PREVIEW: Lula overshadows Brazil presidency race: hard shoes to fill

By Diana Renee Sep 29, 2010, 13:25 GMT

Rio de Janeiro - The massively popular Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is about to leave office, and his anointed successor, Dilma Rousseff, is favoured to win Sunday's election.

Rousseff, 62, Lula's former chief of staff, is the candidate of the ruling Workers' Party (PT). Recent opinion polls show that she is likely to get an absolute majority of the votes, enough to avoid a runoff.

Her main rival among nine candidates is Jose Serra, 68, of the Party of Brazilian Social Democracy (PSDB). The former governor of the state of Sao Paulo, the most powerful in Brazil, started the campaign as the favourite but then lost ground as Lula actively campaigned for Rousseff.

According to an opinion poll made public Tuesday by the Datafolha Institute, Rousseff would get 51 per cent of the valid votes to Serra's 32 per cent.

Green Party candidate Marina Silva, a former environment minister under Lula, would get 16 per cent of the votes, according to this opinion poll, which has a margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points.

Sunday will mark the first time since the return of democracy in 1985 when Brazil's 135 million voters do not have the option to vote for Lula for president.

However, the former steel worker - set to leave office on January 1 as the most popular president in Brazilian history - has been the star of the election campaign.

During his eight years in office, Lula defied expectations that he would bring economic ruin to the country and instead reshaped Brazil from within and redefined his country's position in the global political and economic sphere.

His social programmes lifted millions out of poverty into the middle class, and his rags-to-power story is a role model for millions of supporters, to the point where a biopic on him is set to compete for the Academy Award for best foreign film this year.

Lula put the full weight of his charisma and his record popularity ratings of around 80 per cent in the service of his designated heir, Rousseff.

In so doing, Lula turned the former government chief of staff, who was until a few months ago a virtual unknown, into the the clear favourite in the election, even though she had never before stood for public office. She overcame a lymphatic cancer only last year.

Rousseff appears ready to surpass her mentor, at least in some ways. If she obtains an absolute majority Sunday in the first round of voting, this is something that even Lula himself never achieved.

Lula won the 2002 presidential election after losing his bids in 1989, 1994 and 1998 - in a runoff defeat of Serra, Rousseff's main rival now. In 2006, a corruption scandal denied Lula re-election in the first round, although he easily won the runoff over social democrat Geraldo Alckmin.

Now, in the home stretch of the current campaign, Lula has become a sort of shield to protect Rousseff from new allegations of corruption, including a scandal over an alleged insider-knowledge- trafficking ring operating in the government department that Rousseff led until April.

With opinion polls pointing to a resounding success of Lula's strategy, he is also looking to use his popularity in favour of candidates of the PT and its allied parties in the Senate, where 54 of 81 seats are up for grabs.

The daily Folha de Sao Paulo noted that if final figures confirm Rousseff's election win in just one round and her supporters' comfortable majority in both houses of Congress, she will hold 'a degree of power that is unprecedented in the young Brazilian democracy.'

Also thanks to Lula's efforts, the social democratic opposition is at risk of coming ouit of the election seriously weakened. Opinion polls indicate that the representation of the PSDB and its main ally, the conservative party of the Democrats (DEM), will shrink in both houses of Congress.

The single success likely for the social democrats led by former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who will likely hold on to the governorships of the two Brazilian states which are most powerful in political and economic terms.

In Sao Paulo, Alckmin appears likely to win in the first round, while in Minas Gerais, Antonio Anastasia may be held to a runoff but is also expected eventually to come out the winner.