BRASILIA, Oct. 2 (Xinhua) -- Brazil's Agricultural Parliamentary Front (FPA), which gathers federal deputies and senators with ties to the farming sector, formally endorsed right-wing presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro.
"We will join forces to stop candidates linked to corruption schemes and the deepening of Brazil's economic crisis from returning to power," Tereza Cristina, president of the FPA, said in a statement.
In response to the support, Bolsonaro reaffirmed his pledge to relax environmental regulations by combining the Ministries of Agriculture and Environment, in a bid to "resolve" problems affecting a sector that "has been a huge help to Brazil economically."
Analysts estimate the legislature's "farming bloc" comprises more than 250 lawmakers.
FPA's support for Bolsonaro of the conservative Social Liberal Party comes in spite of the fact that many of those same lawmakers belong to political parties that are part of the coalition backing another presidential candidate Geraldo Alckmin of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party.
But with only five days before the Oct. 7 elections, and Alckmin stuck in the polls at only 8 percent while the voting intentions for Bolsonaro rose to 31 percent, the bloc opted for the front-runner.
Bolsonaro is widely expected to win the first electoral round among all the 13 candidates. However, polls show he would likely lose a runoff later this month to leftist candidate Fernando Haddad, who replaced Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva as the Workers' Party's candidate.
