Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff led Sunday’s presidential election but will have to face conservative candidate Aecio Neves in a runoff October 26, according to official preliminary results.
With more than 99 per cent of the ballots counted, Rousseff had 41.6 per cent of the votes to 33.6 per cent for Senator Neves, of the Party of Brazilian Social Democracy (PSDB).
Environmental activist Marina Silva, 56, of the Brazilian Socialist Party, was garnered 21.3 per cent of the vote.
Silva entered the race in mid-August after her party’s candidate Eduardo Campos was killed in a plane crash. Since then, she had been seen as Rousseff’s main rival, but her popularity among voters slid in the final weeks of the campaign.
Silva retains much clout, as her supporters will be a deciding factor in the runoff election. Both the Workers’ Party of Rousseff and the PSDB will be courting her.
The results were somewhat disappointing for Rousseff, 66. Her performance lagged behind the predictions of opinion polls, and it was her party’s worst result in a presidential election in 12 years.
In Rousseff’s favour is evidence that extreme poverty has fallen by 75 per cent while the rate of malnutrition has been cut by half during successive PT governments since 2003.
“We will not allow the country to take a step back,” she said late Sunday.
However, mass protests since June 2013 have shown that many voters, including members of the emerging middle class, are unsatisfied with the nation’s education, health and transportation services.
Brazil is also in a recession after two quarters of shrinking GDP. Inflation, currently close to 6.5 per cent, is also a concern in the world’s seventh-largest economy.
About 115 of 143 million registered voters cast their ballots in the country of more than 200 million population. With electronic voting in place, the vote count was virtually complete within a couple of hours.
No major incidents were reported, electoral authorities said, although 1,433 people – including 71 candidates – were arrested over the course of the day for violating election rules.
The new president will be inaugurated on January 1.
Brazilians also chose state governors, all members of the lower house of Congress and a third of the Senate.
GNA
