It’s the world’s biggest electoral fight this year, and yet we still haven’t seen the contenders throw a punch face to face.

With just 10 days to go before the pivotal Oct. 25 runoff, the staging of Brazil’s presidential debates between incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his challenger Flávio Bolsonaro remains surprisingly uncertain. In theory, both candidates have now confirmed their participation in the first of two televised showdowns scheduled for Oct. 18 and Oct. 23. But two previous debates have already been canceled, one at the eleventh hour just before the first round and another that was supposed to take place last weekend, officially because of a “scheduling conflict.”

Cynical electoral calculation, fear of unforced errors and mutual animosity have kept the campaigns from sealing a face-off until now. On Wednesday, Kalshi was giving a 93% chance that at least one confrontation would take place, up from 63% a day before, after Bolsonaro flip-flopped and said he would now attend Sunday’s event. The existence of a betting market on whether the candidates will debate tells you how fluid the situation remains. Lula, trailing Bolsonaro by 5.6 percentage points of valid votes according to AtlasIntel/Bloomberg, has little to lose and every reason to get onstage.

Let’s just hope that, in the end, this highly anticipated clash happens. Otherwise, it would be a clear democratic setback in a country where support for democracy is eroding. Just 41% of Brazilians say democracy is preferable to any other form of government, the lowest regional figure after Guatemala in the latest Latinobarómetro poll.

Debates are hardly game-changers, but a recent Datafolha poll found that 78% of Brazilians consider it very important for Lula and Bolsonaro to participate. And if they don’t want to do it as a democratic exercise, at least they should do it for tactical reasons: From Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2006 to Lula himself earlier this month, candidates who avoided debates to protect an imagined lead have experienced pain at the ballot box afterward.

Above all, Brazil needs these debates because voters have the right to hear, loud and clear, the candidates’ specific proposals on three of their biggest concerns: the growing fiscal deficit, the political crisis around Brazil’s Supreme Court and the country’s worrying wave of insecurity. It’s fair to say that, so far, both Lula and Bolsonaro have been shy on details about how they would tackle these issues, making the campaign more a left-right shouting match than a serious exchange of ideas.

Bolsonaro, for instance, has said he will wield “the big scissors” on taxes, bureaucracy and corruption to put the budget in order, à la Javier Milei in Argentina, if elected. But he has been careful not to put a precise number on the fiscal adjustment. While the local press has reported that his economic advisers are studying an initial budget cut of about 2% of GDP, in public they have ruled out privatizations, promised to strengthen social programs and said they will cut taxes to businesses. The argument that Bolsonaro’s fiscal adjustment will focus on “government excesses” may sound reasonable yet you don’t have to be an economist to know that cosmetic changes will hardly put Brazil’s debt trajectory back on a sustainable path.

Lula, for his part, strengthened his anti-crime message after his first-round defeat, with a renewed pledge to imprison the bad guys: “For the working people, protection. For the criminal, prison,” is his new slogan. You wouldn’t be wrong to wonder why he or his party haven’t done this during the 16 years this century that they have been in government.

And then there is the thorny issue of the Supreme Court, with Lula walking a fine line between calling for reform of the judiciary and defending controversial judge Alexandre de Moraes, whom Bolsonaro wants to impeach. Whoever wins the runoff will be in a position to appoint at least four Supreme Court justices during the next presidential term. Brazilians deserve to hear explicitly from both candidates what changes they are considering to improve an institution that has done a disservice to the country for too long.

Even if you think Brazil’s rightwing turn is, at this point, unstoppable, debates would provide greater transparency on all these key issues ahead of decision day. Unfortunately, the candidates seem more focused on trying to capture legal advantages through favorable court rulings than on being fully transparent with voters. In fact, a report by local outlet O Globo found that the campaigns opened 698 cases against rivals in the electoral courts during just the first round, almost three times more than in the previous election. The big majority of the cases were filed by Bolsonaro’s representatives against Lula’s, or vice versa.

This strategy is a massive waste of resources and focus, and cowardly to boot. Instead of losing time with petty judicial battles, candidates should tell the electorate what they will do to improve their lives. If you can’t stand up and defend your ideas against your closest rival for a couple of hours, perhaps you should think about another line of business.