RIO DE JANEIRO—It’s the presidential election that just keeps surprising.
A year after a spasm
of huge anti-government protests across Brazil, President Dilma Rousseff
piled up more votes in Sunday’s election than any challenger, but it
wasn’t enough to avoid a runoff in three weeks.
The race kept up its
unpredictable nature as Aecio Neves, a centre-right former governor and
senator with deep political lineage, came in second. He had languished
in the polls during the campaign but surged in the past week to overtake
former environment minister Marina Silva, who at one time was the
front-runner.
In late August, Silva
held a double-digit lead over the field after only entering the race
following the death of her Socialist Party’s initial candidate in a
plane crash. But then her reputation and credentials were picked apart
by aggressive campaigning from Rousseff’s long-governing Workers’ Party.
With nearly all the votes counted, the president had 41.5 per cent to Neves’ 33.6 per cent. Silva got 21 per cent.
The Oct. 26 runoff
will now pit the candidates of Brazil’s two most powerful parties, which
together have produced all of Brazil’s presidents in the past 20 years
and are well known to Brazilians.
Neves is backed by the
well-organized Social Democracy Party, which held the presidency from
1994 until 2002, a period when Brazil tamed hyperinflation and turned
the economy around.
“Aecio’s performance
has been extraordinary, and one of the reasons for this is the very
strong party structure behind him — a party with a strong nationwide
presence and which has been in the presidency,” said Carlos Pereira, a
political analyst at the Gertulio Vargas Foundation, Brazil’s leading
think-tank . “It is now a new election where everything is wide open.
Aecio, who until recently no one believed had a chance, has emerged as a
very strong candidate.”
Neves is an economist
and former two-term governor of Minas Gerais, Brazil’s second-most
populous state, where he left office in 2010 with an approval rating
above 90 per cent.
He has strong name
recognition in Brazil as the grandson of Tancredo Neves, a widely
beloved figure who was chosen to become Brazil’s first post-dictatorship
president but fell ill and died before taking office.
Neves emphasized those roots in a statement Sunday night.
“What I can say, what
comes to mind, is what my grandfather Tancredo said 30 years ago when he
won the elections for president of the republic: ‘We must not get
dispersed. We are just in the middle of our path.’ And I hope to be able
to walk alongside every Brazilian who wants a dignified and efficient
government to the end,” said the 54-year-old politician, who also has
served four terms as a congressman and one as a senator.
Rousseff’s aggressive
campaigning proved the downfall for Silva, who had been thought poised
to tap into the widespread disdain Brazilians hold for the political
class — anger that boiled over into last year’s roiling protests. But
Silva couldn’t withstand the president’s barrage of attacks labeling her
as indecisive and without the mettle needed to lead the globe’s
fifth-largest nation.
“Marina Silva tried
but was not able to convey her message of change. She’s only responding
to attacks,” said Paulo Sotero, director of the Brazil Institute at the
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. “We’ve
seen negative campaigning before, but never at this level of ferocity.”
During nearly 12 years
in power, the Workers’ Party has ushered in strong social programs that
have helped lift millions out of poverty and into the middle class.
Rousseff’s strongest support comes from the poorest, those who are
precariously hanging onto gains amid an economy that has sputtered the
past four years.
In contrast to Neves’
call for more centrist economic approaches, Rousseff promised in her
campaign to expand social programs and continue strong state involvement
in the economy, a stand that has drawn criticism from the business
sector.
“I feel strongly I
received a message, a simple message saying I must continue moving
forward ... to change Brazil,” Rousseff told a crowd of supporters late
Sunday.
