IHS Global Insight Perspective | |
Significance | The results are not a complete surprise; indeed the outcome of the 2006 presidential contest when the late emergence of a corruption scandal prevented President Lula from winning outright in the first round had paved the way for a similar outcome in this year's election. |
Implications | Despite the uncertainty over whether a first-round victory was possible, Rousseff had been expected to do slightly better than she did and the fact that she did not will increase the confidence of her opponent, José Serra. Meanwhile the almost 20% of the vote garnered by the eliminated candidate from the Green Party (PV), Marina Silva, means that there will be competition between the remaining candidates to secure her support. |
Outlook | The opposition parties prevented Rousseff from winning outright in the first round due more to the impact of a corruption scandal than to the strength of their candidates, and as long as no major new scandal emerges directly implicating Rousseff, she is still on course to become Brazil's first ever female president. |
Brazil's presidential election will be decided in a run-off vote on 31 October, after President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's preferred successor, former chief of staff Dilma Rousseff, failed to secure the 51% of the valid vote that she needed to secure an outright first-round victory. With 99.89% of the ballots counted, Rousseff has won 46.89% of the vote , giving her a 14.3% lead over the former governor of São Paulo, José Serra of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB). Serra has come in second place with 32.62% of the total vote, Marina Silva of the Green Party (PV) in third with 19.34% of the vote, and Plínio Arruda Sampaio of the P-SOL in fourth place with 0.87%.
The results will not have come as a complete surprise. A month ago the polls had been predicting a comfortable victory for Rousseff in the first round. However her popularity has slipped in recent weeks following the emergence of a corruption scandal involving a former aide at the ministry that Rousseff headed prior to launching her candidacy (see Brazil: 17 September 2010: Election 2010: Brazilian Minister Resigns amid Mounting Corruption Scandal). The closing days of the campaign also saw her lose some support to Marina Silva due to the galvanisation of the anti-abortion vote by religious groups and it is possible that President Lula's recent attacks against the press such as accusing them of acting like a political party will not have helped Rousseff's cause either. Instead the surprise appears to be that Rousseff did not do quite as well as the polls had predicted in the days immediately preceding the vote and that Silva did much better.
The election day itself passed off peacefully, there were a number of arrests for alleged vote buying but given the scale of the event the head of the Supreme Electoral Court described these occurrences as "insignificant".
Outlook and Implications
In theory, Serra should have a stronger chance of beating Rousseff in a second-round vote, than in the first. The polls in the weeks before the first-round vote had given Rousseff an advantage of between 20 and 25 points in the first round, but a simulation of the second round released by Datafolha on 30 September gave her a lead of just 14 points (it may even be less given that the outcome of the first round vote was tighter than predicted). The same poll found that the elimination of Marina Silva would favour Serra more than Dilma, with 51% of those who supported Silva for president expressing a willingness to transfer their votes to Serra as opposed to 31% for Rousseff. However this may change if the former environment minister can be persuaded to publicly declare her support for Rousseff's candidacy. Such a declaration would no doubt be difficult for Silva, who is known for being uncompromising in her principles and who clashed with Rousseff over plans to expand the country's nuclear power generation capacity and to build several large hydroelectric power plants in the Amazon Basin, during the time in which they were both serving in Lula's government. Nonetheless Silva's association with the Worker's Party (PT) goes back a long way (she was a member of the party for 30 years, before joining the Green Party (PV) last year) and she and Lula are good friends. His personal intervention, and perhaps also pressure from within her own party interested in the possibility of being rewarded with ministerial posts in a future government headed by Rousseff, may persuade her to assume the role of kingmaker. As well as the eliminated presidential candidates, Rousseff and Serra will be seeking declarations of support from popular governors or senators who were elected yesterday. During the first round many candidates from opposition parties tried to associate themselves with Lula and were reluctant to campaign openly on Serra's behalf, but this may change for those whose own electoral battles are now over.
However if Serra's campaign ahead of the run-off vote is to be more successful, he faces a major challenge: presenting himself as both a "continuity candidate" and a viable alternative to the candidate personally selected by the popular incumbent. A more nuanced debate on policy differences may help but the odds remain stacked against him (see Brazil: 29 September 2010: Election 2010: Limited Policy Debate Seen in Brazil). President Lula's extraordinary popularity means that it is very difficult to attack his record directly, whilst the strong performance of the economy means that the "fear factor" used by presidential candidates from the PSDB in the past no longer works. Indeed the convergence of macroeconomic policy between the PT and PSDB means that there is little to separate the two remaining candidates apart from foreign policy and the perception that a Serra-led government may advocate greater fiscal discipline and slightly less state intervention.