João Ferreira leans against the fence surrounding his two-room house – one of a row of simple properties on a farm outside Coração de Maria in rural Bahia, north-eastern Brazil. “I’ve never voted for Lula but I will on Sunday,” he says. Why? “Prices aren’t going up. It used to be that every two weeks everything was more expensive – but not any more.”

In nearly four years of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s left-leaning government, low inflation is not the only improvement to Mr Ferreira’s life. He and his wife have one 11-year-old son and receive R$65 ($30, £16, €23) a month from a federal income transfer programme in exchange for keeping him in school.