Dilma Rousseff favourite in Brazil’s presidential election runoff

Workers’ party candidate and incumbent president Dilma Rousseff greets supporters at a rally in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Photograph: Felipe Dana/AP

From the Amazon forest to the streets of São Paulo, Brazil began voting for a president on Sunday, with polls indicating the incumbent, Dilma Rousseff, would be re-elected for a second four-year term on the basis of her record in tackling inequality.
But after one of the closest and most unpredictable campaigns in recent memory, the pro-business challenger, Aécio Neves, maintained an outside chance of ending the 12-year rule of Rousseff’s Workers’ party.
Two polls on the eve of the vote showed the Social Democratic party candidate had slightly narrowed the president’s lead. Datafolha put Rousseff on 47% against Neves on 43%. The other main survey firm, Ibope, reported a gap of six percentage points.
Anything other than a Rousseff win would be a surprise, but there have been plenty of those in a dramatic race that has seen erratic swings of voting intentions and divergences between poll predictions and results.
Before the first round of voting earlier this month, Neves was lagging in third place for weeks but won one of the two runoff spots with a late surge. The polls, it turned out, had underestimated Neves’s support by about 10 percentage points.
The 143 million voters have appeared divided – and confused – by an often filthy campaign that has been characterised by name-calling during presidential debates, accusations of corruption, nepotism and incompetence, rumour-mongering on social networks and suspicious delays in the release of government data on deforestation and poverty.

Aécio Neves, Social Democratic party candidate, after voting in the Brazilian presidential election run-off in Belo Horizonte. Photograph: Washington Alves/Reuters

The overwhelmingly anti-Rousseff mainstream media have focused on a huge and unfolding bribes-for-votes scandal in which kickbacks from the country’s biggest company, Petrobras, were used to buy off politicians and fill campaign coffers. A report in Veja magazine this week claimed Rousseff and her predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, were aware of the wrongdoing, a charge they deny.
Neves has made this the focus of his appeal to voters seeking change. “There’s one measure above all others to end corruption … vote the PT [Workers’ party] out of office,” he said during the final televised debate.
The Workers’ party has responded with a string of attacks. It has claimed Neves is guilty of corruption by building an airport on his family’s land, of nepotism by adding half a dozen cousins and relatives to the public payroll during his time as governor of Minas Gerais state, and of disrespecting women – an allusion to a report widely circled on social networks that he punched his wife before they were married. Neves and his wife deny the allegations, but this failed to stop his support plunging among female voters.
The name-calling has been no more edifying. Neves compared Workers’ party campaign manager João Santana to the Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels. In response, Lula da Silva said the Social Democrats persecuted the poor north-east region of Brazil in the same way the Nazis maltreated the Jews, and that Neves, whom he has described as a drunk and a playboy, was as intolerant as King Herod.
Amid all the flying mud, it has often been hard to discern a clear difference in policies. To win votes both candidates have moved to the middle ground. Nonetheless, this is a classic left-right contest between a society-focused president and an economy-oriented challenger. Rousseff, who was a Marxist guerrilla during her student years, has pledged to build on her government’s success in reducing inequality and to strengthen management of the economy, which has been in the doldrums for the past few years. Neves, whose grandfather was the first president elected after the dictatorship, promises a more results-oriented and efficient administration which would make life easier for businesses through tax changes and a more streamlined bureaucracy, but he too would maintain the bolsa familia social allowance programme and continue efforts to reduce poverty.
Rousseff is dominant in the north-east. Neves, the favourite of global financial markets, is more popular among middle-class urbanites. But whoever wins will have to make further compromises to secure alliances in the fractious Congress.
After all the rancour, voting appeared to be taking place calmly on Sunday. The only question was whether, after the drama of the past few months, this election could throw up one last twist.