On Sunday 100 million Brazilians turned out to vote for president, members of Congress and state governors. That’s almost certainly more than will vote in our offyear elections next month; the total turnout in 2006 was just over 80 million. The results in Brazil were a little surprising. In the presidential race polls have been showing Dilma Rousseff, former top staffer to President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva and his endorsed candidate, running over 50%. That was plausible: Lula’s job rating has been sky high during most of his second term in office. But Dilma (Brazilians invariably refer to her by her first name) fell short of the 50% of the vote needed to win without a runoff. Her 47% leaves her well ahead of second place finisher José Serra, governor of the state of São Paulo and candidate of the PSDB, the party once led by former President (1994-2002) Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who got 33%. In third place was Marina Silva, a champion of the environmental and indigenous people’s movements in the Amazon region and a former Lula appointee; she got 19% of the vote.
Looking over the state by state returns, Dilma got more than 60% in some of Lula’s strongest areas—the state of Amazonas and the northeastern states of Bahia, Pernambuco, Ceará, Piauí and Maranhão. But she fell well short of Lula’s showings in Rio de Janeiro. Marina carried Distrito Federal, the capital city of Brasília and its suburbs, which is by far and away the most affluent and educated of Brazil’s states; she finished a strong second in Rio de Janeiro, with 32% to Dilma’s 44%.
