Quick victory eludes Lula’s chosen successor in Brazil

Dilma Rousseff, the woman President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva wants to succeed him in office, faces a run-off vote after falling unexpectedly short of outright victory in Brazil’s presidential election.

The official tally for Sunday’s vote showed Ms Rousseff, Lula’s former Cabinet chief, with 47 per cent of the vote against 33 per cent for her nearest rival, former Sao Paulo state Governor Jose Serra.

Ms Roussef needed 50-per cent-plus-one to avoid an October 31 knockout round against Serra – a vote all pre-election surveys said she should have been able to avoid.

Mr Serra’s attempt to tar Ms Rousseff with scandals swirling in her camp and the ruling Workers’ Party in the days before the election appeared to have paid off.

But the real benefactor was Green Party candidate Marina Silva, Mr Lula’s former environment minister, whose 19 per cent share put her in third place, far higher than the 14 per cent she was forecast to win.

“We defended a victorious idea and Brazil heard our cry,” Ms Silva, 52, told reporters after the vote.

Ms Silva is seen as a power broker because her votes could prove decisive to either Rousseff or Serra in the run-off election.

“I go into this second round with courage and energy because it gives me a chance to better lay out my proposals and plans,” Ms Rousseff told disappointed supporters in Brasilia, flanked by Workers’ Party officials wearing deflated looks.

Pre-vote surveys predicted Ms Rousseff would win 50-52 per cent of the ballots. They also suggested she would handily beat Serra in the second round to become Brazil’s first woman president.

At a noisy post-vote event Mr Serra thanked his cheering supporters, saying, “We’re heading towards victory and the presidency.”

Mr Serra called on “the parties, politicians and well meaning Brazilians” to “build a better country.”

Carlos Alberto de Melo, a political analyst at the Insper Institute in Sao Paulo, said the shift to Ms Silva “was a protest vote by part of the electorate who weren’t convinced by Dilma or Serra, and who finally voted for Marina to play for time and force a second round.”

In local races, the opposition held on to the governor’s seats in Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais, Brazil’s two most populous states, but Lula supporters won a crushing victory in Rio de Janeiro, an oil state where the 2016 Olympics will be held.

In the Senate, early results show that the Workers’ Party and its allies are likely to have 49 of the 81 available seats, increasing their number by six.

The makeup of the lower house however was unclear, though election officials early yesterday said that football great Romario was elected in southeastern Rio de Janeiro state.

Also elected was humorist Francisco Oliveira – better known as Tiririca the clown – who obtained nearly 1.2 million votes, the highest number of votes for any federal deputy across the country.

Voting is compulsory in Brazil.

Mr Lula, 64, Brazil’s wildly popular president, is leaving office at the end of the year after serving the maximum two straight terms permitted under Brazil’s constitution.

He has thrown his full weight behind getting Ms Rousseff, 62, elected, promising voters she would continue his policies that have brought prosperity to Latin America’s biggest nation, the world’s eighth-ranked economy.

Brazil’s economy – booming thanks to financial stability, strong exports, soaring domestic consumption and poverty eradication overseen on his watch – is forecast to grow by more than seven per cent this year.

The High Electoral Tribunal said no incidents of violence disrupting voting were reported during the day, though 650 people were arrested for illegally campaigning, trucking in voters or trying to buy votes. Forty-three of those detained were candidates for public office.