Rousseff Up, Neves Reeling as Brazil Heads to Run-Off
After a no-holds-barred campaign, Brazil's leftist leader Dilma Rousseff is the favorite heading into a presidential run-off election Sunday against bruised center-right challenger Aecio Neves.
As the hard-fought race to lead the world's seventh-largest economy entered the final stretch, two opinion polls released Thursday gave Rousseff -- looking to extend 12 years of Workers' Party (PT) rule -- a six- to eight-point lead over Neves, the business-world favorite.
Polling firm Datafolha gave her 53 percent to 47 percent for Neves, while Ibope put the incumbent on 54 percent and the popular former state governor on 46 percent.
That was the first time the two major pollsters had found either candidate leading by more than the two-percentage-point margin of error since the first-round election on October 5.
Rousseff, who was elected Brazil's first woman president in 2010, has had to fight tooth and nail to re-emerge as the front-runner.
In the build-up to the first round, she had to fend off environmentalist Marina Silva, who took the polls by storm vowing to become the South American country's first "poor, black" president when she dramatically entered the race after her running mate Eduardo Campos died in a plane crash.
No sooner had the PT's electoral machine dispatched Silva -- who exited the first round with 21 percent of the vote, to Rousseff's 42 percent and Neves' 34 percent -- than the incumbent had to beat back Neves, the scion of a well-known political family who converted the momentum of his first-round comeback into a narrow lead.
With the candidates fighting for every vote in this sprawling country of 202 million people, where voting is compulsory, the campaign has taken on a level of virulence not seen since the end of Brazil's 1964-1985 dictatorship and the return to democracy.
Rousseff, a 66-year-old former guerrilla fighter with a reputation for toughness, went on the attack against Neves, the 54-year-old grandson of a former prime minister.
She accused him of nepotism when he was governor of Minas Gerais state, played up a media report that he once hit his then-girlfriend in public and suggested he was driving "drunk or on drugs" when he refused to take a blood alcohol test during a 2011 traffic stop.
Her popular predecessor and mentor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, has meanwhile branded Neves "a little daddy's boy who looks at you with his nose in the air."
Neves has tried to fight back by calling Rousseff a "liar," accusing her of "collusion" in a multi-billion-dollar kickback scandal at state oil giant Petrobras, and saying she is "incompetent" to reignite economic growth and rein in rising inflation that stands at 6.75 percent.
The candidates face off in a final debate on Friday night.
Brazil's political landscape is divided along social lines.
The poor, particularly in the impoverished northeast, are loyal to the PT thanks to landmark social programs that benefit 50 million people and have helped lift 40 million from poverty in the past 12 years.
The country's elites are meanwhile exasperated with interventionist economic policies such as petrol price controls and high taxes, and want to return to the market-friendly days of former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003), the elder statesman of Neves' Social Democracy Party (PSDB).
The battle is for the middle class in the industrialized southeast, the cradle of million-strong protests against corruption and poor public services that shook the country last year.
This demographic is torn between voters loyal to Lula for presiding over nearly a decade of prosperity and social gains from 2003-2011, and those frustrated with Rousseff's government.
It is this group that has given the incumbent a bump in the polls in the final days.
"Rousseff has run a well-produced campaign, more sophisticated and interesting than Neves," political analyst Andre Cesar told AFP.
He said the incumbent's strategy has been to "dismantle" Neves' image and above all to compare the PT's rule with the preceding eight years under the PSDB.
"It was a different world, but Dilma's campaign has reminded people that the interest rate was at 45 percent (today it is at 11), there was high unemployment (today at a record-low 4.9 percent), inflation," Cesar said.
"All that sets off alarms for the average voter."
Source: Agence France Presse
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