Brazil's presidential race has drawn about even, a new poll showed on Saturday, a day before the tense runoff vote between right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro and his leftist challenger Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
Mr Lula has 51.1 per cent of the valid votes and Mr Bolsonaro has 48.9 per cent, a difference that is equal to the margin of error of the MDA poll commissioned by the transport sector lobby CNT.
Most polls suggest Mr Lula is the slight favourite to come back for a third term, capping a remarkable political return after his jailing on graft convictions that were overturned. But Mr Bolsonaro outperformed opinion polls in the first-round vote on October 2nd, and many analysts say the election could go either way.
The deeply polarising figures attacked each other's character and record in a televised debate on Friday night. They accused each other of lying and refused repeatedly to answer each other's questions.
Mr Bolsonaro opened the debate by denying reports that he might unpeg the minimum wage from inflation, announcing instead he would raise it to 1,400 reais (€265) a month if re-elected, a move that is not in his government's 2023 budget.
Still, with their campaigns focusing on swaying crucial undecided votes, analysts suggested that the president gained little ground in the debate to win a race that polls had shown roughly stable for weeks since Mr Lula led the first-round voting by five percentage points.
Riding a wave of conservative voter sentiment, that result was better for Mr Bolsonaro than most polls had shown, giving him a boost of momentum to start the month, but the past two weeks of the campaign have presented headwinds.
On Sunday, one of Mr Bolsonaro's allies opened fire on federal police officers coming to arrest him. A week earlier Mr Bolsonaro had to defend himself from attack ads after he told an anecdote about meeting Venezuelan migrant girls in suggestive terms.
In their first head-to-head debate this month, Mr Lula blasted Mr Bolsonaro's handling of a pandemic in which nearly 700,000 Brazilians have died, while Mr Bolsonaro focused on the graft scandals that tarnished the reputation of Mr Lula's Workers Party.
On Friday night, both candidates returned repeatedly to Mr Lula's two terms as president from 2003 to 2010, when high commodity prices helped to boost the economy and combat poverty. Mr Lula vowed to revive those boom times, while Mr Bolsonaro suggested current social programmes are more effective.
MDA was the most accurate of the major in-person pollsters in the first-round vote on October 2nd, although all of them underestimated support for Mr Bolsonaro.
Of the total votes, including blank votes and the undecided, Mr Lula has 47 per cent of voter support and Bolsonaro has 45 per cent, up from 42 per cent in the previous poll two weeks ago.
MDA interviewed 2,002 voters between October 26th-28th.
