Brazil Counts Down to a Vote That Both Sides Say Will Redraw the Country

BRASÍLIA — With four days to the vote, the country has stopped pretending the election is about anything else. Jobs, water, the price of cooling — all of it has been folded into the single question of whether an augmented citizen and a natural-born one belong in the same classroom, the same hiring pool, the same idea of Brazil. The Naturalist bloc, polling near a quarter of the electorate, campaigns on enhancement caps and separate schooling; the governing coalition warns that the caps are a door that, once opened, does not close. Between them stands the exhausted middle, and it is the middle that will decide. In a Brasília community hall Monday night, a room of a hundred voters split not by party but by household. "My husband is enhanced. My mother thinks that makes him a stranger," said Beatriz Nunes, near tears. "The ballot asks me to agree with one of them." The candidates promise to redraw the country. The voters mostly want theirs left intact.