr Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right, hitherto-fringe politician who models himself on the US leader, won 46 per cent of the ballots in the first round of voting in Brazil's presidential election on Sunday.

And Mr Bolsonaro seems likely to win the presidency when the second round is held on Oct 28.

His tally, far bigger than initially expected, represents an astonishing rebuke to Brazil's existing politicians and a warning for the rest of Latin America of what happens when voters lose faith in an entire political class.

Brazil, Latin America's biggest economy, is struggling with the worst recession in the country's two centuries of history, with 13 million people currently out of work.

It also suffers from a massive crime wave fuelled by poverty, the drugs trade and organised criminal gangs; a record 63,800 murders were reported last year.

But the biggest problem is a catastrophic collapse in governance as the result of a massive corruption scandal involving Petrobras, Brazil's huge majority-state-owned oil company, and kickbacks to prominent members of the ruling centre-left Workers' Party.

Ms Dilma Rousseff, elected as Brazil's first female president in 2010, was impeached and driven out of power in August 2016 as a result of this scandal; Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, her predecessor and the man who presided over Brazil's transformation into a thriving economy during the previous decade, is now in jail.

According to the Brazilian Institute of Public Opinion and Statistics, 87 per cent of voters distrust all politicians.
• Percentage of voters in Brazil who distrust all politicians, according to the Brazilian Institute of Public Opinion and Statistics.

Although Mr Fernando Haddad, the 53-year-old Workers' Party presidential candidate in Sunday's election, served as mayor of Rio de Janeiro and is respected, he paid the price for his party's scandals and proved no match for Mr Bolsonaro.

Mr Haddad polled 29 per cent of the ballots, or 31 million votes, while Mr Bolsonaro got 49 million votes, or 46 per cent of the total cast in this 210 million-strong nation.

A charismatic former paratrooper, Mr Bolsonaro, 63, has succeeded in using his fringe status to portray himself as the only candidate untainted by corruption and has endeared himself by offering apparently simple solutions to Brazil's ills.

He promises to "change the destiny of Brazil" by shoving aside an entire generation of Workers' Party officials. And he hints at the possibility of extrajudicial killings in order to stop criminal gangs.

"There are certain types of people who aren't humans," he told an electoral rally, implying that such people can just be liquidated.

Mr Bolsonaro has often been dismissive of women, claiming they should not receive equal pay since "they tend to get pregnant".

He also praised the military dictatorship which ruled Brazil from the 1960s to the 1980s, and has attracted strong support from the armed forces and the Church.

His stabbing last month by a far-left activist who claimed to be on "a mission from God" only increased his popularity. After losing almost 40 per cent of his blood in the assassination attempt, he made no further public appearances but, like Mr Trump, proved adept at using social media platforms to address his growing electoral base.

In his first reaction to Sunday's electoral results, delivered on Facebook Live rather than at an anticipated press conference, he claimed that he would have won the first round vote outright were it not for the electronic voting system. "We have received many complaints of (electronic) voting systems that have had problems," he said.

Still, he proclaimed himself confident of total victory on Oct 28, claiming that Brazil faces only two futures: his path of "prosperity, freedom, family and God" or "the path of Venezuela", a country now bankrupted by a Marxist regime.

In theory, Mr Haddad, the centre-left candidate who also qualified for the second round of voting, can still defeat Mr Bolsonaro by attracting all the ballots which went to smaller centrist candidates in the first round. Yet, this will be a very tall order never achieved before in national politics.

Populist right-winger Bolsonaro claims inspiration from Mr Trump on everything from closing Brazil's borders to immigrants to slashing bureaucracy and liberating private enterprise from government controls. But he has no government experience, no record as a liberal economist and has offered nothing but slogans about how he will rule the country.

Still, many Brazilians seem unperturbed. For they see in Mr Bolsonaro the only way to put an end to a political system which evidently failed. </s> BRASILIA (Reuters) - Brazil’s presidential election will be decided in a run-off between right-winger Jair Bolsonaro and leftist Fernando Haddad, the president of the country’s top electoral court said on Sunday.

Bolsonaro obtained 46.7 percent of the votes in Sunday’s first-round vote, and Haddad got 28.37 percent. The run-off between the two top vote-getters is required when no candidate wins a majority. The vote will be held on Oct. 28. </s> Far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro won the first round of Brazil’s presidential elections on Sunday, Reuters reported. Bolsonaro, who received 46% of votes, will face leftist candidate Fernando Haddad in the second round on October 28.

Haddad secured 29% of votes in the first round. A candidate needs 50% or more to win the elections outright.

Meanwhile, Bolsonaro’s supporters protested outside the national electoral tribunal in Brasilia, claiming fraud in the polls, AFP reported. In his victory speech, Bolsonaro, the candidate of Social Liberal Party, told citizens to take the “path of prosperity, liberty, family on God’s side”. He also echoed Trump when he called on his social media followers to “make Brazil great”. “Let us be proud of our homeland once again,” The Guardian quoted him as saying.

The 63-year-old is a former Army captain whose divisive comments have drawn the ire of liberals and increased his support among right-wing voters. In September, Bolsonaro was stabbed during a rally in Minas Gerais by a man who appeared to be “mentally ill”.

He is scheduled to face trial in the Supreme Court for allegedly inciting hate and rape. Bolsonaro has promised to encourage police to kill suspected drug gang members and other armed criminals with abandon if elected to power and has gone on record to praise Brazil’s history of military dictatorship. </s> SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL – Security around the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) building in Brasilia is being reinforced for the start of the trial that seeks the annulment of the 2014 Dilma Rousseff and Michel Temer presidential ticket. This is the first time that a Brazilian court examines a request for annulment of a presidential election result.

The results of the 2014 presidential elections are being questioned by the PSDB (Brazilian Social Democrat Party) that allege there were some irregularities in the winning ticket’s donations, including suspicion that the Rousseff-Temer campaign received funds from the mega-corruption scheme dubbed Operação Lava Jato (Carwash Operation). If irregularities are found to be true, President Michel Temer could be ousted from the Presidency.

According to the PSDB the Rousseff-Temer presidential campaign is guilty of abuse of political and economic power, obtaining campaign donations from companies involved in the Lava Jato scheme and bribing Petrobras executives for contract benefits. Executives from the state-owned oil giant were charged and convicted of receiving millions of dollars from construction and logistics companies for contracts.

Rousseff and Temer are presenting separate and distinct defenses. The defense of former president, Dilma Rousseff, impeached last year for mismanagement of funds, denies any irregularity and maintains that the entire campaign funding was documented and monitored. The defense of President Michel Temer states that the PMDB election campaign has no relation to suspicious activities.

If the Rousseff-Temer ticket is annulled, the Brazilian Constitution states that, after half of the presidential term, if the positions of president and vice-president become vacant, Congress must choose the new representative.

Over the weekend protests in cities such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo rejected the option of having Congress choose a new leadership if the 2014 results are annulled. Demonstrators called for new presidential elections to be held instead. </s> Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing Brazilian Congressman, is headed toward a second-round runoff against leftist former Sao Paulo mayor Fernando Haddad, according to early results in Sunday's presidential election.

With 79 percent of votes counted, Mr Bolsonaro had received 48 percent of valid votes, far ahead of Mr Haddad's 27 percent but short of the outright majority needed to avoid an October 28 runoff.

Much of the support for Mr Haddad, the stand-in for jailed ex-President Luiz Inacio da Silva, is concentrated in northeast Brazil, which is often slower to report electoral results.

Many analysts thought Mr Bolsonaro would win the first round of voting but face a runoff between the two top vote-getters which he would he lose. A first round win was considered a long shot at best in a country where big parties and the public campaign financing and free ad time they command hold sway.

But little in this election has gone to plan, and Mr Bolsonaro's strong showing reflects a yearning for the past as much as a sign of the future. The candidate from the tiny Social and Liberal Party made savvy use of Twitter and Facebook to spread his message that only he could end the corruption, crime and economic malaise that has seized Brazil in recent years. </s> Early exit polls in Brazil this evening boosted hopes among supporters of right-wing presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro that he could outperform recent opinion surveys enough to win a first-round victory.

The fiery lawmaker has surged in opinion polls in the past week, with all major surveys suggesting the race would go to a second-round runoff in what has become a referendum on Mr Bolsonaro, a former army captain who praises dictatorships and vows a brutal crackdown on crime.

However, exit polls today suggested an even more dramatic swing. An Ibope exit poll for the Rio de Janeiro governor race showed former judge Wilson Witzel, a Bolsonaro ally, scoring a shock victory over former Rio mayor Eduardo Paes by 39% to 21%, suggesting earlier opinion surveys underestimated a deep-seated desire for change in the electorate.

Mr Bolsonaro, 63, was accompanied by a nurse as he cast his vote today, a month after a near-fatal stabbing at a campaign rally that required two emergency surgeries.

He said he was confident he had the majority of valid votes necessary to clinch the race without a runoff vote on 28 October, avoiding a showdown with the leftist Workers Party (PT).

"If God is willing, we'll settle this today," he told reporters. "We are on an upward trajectory and are confident that the Brazilian people want to distance themselves from socialism."

Read more: All you need to know about Brazil's divisive election

An exit poll also showed one of Mr Bolsonaro's closest aides, former police major Olimpio Gomes, scoring a surprise win in the Senate race in Sao Paulo state, surging past his recent polling.

In Minas Gerais state, exit polls showed another Bolsonaro ally scoring an upset victory in the governor's race.

Mr Bolsonaro is riding a wave of anger at the establishment over one of the world's largest political graft schemes and rising crime in the country with most murders in the world.

His supporters blame all that on the PT, which ruled Brazil for 13 of the past 15 years, along with reckless economic policies that contributed to Brazil's worst recession in a generation.

Still, Brazil is split over the danger to democracy posed by Mr Bolsonaro, a long-time congressman who advocates for torture and police violence, praises the country's 1964-85 military regime and suggested that opponents could only win the race through fraud, although he now vows to respect the electoral process.

Mr Bolsonaro's closest rival, PT candidate Fernando Haddad, a former education minister and one-term mayor of Sao Paulo, is standing in for the party's jailed founder, former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who is serving time for bribery and money laundering.

Brazil's 147 million voters will choose the president, all 513 members of the lower house of Congress, two-thirds of the 81-member Senate, plus governors and lawmakers in all 27 states.
Brazilians elect a new president (first round), state governors and parliaments.