A beach full of red on the eve of the vote

Rio's City Hall estimated that about 1.1 million people streamed on to Copacabana, the city's most famous beach, for the lula supporters rally on the Saturday before the vote. Red-clad crowds filled the 2.5-mile stretch of sand. It was one of the last presidential campaign events in Lula's 50-year political career, and the 80-year-old president, first elected in 2002, is seeking a fourth non-consecutive term.

On Saturday afternoon Lula went on to attend an even larger rally on Paulista Avenue in São Paulo, Brazil's biggest city. The mood on Copacabana carried a carnival air. Activists unfurled an enormous yellow and green banner with a single message:

• •Nearly 159 million Brazilians are eligible to vote in Sunday's runoff.
• •Large pro-Lula street protests have swept the country since the first-round defeat, many of them led by students.

A comeback no first-round loser has managed

The contest remains open. Flávio Bolsonaro won the first round on 4 October by 47% to 45%, and the two candidates have been tied in the brazilian election polls since. Analysts, however, mostly see Bolsonaro as the slight favourite, having presented himself to voters as the candidate who will confront the country's chronic violent crime with an iron fist.

History is against a Lula comeback: never since Brazil's return to democracy in the 1980s has a first-round loser managed to bounce back and win the presidency.

Why the crowd came

Josias Silva, a 61-year-old truck driver, carried a homemade sign through the procession reading "Lula re-elected. Tomorrow will be a new day." Of the large street protests, he said:

Silva argued that young people know the country needs this victory, warning that otherwise there would be dictatorship again, and said they want a country of love rather than hatred or guns. He called the Copacabana gathering the biggest protest in Brazil's history and predicted victory on Sunday with more than 60% of the votes.

• •Marta Moraes, a 59-year-old restaurateur, was among those on the beach. "I'm super excited. Lula's going to win," she said.
• •For Moraes the vote was personal as well as political: she said she lost four members of her family because of Bolsonaro's neglect during the Covid response.
• •"We've nothing against the right … what we're against is Bolsonarismo," she said, framing the election as a contest against Bolsonarismo rather than left against right.

Others came out of concern for democratic institutions. Cammy Marinho, a 49-year-old DJ and activist, said: "I'm here to prevent democracy becoming extinct – which is what the Bolsonaro family wants". She had spent the previous fortnight trying to persuade first-round Bolsonaro voters and non-voters to back Lula, in places as ordinary as the bakery, the supermarket and the underground.

Many of the faces on Copacabana belonged to so-called "Lula's Army", a 10 million-member WhatsApp group created after the first round. Isabella Gaze, a 64-year-old retired teacher and member of the group, explained what membership meant to her: "Being a soldier in Lula's army … means fighting for Brazilian democracy. This isn't a normal election". She added that the Bolsonaros, in her view, represent the most rotten and worst part of Brazilian politics.

Heitor Lopes da Silva, a 14-year-old boy who came in his wheelchair from the city of Duque de Caxias, carried a placard that said: "Lula, I'm a person with a disability and I'm here to support you". He said Bolsonaro represents the destruction of Brazil and, recalling the Covid era, sadness and death.

On the other side, and the shadow of Jair Bolsonaro

Large crowds of Bolsonaro supporters also took to the streets, including in Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais state. The state matters out of all proportion: it has Brazil's second-largest electorate after São Paulo, no presidential candidate has ever won without securing it, and Bolsonaro led there by just under 5% in the first round. Thousands gathered at Praça da Liberdade, a palm-lined plaza, where the candidate appeared to a soundtrack of AI-generated funk carioca tracks, with Brazilian and US flags on display.

Marcos Antonio, a 56-year-old cosmetics entrepreneur, was one of them. "The US is a great nation. Who wouldn't want to be aligned with them?" he said. When it was pointed out that Venezuela was aligned with the US after Donald Trump's January invasion, he replied that a fully right-wing government had not yet been installed there and that the country was in transition.

The gun question divided the two camps. Antonio Carlos Costa Jr, the 59-year-old owner of a shooting club, complained that "Lula did nothing for the country", and defended the looser firearms rules: "Jair Bolsonaro simply gave citizens the right to defend themselves, and his son will do the same," he said.

Jair Bolsonaro, the candidate's father, was president from 2019 to 2022 and relaxed gun ownership and buying laws; security experts agree those changes ended up diverting many firearms to criminal gangs, and Lula tightened the regulations again.

Flávio Bolsonaro's campaign has also faced an allegation in the press. Last week the Brazilian magazine Piauí claimed that at the height of the 2020 coronavirus outbreak he attended a boat party with sex workers and vaccine lobbyists seeking a deal with his father's government. Lula's supporters additionally point to the candidate's well-documented ties with members of Rio's paramilitary "militia" groups.

"If we vote the militias into power, we will be living in a dictatorship," said Erika Cavalcante, a 43-year-old architect, whose sign read "Don't let the mobsters win".

Behind it all stands the father: Jair Bolsonaro is serving a 27-year prison sentence for plotting a coup after losing the 2022 election to Lula. Reports in the Brazilian press suggest several of his fellow plotters, now in prison or hiding in exile, may be given top military and police jobs under a Bolsonaro administration.

The runoff takes place on Sunday, with nearly 159 million Brazilians eligible to vote.