RIO DE JANEIRO: Brazilians voted yesterday, with President Dilma Rousseff likely to win the first round but expecting a run-off as voters weighed her party’s social gains against rival promises to revive the economy.
The telenovela-like drama of the race — a candidate’s death in a fiery plane crash, a poor maid’s rise to the cusp of the presidency, a seedy oil scandal — continued down to the wire.
Socialist Party candidate Marina Silva, a well-known environmentalist whose meteoric rise looked unstoppable a month ago, slipped to third place in the final opinion polls behind business-world favorite Aecio Neves from the powerful Social Democratic Party (PSDB). Silva, a former environment minister, has vowed to be Brazil’s first “poor, black president.”
But opinion polls showed Rousseff with a double-digit first-round lead, then defeating either of her rivals by around five percentage points in a second round on October 26. Surveys gave Silva, a one-time maid who grew up in a poor rubber-tapping family in the Amazon, between 21 percent and 24 percent of the vote, trailing Neves (24-27 percent) and Rousseff (41-46 percent).
All the main candidates have vowed to protect the popular social welfare programmes implemented by Rousseff’s Workers’ Party (PT), which have lifted some 40 million Brazilians out of extreme poverty over the past decade. The reforms were implemented by Rousseff’s predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, whose enduring popularity and backing for the incumbent looked set to keep her in office.
But the candidates disagree on how to kickstart Brazil’s recession-hit economy, which, along with corruption scandals, has dragged down Rousseff’s standing during a tenure marked by sluggish growth.
After casting her vote in the southern city of Porto Alegre, Rousseff said she expected a runoff. “I have been working on the hypothesis of there being two rounds right from the start of the elections,” she said.
AFP
