Dilma Rousseff pledges unity after narrow Brazil election victory

President Dilma Rousseff has struck a conciliatory
tone after her victory in the closest Brazilian
election in generations.
Rousseff was re-elected by a narrow margin on
Sunday, ensuring that Latin America’s biggest
nation will remain under the control of a Workers
party (PT) committed to tackling inequality.

She won 51.6% of the valid votes cast to secure a
much reduced mandate, having fought off a strong
challenge by the pro-business Aécio Neves.
In a victory speech, a beaming Rousseff said she
hoped the nation could rally together. “Instead of
increasing differences and creating gaps, I strongly
hope that we create the conditions to unite,” she
told supporters in Brasilia. “I want to be a much
better president than I have been until now.”

She gave particular thanks to former president
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who many tip to run
again in 2018. Rousseff is ineligible to stand for a
third consecutive term.

Brazil’s stock exchange lost six points early on
Monday, and its currency has fallen against the
dollar in the first hours of trading. Analysts had
predicted the market would react negatively to a
Rousseff victory, under whom the economy has
largely stalled. Neves was overwhelmingly
favoured by Brazil’s business community, who
believed his market-friendly policies would help
jumpstart growth.

Neves said he had called the president to offer his
compliments and expressed thanks to supporters.
In Rio de Janeiro, more than a thousand Workers
party supporters braved driving rain to gather
under the arches in Lapa, where they watched the
results come in on a giant screen. As Rousseff’s
victory flashed up, they erupted in cheers, waved
campaign flags, danced and chanted, “Olé, olé, olé,
olé, Dilma, Dilma!”

“This is good for Brazil ,” said one campaigner,
Vinicius Barchilon. “Dilma has done a lot for the
poor and we have a government that is determined
to tackle inequality.”

Rousseff’s support remained strong in the poor
north and north-east, areas that have benefited
most from state development projects and where a
high proportion of the electorate are recipients of
bolsa familia , a poverty relief programme that
covers almost a quarter of the population. But she
lost many voters in the more affluent south-eastern
cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro due to
middle-class frustration with the moribund
economy and corruption scandals.

Voters appeared divided – and confused – by an
often dirty campaign characterised by name-
calling, accusations of corruption, nepotism and
incompetence, rumour-mongering on social
networks and suspicious delays in the release of
government data on deforestation and poverty.
The overwhelmingly anti-Rousseff mainstream
media focused on a huge bribes-for-votes scandal
in which kickbacks from the country’s biggest
company, Petrobras, were used to buy off
politicians and fill campaign coffers. A report in
Veja magazine this week claimed that Rousseff and
her predecessor, Da Silva, were aware of the
wrongdoing, a charge they deny.

Neves made this the focus of his appeal to voters.
“There’s one measure above all others to end
corruption: vote the PT out of office,” he said
during the final televised debate.
But his message was ultimately drowned by a
string of attacks.
The Workers’ party accused Neves
of corruption for building an airport on his
family’s land, of nepotism by adding half a dozen
cousins and relatives to the public payroll during
his time as governor of Minas Gerais state, and of
disrespecting women – an allusion to a widely
circulated report that he punched his wife before
they were married. Neves’ denial failed to stop his
support plunging among female voters.

The name-calling was no more edifying. Neves
compared Workers’ party campaign manager João
Santana to the Nazi propaganda chief Joseph
Goebbels. In response, Lula da Silva said the Social
Democrats persecuted the poor north-east region of
Brazil in the same way the Nazis maltreated the
Jews, and that Neves, whom he has described as a
drunk and a playboy, was as intolerant as King
Herod.

Nonetheless, the 143 million eligible voters appear
to have carried out their electoral duties peacefully
– if not enthusiastically. Although voting is
mandatory, more than 29 million abstained and
about 7 million votes were blank or nullified.
Rousseff, a marxist guerrilla during her student
years, has pledged to build on her government’s
success in reducing inequality. Over the 12 years
of Workers party rule, almost 40 million people –
or a fifth of the population – have moved out of
poverty. The rich-poor gap remains one of the
highest in the world, but the Gini coefficient
measure of inequality of 0.49 is down from 0.56 in
2001 and unemployment is close to record lows.
But the overall condition of the economy is less
impressive. Brazil entered a technical recession
earlier this year and the financial markets have
turned more sharply against the Workers party. A
key indication of how Rousseff, an economist by
training, plans to turn this around will be her
choice of finance minister. The current holder of
the post, Guido Mantega, is standing down at the
end of the year.