Brazil’s Rousseff 'likely to win' first round in presidential election
Brazilians headed to the polls Sunday with President Dilma Rousseff likely to win the first round but facing a run-off as voters weighed her party's social gains against rival promises to revive the economy.
After a campaign packed with all the drama of a telenovela -- a candidate's death in a fiery plane crash, a poor maid's rise to the cusp of the presidency, a seedy oil scandal -- Rousseff entered the first round the firm favorite with poll numbers between 41 and 46 percent.
The tighter race was to see which of her opponents would face her in a likely second round on October 26: Aecio Neves, a business-friendly former governor from the powerful Social Democratic party (PSDB), or Marina Silva, a popular environmentalist who rose from illiteracy and poverty to become a senator, environment minister and presidential contender.
Silva, a one-time maid who has vowed to be multi-racial Brazil's first "poor, black president," upended the race when she replaced the Socialist Party's original candidate, Eduardo Campos, after he was killed in a plane crash on August 13.
Soaring in the polls, she was initially forecast to beat Rousseff in a runoff.
But Rousseff and Neves steadily reversed her lead.
The last three opinion polls, released Saturday, found Silva trailing Neves for the first time, with between 21 and 24 percent of the vote, to his 24 to 27 percent -- though in all three cases the gap between them was within the margin of error.
Rousseff led both Neves and Silva by more than five percentage points in projections on a probable runoff, consolidating her momentum toward a second four-year term.
The election, the closest in a generation for Latin America's largest democracy, is widely seen as a referendum on 12 years of Rousseff's Workers' Party (PT).
The party endeared itself to the masses with landmark social programs and an economic boom in the 2000s that have lifted 40 million Brazilians from poverty, increased wages and brought unemployment to a near-record low.
But Rousseff, 66, has presided over rising inflation and, since January, a recession, as well as million-strong protests last year against corruption and poor education, healthcare and transport.
Rousseff, a former guerrilla who was jailed and tortured for fighting the country's 1964-1985 dictatorship, has also been battered in recent weeks by a corruption scandal implicating dozens of politicians -- mainly her allies -- at state-owned oil giant Petrobras.
What kind of 'change'?
All the main candidates have vowed to protect the PT's popular welfare programs.
But they disagree on how to kickstart the world's seventh-largest economy and bring the "change" that has been the buzzword of the election.
Even the incumbent vowed to "continue delivering the change Brazil needs" as she cast her ballot in the southern city of Porto Alegre.
Silva, who cast her ballot in Acre, in the Amazon, where she grew up in a poor rubber-tapping family, took a different view.
"These protests in June (2013) were about this desire for change," the 56-year-old said.
"President Dilma is leaving us the country in worse shape than she found it."
Neves, 54, the grandson of political scion Tancredo Neves, for his part had his eye on the second round as he cast his ballot in his native Belo Horizonte.
He was nonchalant about his comeback in the polls, saying: "It happened naturally. It wasn't a surprise. I'm relaxed."
Floating polling stations
More than 142 million Brazilians are registered for the polls, and voting is compulsory.
The sprawling country has even set up floating polling stations in the Amazon where voters cast ballots with a fingerprint, to be beamed by satellite to electoral authorities.
"I hope the country improves. We're always changing policies, but the country never gets better," said fisherman Antonio Lopes da Silva, 33, after paddling his canoe to go vote.
Nearly 3,000 kilometers (more than 1,500 miles) away, in industrial mega-city Sao Paulo, hospital worker Eliana Veracruz, 60, said she was voting for the PT "because of all they've done for me, even if I'm afraid the current economic situation is affecting us."
Lounging on the beach with a book in Rio de Janeiro, Barbara Souza, 37, said she was fed up with the PT but had wavered on who to vote for.
"I was going to vote for Marina, but in the end I voted for Aecio just because of the polls. I voted for him because he's got a better chance of beating Dilma," she said.
Besides choosing their next president, voters were also electing 27 governors, 513 congressmen and 1,069 regional lawmakers, as well as a third of the senate -- with a total of more than 26,000 candidates to choose from.
This pool of water with sulphuric acid is used to extract copper stones inside the "Buena Vista" copper mine, a subsidiary of Grupo Mexico.