Brazil runoff: Bolsonaro leads Lula 50.51% to 49.49% with 25.19% of votes counted

The early count is a snapshot, not a verdict: with only a quarter of ballots tallied, a one-point gap is well within the range that later regions can erase, and Brazil's regional voting patterns often make partial counts poor predictors of the final result. This matters most for markets already sensitive to Brazilian fiscal and policy direction, since the two candidates imply very different outlooks. The open question is whether the lead holds as counting progresses and how quickly the gap narrows or widens.