A survey conducted in Brazil by market research firm AtlasIntel for Bloomberg this week found that conservative Senator Flavio Bolsonaro has a slight lead against incumbent socialist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
The two candidates, however, still remain “technically tied” a little over two weeks before the first round of the presidential election.
Brazil is half a month away from conducting its 2026 general election on October 4. On that day, Brazilians will elect their next president, governors, and new members for the nation’s regional legislatures. With 13 different candidates appearing on the October 4 presidential ballot, no candidate is expected to obtain the required majority of the votes to win in the first round.
As such, all polling firms project that the 2026 presidential election will ultimately be defined by a late October runoff between President Lula of the ruling Workers’ Party (PT) and Senator Bolsonaro of the Liberal Party (PL).
On Thursday, Brazilian outlets published the results of the most recent survey conducted by AtlasIntel for Bloomberg, which presented participants with a series of prospective runoff scenarios. In a runoff between Bolsonaro and Lula, 47.2 of respondents said that they would vote for the conservative senator, while 46.8 percent expressed their intention to vote for Lula. Although the poll indicates that Bolsonaro now has a slight 0.4 percent lead, the results are still within the poll’s one-percent margin of error — as such, the two candidates are deemed to be “technically tied,” much like the results of polls conducted by other firms have reflected in recent weeks.
Jovem Pan nevertheless pointed out that according to the poll, six percent of respondents said they would either cast a “blank” vote or a “null” vote (there is a slight difference between the two, but no candidate benefits by either one) or “did not know how to respond.” The outlet explained that excluding those answers from the poll’s results leaves Flávio Bolsonaro with 50.2 percent and Lula with 49.8 percent.
AtlasIntel reportedly asked participants for their vote intention if a runoff were to take place between Lula and four of the other presidential candidates. The results indicate that the incumbent president would defeat all other non-Bolsonaro candidates with varied margins ranging from three to up to 16 percent depending on the candidate in the respective scenarios.
The new AtlasIntel poll, while still suggesting a “technical tie” between Bolsonaro and Lula, indicates that the conservative senator has taken a slight lead over the incumbent socialist president. Multiple past polls released before and after the official start of the 2026 presidential campaign in August indicate that Bolsonaro has been steadily closing in on Lula as the election draws near. A prior survey conducted by AtlasIntel in late July indicated that Lula had a greater than 6.5 percent vote lead over Bolsonaro in a runoff scenario between the two candidates.
Bloomberg detailed that Lula has seen his once-narrow lead “evaporate” in the past two months amid Brazil’s economic slowdown and the rise of several corruption allegations involving his oldest son, Fábio Luís Lula da Silva. Additionally, Bloomberg attributed Lula’s dwindling lead to the ongoing scandal at the Brazilian Supreme Court, which has been deemed by outlets a “civil war” among its justices. Per Bloomberg, about half of the survey’s participants said they expect that the ongoing crisis at the judiciary will affect Lula more than Bolsonaro in the polls.
According to CNN Brasil, Lula referred to the subject of presidential polling during a Wednesday podcast. The president reportedly downplayed results showing Bolsonaro closing in and affirmed, “I’m not driven by polls.” Lula also reportedly affirmed that he cannot imagine “how we could not win these elections.”
Lula, who narrowly defeated then-incumbent conservative President Jair Bolsonaro in 2022, is currently running for reelection for a fourth presidential term. Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, former President Jair Bolsonaro’s eldest son, chose to ran for president after his father was banned from office and later convicted and imprisoned for 27 years on dubious “crimes against democracy” charges.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.