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Rousseff scores narrow win in poll

Dilma Rousseff scored a narrow victory over her opponent Aécio Neves in Brazil’s presidential election on Sunday, with polls showing the president nearly 3 percentage points ahead of her rival with almost 98 per cent of the votes counted.
Results showed Ms Rousseff with 51.38 per cent of the votes, and Mr Neves with 48.62 per cent.

In one of the most closely fought, bare-knuckle campaigns in a generation, Ms Rousseff was touting the achievements of her Workers’ party, the PT, in reducing poverty and lowering unemployment.
Mr Neves of the pro-business PSDB, on the other hand, was promising Brazilians an improvement in the country’s shoddy public services and a return to more conventional economic policies, tackling inflation as the country flirts with recession.
“I’m counting on your vote so that we can together continue building this new Brazil,” Ms Rousseff said on Twitter before voting in Porto Alegre, where she began her political career.
“Let’s try until the last instant to gather the votes still needed to guarantee that Brazil changes for real,” Mr Neves said on his Twitter account before going to the polling booths in his home state of Belo Horizonte.
At stake was an economy that was once among the fastest growing of the so-called Brics group of emerging nations that also includes Russia, India, China and South Africa, but which over the past four years has suffered its lowest growth since the early 1990s.
This was the first election in which Brazil’s new middle class, a group of more than 30m people who escaped poverty over the past decade, was expected to be a deciding factor.
This group is seen as grateful to the PT for its wealth redistribution policies, such as the Bolsa Família monthly stipend for the poor, but is keen for better public education, health and transport.
In the two most prominent polls, Datafolha and Ibope, Ms Rousseff lost ground on Saturday. Datafolha had earlier showed the president with a lead of 6 percentage points, but by Saturday this had narrowed to 4 percentage points, within the margin of error. Ibope showed her lead narrowing from 8 percentage points to six.
The election has also been overshadowed by what is potentially the biggest corruption scandal seen in Brazil in recent years, in which the PT and its allies have been accused of diverting 3 per cent of every contract awarded by state oil company Petrobras.
The PT has vehemently denied the allegations. But the party sparked outrage last week when it sought an injunction against an edition of magazine Veja that quoted a jailed suspect in the alleged Petrobras scheme as saying Ms Rousseff and former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva knew of the operation.

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While the allegations were angrily dismissed by Ms Rousseff and Mr Lula da Silva, the attempt to suppress publication was denounced as censorship on social networks.
Leftist protesters also sparked anger by spraying graffiti on the walls of the headquarters of the magazine’s publisher, Abril, saying: “Veja lies” and “Out with Veja”.
Mr Neves was also seen as gaining an edge in the final televised debate between the candidates on Friday night in which his responses to questions from voters in the audience were smoother than those of the president, a technocrat who is seen as lacking the charisma of a conventional politician.
I voted for Dilma because she represents the economic and social model that has a closer affinity with what I believe in
- Nathalia Filgueiras, economist in Brasília
“I voted for Dilma because she represents the economic and social model that has a closer affinity with what I believe in,” said Nathalia Filgueiras, an economist in Brasília. “The state incentivises social inclusion, which acts counter-cyclically during times of crisis.”
Julio Luiz de Medeiros Alves Lima, a young lawyer, said in the first round of the election on October 6 that he voted for environmentalist Marina Silva because she represented a break with the PT-PSDB dominance of Brazilian politics over the past 20 years.
With her defeat in the first round, which turned the second-round run-off into a contest between Mr Neves and Ms Rousseff, he voted for the PSDB.
“Aside from incorporating the proposals of Marina Silva in his platform of government, he [Mr Neves] has captured the desire for change and to alternate who is in power because the PT has already been in power for 12 years.”
Additional reporting by Thalita Carrico in Brasília


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