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It’s the presidential election that just keeps surprising. A year after a spasm of huge anti-government protests across Brazil, President Dilma Rousseff piled up more votes in Sunday’s election than any challenger, but it wasn’t enough to avoid a runoff in three weeks.
The race kept up its unpredictable nature as Aecio Neves, a center-right former governor and senator with deep political lineage, came in second. He had languished in the polls during the campaign but surged in the past week to overtake former environment minister Marina Silva, who at one time was the front-runner. In late August, Silva held a double-digit lead over the field after only entering the race following the death of her Socialist Party’s initial candidate in a plane crash. But then her reputation and credentials were picked apart by aggressive campaigning from Rousseff’s long-governing Workers’ Party. With nearly all the votes counted, the president had 41.5 percent to Neves’ 33.6 percent. Silva got 21 percent.
The Oct. 26 runoff will now pit the candidates of Brazil’s two most powerful parties, which together have produced all of Brazil’s presidents the past 20 years and are well known to Brazilians. Neves is backed by the well-organized Social Democracy Party, which held the presidency from 1994 until 2002, a period when Brazil tamed hyperinflation and turned the economy around. “Aecio’s performance has been extraordinary, and one of the reasons for this is the very strong party structure behind him — a party with a strong nationwide presence and which has been in the presidency,” said Carlos Pereira, a political analyst at the Gertulio Vargas Foundation, Brazil’s leading think tank. “It is now a new election where everything is wide open. Aecio, who until recently no one believed had a chance, has emerged as a very strong candidate.”
