Brazil's presidential race goes to second round

Brazil’s left wing only won a partial victory in presidential elections that will go to a second round, but they still set off fireworks and danced the samba on the streets.

Former trade union boss Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is now headed for an October 27 showdown with the second place finisher, government-backed candidate Jose Serra.

“Let us go wage the fight, let’s go to the streets immediately!” Jose Geonino, one of Silva’s closest aides, told more than 1,000 cheering supporters of the left wing Workers’ Party candidate after yesterday’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%.

Included in those eliminated in the first round were former Rio state Governor Anthony Garotinho with 16.75 and former finance minister Ciro Gomes with 12.4%.

Silva’s campaign said it would immediately begin hunting for votes from Garotinho, who had strong support from evangelical groups, and from Gomes, a centre-left wing figure seen as sympathetic to him.

More than three quarters of the electorate rebuffed the government candidate Serra and the free market policies he vowed to continue from outgoing President Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

“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.

He said that discontent is not confined to Brazil, but is part of a region-wide dissatisfaction with unbridled 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 free trade bloc by 2005.

Silva has said the FTAA is Washington’s “annexation plan of Latin America”.

But if financial markets abroad openly worried about a left winger winning elected office for the first time in Brazil in nearly 40 years, many in Brazil openly embraced the man as a catalyst for change in a country rife with poverty, hunger and a growing gap between rich and poor.

“Lula! Luuuu-laaa!” people shouted in Sao Paulo, Silva’s home turf, rallying into the early hours of today amid a barrage of fireworks after a compulsory ballot by 115.3 million registered voters.