More than 100 million Brazilians voted Sunday — the third election this year, the first two being in Indonesia and India — in which more than 100 million people voted, more than the 86 million people who voted in U.S. elections for the House of Representatives in 2010. The final returns are not quite in as I write, but according to Brazil’s largest newspaper, Folha de São Paulo, with about 98 percent are in within five hours, in contrast to our largest state of California, which in recent years has taken five weeks to count all its votes.
The returns show the incumbent president, Dilma Rousseff, with 42 percent of the vote, to 34 percent for Aécio Neves and 19 percent for Marina Silva. Since no candidate had a majority, there will be a runoff between Dilma and Aécio on Oct. 26.
This is something of a surprise. Marina (Brazilians typically refer to candidates and to public figures generally by their first names) had sprinted out ahead to parity with Dilma after the death in a plane crash in August, of Eduard Campos, whose vice presidential candidate she had been. Aécio, whose grandfather Tancredo Neves had been elected president in 1985, after 21 years of military dictatorship but who died of medical complications following surgery before he could take office, was consigned to third place. This was something of a revolution in Brazilian politics.
Marina’s Socialist party was nominally left wing, but advanced a business-friendly platform that seemed to strike a chord as Brazil’s economy foundered; her Indian and black ancestry combined with her evangelical Protestant religion gave her a link with many voters who otherwise may have been inclined to support Dilma, the candidate of the same PT (workers’ party) as the generally successful President Lula Da Silva, elected in 2002 and 2006 after multiple electoral defeats. Aécio, the candidate of the PSDB, the more center-right (though not very right) party of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, elected in 1994 and 1998 over Lula, seemed to be lost in the shuffle.
But after the wild oscillations in the polls, the results were very similar to those of 2010. This time Dilma received (at this counting) 42 percent of the votes; she had 47 percent in the first round in 2010. Aécio received 34 percent, almost identical to the 33 percent received by José Serra, the PSDB candidate in 2010. Marine received 21 percent, just a slight uptick from the 19 percent she received, as an independent candidate, in 2010.
Although Brazil has experienced upheavals in public opinion, from the riots in 2013 protesting the infrastructure upheavals caused by preparations for the World Cup games this summer (actually, it’s winter in Brazil) and the 2016 Summer Olympics (which, similarly, will be conducted in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil’s temperate winter rather than the scorching carioca summer) to the boomlet for Marina after Eduardo Campos’s death.
Who will win on Oct. 26? Not clear. Dilma rose from 47 percent to 56 from the first to the second round in 2010. This year she starts from 42 percent.
Marina made a case for the proposition that Dilma has stifled economic growth (quite lively in 2010, nearly nonexistent this year) by domestic policies that are unfriendly to job creation and foreign policies that are too intertwined with Brazil’s Mercosur partners (Argentina, Chavista Venezuela) and too unfriendly to free trade and the United States. Those arguments, coming from a candidate associated with an indigenous and environmentalist (and also evangelistic) candidate, could be appropriated and have more credibility given their origin by Aécio, who is from Mina Gerais (which gave Dilma a narrow plurality) rather than from the more prosperous and market-oriented southern states of São Paulo (the base of José Serra), Paraná and Santa Catarina, which together cast 31 percent of the nation’s votes this year. There this time Dilma received only 28 percent, compared to 22 percent for Marina and 46 percent for Aécio. Dilma got big majorities in the much less affluent northeast, but it’s hard to see how she can improve on them much in the runoff, while she needs to win a substantial share of the Marina votes in the three southern states. This could be a very close contest three weeks from now.
