Brazil set to return leftist president
Unable to win a weekend election outright, former labour boss Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is headed for an October 27 showdown with the second-place finisher, government-backed candidate Jose Serra.
“Let us go and wage the fight,” said Jose Geonino, one of Silva’s closest aides, as he rallied more than 1,000 cheering supporters of the leftist Workers Party candidate after Sunday’s ballot. "I call for the vote of all who want to change Brazil.”
With 84.5% of the ballot counted, elections officials said Silva finished with 46.6% and Serra with 23.7%. Eliminated in the first round voting were former Rio state Governor Anthony Garotinho with 16.7%, followed by former finance minister Ciro Gomes with 12.4%, according to the electoral tribunal.
“There is disillusionment with free market policies being highlighted by this election,” said political scientist David Fleischer, an American teaching at the University of Brasilia.
Fleischer said discontent is not confined to Brazil but is part of a region-wide dissatisfaction with free markets from crisis-ridden Argentina and Uruguay on Brazil’s south to Peru and Ecuador on the west.
For many, Silva also represents a challenge to a Free Trade Area of the Americas, a US-backed effort to link up the hemisphere in the world’s largest trading bloc by 2005. Silva has called the FTAA Washington’s “annexation of Latin America”.
But if financial markets abroad worried about a leftist winning elected office for the first time in Brazil in nearly 40 years, many here openly embraced Silva as a catalyst for change in a country rife with poverty and hunger.
