Brasilia, 28.10. (Prensa Latina) Former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and President Jair Bolsonaro will today take part in a final televised debate ahead of the second round of elections scheduled for Sunday in Brazil.
Lula, the Labor Party’s presidential candidate, and Bolsonaro, the Liberal Party’s re-election candidate, will take the podium at 9:30 p.m. local time in a TV Globo studio in Rio de Janeiro.
Mediated by journalist William Bonner, the confrontation will consist of five blocks: the first and third are free topics and last 30 minutes.
Each candidate has 15 minutes and must manage their time between questions, answers, answers and objections. Bolsonaro opens the first segment and Lula the third.
The second and fourth blocks deal with specific topics and have a total duration of 20 minutes, with two debates of 10. The topics will be chosen by the applicants among the six topics offered by TV Globo on a big screen.
Each contender for power has five minutes to fight and manage their time. Each content can only be selected once, without repetition.
Lula starts the questions in the second block and Bolsonaro in the fourth. In the fifth, the politicians will make their final reflections.
The order in which the applicants ask the questions in the individual sections and the concluding statements was determined by drawing lots in the presence of party representatives.
After the end of the event, applicants can attend a press conference, each lasting 10 minutes. On October 21, Lula declined to take part in a debate at the SBT studio in Sao Paulo to fulfill his election manifesto in Juiz de Fora, a municipality in the interior of Minas Gerais state (southeast).
According to the Brazil of Hope Coalition, an alliance of 10 political parties supporting the former trade unionist, there was an “incompatibility of agendas” that made it impossible for the former president to attend.
The election judge confirmed that Lula won the first ballot on Oct. 2 with 48.43 percent of the valid votes and Bolsonaro with 43.20.
Both will contest the October 30 election as they failed to achieve an absolute majority of votes in that first dispute, i.e. more than half of the valid votes (excluding blank and zero votes) set for the election under national law.