Prestem atenção ao mantra abaixo:
"Analysts expressed little doubt that Ms. Rousseff, 62, would prevail in a second round against Mr. Serra." A ladainha será o mote dos coleguinhas cientistas políticos, formados em letras ocultas e letras apagadas. Eles tinham certeza de que a senhora venceria no primeiro turno. Alguns chegaram a me insultar (mas o pior foi insultar a inteligência alheia) porque não concordei com a sua "tese", na verdade slogan partidário. Postei o video do debate na Globo News (Painel) onde fui obrigado a dizer, em pleno ar: "até em corrida de cavalo existe o azarão". Isto porque a ciência política proclamava que a vitória da senhora era absolutamente certa. O texto "jornalístico" do NYT amplia a coisa, dando ao desejo dos analistas o foro de verdade. Enfim, cada um escolhe o jornalismo que acha melhor. Há um filme de classe B, "Cabaret", que exibe uma cena perfeita para o agora brasileiro: um gordo alemão fecha o jornal e grunhe algo sobre a "conspiração judaico-comunista que ameaça a Alemanha". O personagem principal do filme replica: "o que mais vejo é aumentar a conspiração dos burros". This is this and that is that. Ou, como diria o grande pensador Genoino, "cada coisa é uma coisa". RR
Runoff Will Decide the Presidency of Brazil
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
Published: October 3, 2010
SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Dilma Rousseff was leading late Sunday in her bid to be Brazil’s first female president, but election officials said she had failed to come up with enough votes to avoid a second round.
Natacha Pisarenko/Associated Press
Workers party presidential candidate Dilma Rousseff waved at a press conference in Brasilia on Sunday.
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Times Topics: Dilma Rousseff | Brazil
Andre Penner/Associated Press
Presidential candidate of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party José Serra greeted supporters after listening to the official results in Sao Paulo on Sunday.
With about 99.6 percent of the votes counted, Ms. Rousseff, the former chief of staff of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, had 46.8 percent of the votes to 32.6 percent for her closest rival, the former governor of São Paulo, José Serra. Ms. Rousseff needs to exceed 50 percent of the vote total to win outright.
With Ms. Rousseff coming up short, the election will now be decided with an Oct. 31 runoff. Ms. Rousseff was denied her victory by a strong showing by a third candidate, Marina Silva, the Green Party candidate and a former environmental minister, who captured more than 19 percent.
Analysts expressed little doubt that Ms. Rousseff, 62, would prevail in a second round against Mr. Serra. Despite her lack of political experience and public charm, she has ridden a wave of prosperity and good feeling in Brazil under the leadership of Mr. da Silva, whose approval ratings hover near 80 percent.
After two four-year terms, Mr. da Silva is barred by Brazil’s Constitution from running for a third consecutive term — although he could run again in four years.
If elected, Ms. Rousseff will join a wave of elected female leaders breaking the gender barrier in the past five years, including Michelle Bachelet of Chile, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina and Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel.
Ms. Rousseff, who was active in armed militant organizations fighting the dictatorship in the 1960s, is considered a competent administrator but is lacking in the kind of seductive charisma that helped make Mr. da Silva so popular. A former union leader with a fourth-grade education, Mr. da Silva’s dirt-poor background resonated with many Brazilians, especially in the northeast and among an emerging lower-middle class he helped create.
Some analysts and foreign investors have expressed concern that Ms. Rousseff’s leftist background could cause her to steer the country left and give the state more control over the economy.
The daughter of a Brazilian mother and a Bulgarian immigrant father, Ms. Rousseff grew up middle class in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte.
In an interview last year, Ms. Rousseff denied having participated in an armed action against the government, including the most celebrated incident tied to her, a 1969 armed robbery of the safe of São Paulo’s governor.
She was captured and imprisoned in 1970 for crimes of “opinion and organization.” She ended up spending three years behind bars; she said that she was tortured repeatedly with electro-shocks and that her head was forcibly dunked under water.
Shortly after Mr. da Silva was elected in 2002, he named her minister of mines and energy. Then, after a vote-buying scandal involving his previous chief of staff, José Dirceu, who was forced to resign, Mr. da Silva put her in charge of the cabinet in 2005.
As chief of staff, she handled a multibillion-dollar infrastructure development fund, and, separately, she served as chairwoman of Petrobras, the giant Brazilian oil company.
Mr. da Silva spent the better part of a year introducing Ms. Rousseff to Brazilians and giving her some credit for his accomplishments. Her treatment for lymphatic cancer caused some concern last year over whether she would continue as the Workers’ Party candidate. But the president stuck with her, campaigning vigorously for her and managing to make the election essentially a referendum on his years in office.
“I am voting for Dilma to continue what Lula began,” Wagner Campos, a 27-year-old supermarket manager, said Sunday after voting in the center of São Paulo. “Dilma’s story and her struggles inspire me and Brazil.”
Ms. Rousseff also managed to maintain most of her lead over Mr. Serra despite a scandal last month involving Erenice Guerra, the woman that succeeded her as chief of staff, who was accused along with Ms. Guerra’s son of being involved in influence-peddling. Ms. Guerra, while denying the accusations, resigned under pressure from the president a few days after the scandal broke.
Both Ms. Rousseff and Mr. Serra have vowed to continue the economic formula that has allowed Brazil to rise into a bigger global power during the past decade. That includes the subsidy programs for the poor that have been greatly expanded under Mr. da Silva to more than 12 million people.
Ms. Rousseff has promised to create millions of jobs and housing units, and to “dramatically” reduce Brazil’s interest rates, which are among the highest in the world. She also said she would greatly expand the number of health care centers and adapt a program to forcibly oust drug lords from Rio de Janeiro slums for use in other cities. During the campaign, she defended alliances Mr. da Silva forged with Iran and Venezuela, despite criticism from the United States about those leaders’ democratic values.
Mr. Serra tried to publicize his superior political experience during the campaign. He said he would more than double the number of metro rail miles across 13 cities; promised to create a ministry of public security to better combat organized crime and drug trafficking; and said he would pressure Bolivia to crack down on drug cartels that are sending cocaine across Brazil’s border.