At a samba bar in Rio de Janeiro, three university students engage in a heated political debate as they count down to Brazil’s presidential elections.

your preference? “We’re in an ‘L’ for Lula,” Letizia Corvello, a 22-year-old law student, told AFP.

Brazil’s youngest voters are betting their future on the oldest of the two frontrunners: 76-year-old leftist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who is hoping for a comeback 12 years after leaving office at the end of two consecutive terms.

Lula has a strong lead over far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, 67, in the polls. The men face off in a first round of voting on Sunday.

“The last thing I want is for Jair Bolsonaro to be re-elected,” Corvello said.

“We have to fight for our future and that of the university” where she is studying.

Young people have led the anti-Bolsonaro movement in Brazil with protests against his cuts in education spending, his management of the coronavirus epidemic and police brutality.

“Some of the environmental issues, the destruction of the Amazon and just the… outrageous policies of Bolsonaro are of concern to a lot of people, especially younger people,” analyst Michael Shifter of the think tank Inter-American Dialogue told AFP.

And they seem to put their money where their mouth is.

More than 2.1 million people aged 16 and 17 – about a fifth in that age group – have registered to vote ahead of Sunday’s first round of voting – a 51 percent increase from 2018.

Voting is optional for Brazilians aged 16 and 17 and compulsory for those over 18.

Youth registration numbers for 2022 “are unprecedented in the history of Brazil,” political scientist Marco Antonio Teixeira of the Getulio Vargas Foundation told AFP.

Under Bolsonaro, young people seem to have learned the importance of having a political voice, he said.

Young people “have suffered a lot from the pandemic, they have been hit the hardest by unemployment,” Teixeira said.

Bolsonaro and his government have also repeatedly succeeded in offending the sensibilities of a younger generation, which values ??respect for cultural and gender diversity.

Case in point: In a 2020 speech, Bolsonaro’s then Education Minister, Milton Ribeiro, described young people as “existential zombies” who “don’t believe in anything anymore, from God to politics.”

“I never thought there were still people with such declining beliefs,” Corvello replied.

“Bolsonaro has enabled people to take to the streets to defend violence and discrimination.”

Polls show that 52 percent of voters aged 16 to 24 are backing Lula, compared to 32 percent for Bolsonaro.

Some were not born during Lula’s final tenure, others were just babies, but they all know about Lula’s educational legacy: increasing scholarships and introducing quotas to help people from racial and socioeconomic minorities access good schools.

“Everyone knows what Lula did,” said Adrianny Brasil, 22, a resident of the Mare de Rio slum complex, where going to school depends on no shootings and university is an unattainable dream for most.

“I’m the only ‘favelada’ (slum dweller) in my (university) physics class, all the other students are from the elite areas of Rio, like Ipanema,” said Brasil, who hopes there will be more like her among the new ones Lula government.

Not everyone agrees.

Mateus de Medeiros, an 18-year-old mechanical engineering student, regrets that the choice is limited to “the extreme right or the extreme left”.

“I wish there was another candidate and we didn’t have to vote for one just to eliminate the other,” he told AFP.

Bolsonaro also has ardent supporters among the youth.

Gabriel Lira, a 22-year-old Afro-Brazilian who works as a clerk in a shop, believes that many university students are being brainwashed by “leftist professors.”

“If they were better informed, they would see that (Lula) resembles Maduro and the leftist dictators,” he told AFP in Campinas, on the outskirts of Sao Paulo, referring to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

And he denied that Bolsonaro was racist, although he once said of a community of black slave descendants: “They do nothing. They are of no use even for reproduction.”

“It was an unfortunate statement. But if he was really (racist), he would capture black people and put them back into slavery,” Lira said.