Brazil, polls open for the presidential run-off between Lula and Bolsonaro

Polls open in Brazil for the presidential run-off between the outgoing president, the progressive leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and the right-wing senator Flavio Bolsonaro.

The polls will be open from 8am to 5pm, Brasilia time, and from 12pm to 9pm in Italy.

There are over 158 million people entitled to vote, distributed in over 517 thousand polling stations in Brazil, while abroad people vote in 186 cities.

The counting will begin immediately after closing and the first data will be released from 5pm to 9pm in Italy. The law prohibits the dissemination of exit poll results.

Given the use of electronic ballot boxes and the simplicity of voting operations for the second round, the first official data will arrive at the collection centers in the states and will then be transmitted to Brasilia within a few minutes.

Given the head-to-head between the two candidates photographed by all the polls, with a slight advantage of around one percentage point for Bolsonaro, to know the outcome, however, we will have to wait for the final counting data, normally expected within three hours of the closing of the polls.