Sunday’s presidential election results from Brazil came as a surprise. Pre-election polling had indicated that center-left Workers’ Party candidate Dilma Rousseff, the hand-picked successor of incumbent Brazilian president Lula da Silva, would win an outright majority in the first round of voting. This made sense: After all, Lula is tremendously popular (with approval ratings in the 80 percent range); millions of Brazilians have escaped from poverty on his watch; and the country’s booming economy will grow by over 7 percent this year.
In the end, however, Rousseff came up short, winning only 47 percent of the vote. She will now face the second-place finisher, center-right candidate José Serra of the Social Democracy Party, who garnered about 33 percent of the vote, in a runoff election on October 31.
