Brazil's presidential candidate Dilma Rousseff and candidate for governor Tarso Genro greet supporters during a campaign rally in Porto Alegre on Saturday. Presidential candidates traded accusations over political corruption in a last-ditch attempt to sway undecided voters before Sunday's election runoff in Brazil's closest race in decades.
Reuters/Rio de Janeiro
Brazilians were set to vote on Sunday in a bitterly-contested election that pits a leftist president with strong support among the poor against a centrist senator who is promising pro-business policies to jumpstart a stagnant economy.
Polls give a slight edge to incumbent Dilma Rousseff, 66, who is seeking a second four-year term. Her Workers' Party has held power for 12 years and leveraged an economic boom to expand social welfare programs and lift over 40mn people from poverty.
But many voters believe Aecio Neves, a 54-year-old former state governor with strong support among upper-middle class and wealthy Brazilians, offers a much-needed change of the guard for Latin America's biggest economy. A decade of growth peaked at 7.5% in 2010 and has flagged since Rousseff took office.
Despite acrimonious finger pointing and corruption scandals that have characterised the campaign since a first-round vote on October 5, voters are likely to be divided between those who feel better off than they did before the Workers' Party took office and those who believe its reign, no matter how successful, is no longer producing results.
"Forget the noise on both sides," said Alexandre Barros, a political consultant in Brasilia, the capital. "This is about an individual choice by each voter - what's in it for me?"
Rousseff has promised to deepen flagship welfare programs and seek to restore growth with a new economic team.
Neves also vows to keep the social benefits while adopting more market-friendly fiscal measures to rein in public spending, take a tougher stance against inflation and give the central bank more autonomy to set monetary policy.
The choice takes Brazil back to a clash between classes in a country still riven by inequality.
It also reverts to a longstanding rivalry between the Workers' Party, with roots in Brazil's labour movement, and the Brazilian Social Democracy Party, which held power for two terms before Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Rousseff's mentor and predecessor, was elected in 2002.
Two closely-watched polls on the eve of the runoff showed Rousseff with a lead of as much as 6 percentage points.
Earlier in the day, however, a smaller poll swung in favour of Neves, who surprised in the first round of voting earlier this month by surging from a distant third place in polls to clinch second.
More than 140mn people are registered to vote in Brazil, where casting a ballot is mandatory for everyone between the ages of 18 and 70.
Voting is electronic, even at remote Amazon polling stations and hamlets in Brazil's historically poor Northeast.
