The writer Augusto Cury, candidate of the small Avante party, climbed to third place in Brazil's presidential race in two polls released on Monday, August 31. In the BTG/Nexus survey he jumped from 2% to 11% of first-round voting intentions. According to CNN Brasil, he is the first so-called third-way candidate, meaning one outside the camps of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Flavio Bolsonaro, to reach double digits in this race.
In the Atlas/Bloomberg poll, Cury went from 1.6% to 7.8%. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers' Party and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro of the PL remain in the lead. Lula polls at 43.4% against Bolsonaro's 33.7% in the Atlas survey, and at 39% against 33% in Nexus, according to the newspaper Estadão. Behind Cury in the Atlas poll come Renan Santos of the Missão party, at 7.6%, and former Goias governor Ronaldo Caiado of the PSD, at 3.3%. In Nexus, Caiado is fourth with 5%, followed by Renan Santos with 3% and Romeu Zema of the Novo party with 1%. In a separate first-round projection, the influencer Pablo Marçal, barred from running by the Electoral Court, still scores 3%.
How the polls were conducted
The BTG/Nexus poll interviewed 2,005 people by phone between August 28 and 30, with a margin of error of two percentage points. It is registered with the Superior Electoral Court, which oversees Brazilian elections, under code BR-08900/2026. AtlasIntel heard 5,014 respondents between August 25 and 30, with a one-point margin of error, under registration BR-07972/2026. According to Estadão, both surveys capture the electorate's movement after the first presidential debate, TV Globo's one-on-one candidate interviews and the start of free campaign airtime on August 28.
Social media surge and the campaigns' reaction
The polling jump follows a wave on social media. According to a Vox Radar survey released by CNN Brasil, Cury gained more Instagram followers than any other presidential candidate after the first debate, a 19.4% rise that took him from about 8.3 million to 9.9 million followers. Google searches for his name rose 900% in the week after the event. In the Nexus series, the writer stood at 1% on August 3 and 2% in the round released on August 24.
Rival campaigns are skeptical. Officials of the Workers' Party and Bolsonaro's PL heard by CNN Brasil describe the surge as a "voo de galinha", Portuguese for a short-lived jump, and argue that Cury lacks the party structure to reach a runoff. Still, they share one warning. According to CNN Brasil, both campaigns fear that voters who moved to Cury out of frustration with polarization may simply stay home in a possible runoff between Lula and Flavio Bolsonaro.
The first round is scheduled for October 4. Neither pollster released runoff scenarios including Cury. In projections without him, Atlas shows Lula at 47.1% against Bolsonaro's 42.6%, and Nexus has 46% to 45%, a gap within the margin of error.