SAO PAULO — Brazil's right-wing President, Jair Bolsonaro and leftist leader and former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva have taken part in a fiery first television debate on Sunday ahead of October's general election.

The six main presidential candidates took part in the first televised debate on Sunday.

Opinion polls suggest Lula — who served as president from 2003 to 2010 — is ahead in the election race. But the gap between the two candidates seems to be narrowing.

Facing off for the first time in public, Bolsonaro and Lula stole the limelight with discussions turning toward accusations of corruption and deceit.

The far-right incumbent called Lula a "thief" minutes before the debate started, referencing a corruption scandal at state oil company Petrobras. He went further calling the former president’s administration the most corrupt in Brazilian history.

The insult was a reference to Lula being convicted of corruption and jailed in 2018. The corruption scandal came to be known as Operation Car Wash and involved the state-run oil giant Petrobas.

The judgment against Lula was later overturned.

"What do you want to come back to power for? To do the same thing to Petrobras again?" Bolsonaro asked.

Lula, 76, was quick to rebuke his government's record in terms of social reforms and said Bolsonaro "is destroying" the country.

Lula accused Bolsonaro of spreading lies and trashing his presidential legacy. He said his government should be remembered for helping to lift tens of millions of people out of poverty.

During the debate, which lasted three hours, Lula focused his speech on defending the environment and the Amazon.

Bolsonaro notably lashed out at journalist Vera Magalhaes after she claimed he had spread false information about COVID vaccines. He denies these accusations and called her a “disgrace to Brazilian journalism”.

According to the latest polls by the Datafolha Institute, Lula is leading Bolsonaro by 47% to 32%. Other polls give a smaller lead to Lula.

In addition to the two favorites, the organizers of the debate invited four other candidates, including former finance minister Ciro Gomes of the PDT (center-left) and senator Simone Tebet of the MDB (centrist), respectively third and fourth in the polls.

The former president was detained between April 2018 and November 2019 after being convicted of corruption. He regained full political rights in 2021, when the Supreme Court overturned these convictions, ruling that the court that had tried him in the first instance was incompetent.

Throughout the debate, Lula argued that his innocence had been proven, but the other candidates repeatedly accused him of corruption.

In 2018, the year Bolsonaro won the election, the current president only participated in the first two debates. A month before the first round, he was stabbed at a meeting and after undergoing surgery did not return to the debates.

The first round of the election will be held on 2 October with a second round scheduled for 30 October if none of the candidates gets 50% of the vote. — Agencies