With less than a week to go, the momentum seems to be with President Dilma Rousseff
By J.P. | SÃO PAULO
BRAZIL is on tenterhooks. With five days to go before the presidential run-off on October 26th the race remains too close to call. But for the first time since the first round of voting two weeks ago the left-wing incumbent, Dilma Rousseff, has gained ground. On October 20th a poll by Datafolha put Ms Rousseff four points ahead of Aécio Neves, her centre-right challenger; last week Mr Neves was leading by a whisker.
Perhaps it was only a matter of time. Ms Rousseff’s campaign, as cynical as it is formidable, has relentlessly (and unfairly) bashed the market-friendly Mr Neves for wanting to slash social programmes and govern solely for the rich elite. It has also attacked his record as governor of Minas Gerais, a big state which has just elected a governor from Ms Rousseff’s Workers’ Party (PT) and where she beat Mr Neves in the first round (in part because the opposition vote was split between him and Marina Silva, a charismatic centrist who came third overall). “People who know Aécio don’t vote for him,” blare PT television ads, conveniently omitting to mention that whenever Mr Neves himself stood for elected office in Minas, he strolled to victory.
Acrimony came to a head in a bad-tempered debate on October 16th. The candidates traded charges of nepotism (over Mr Neves’s sister and Ms Rousseff’s brother, both employed in local administrations run by their respective parties) and corruption (leaked testimonies from a probe into a kickback scheme at Petrobras, the state-controlled oil company, fingered politicians linked to both candidates). On several occasions they accused each other of being “misinformed” about arcane facts and figures, leaving viewers baffled: unlike in first-round debates, campaign managers reportedly vetoed the presence of journalists to adjudicate such quibbles (or grill the candidates).
The electoral authority has since banned personal attack ads from both camps that it deemed “a disservice to fertile and genuine debate”. The tone in another hustings on Sunday was milder—but perhaps the pair were saving their ammunition for the final showdown, this Friday, on Brazil’s most watched network.
Meanwhile, São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest state, which Mr Neves’s Party of Brazilian Social Democracy (PSDB) has ruled for 20 years and where he trounced Ms Rousseff two weeks ago, faces a looming water crisis. Cantareira, a reservoir system which supplies 10m people in and around the state capital, is running on empty. A survey by Datafolha also published on October 20th found that 60% of paulistanos have seen their taps run dry at least once in the past 30 days. The PSDB blames the most severe drought on record; critics allege chronic mismanagement.
Mr Neves’s lead in the rich and industrialised São Paulo has not evaporated entirely. But in the populous south-east it has shrunk from 15 percentage points last week to just nine. As worrying, his “rejection rate”, or the proportion who say they would never vote for him, has climbed from 34% to 40% since the first round. It is now higher than Ms Rousseff’s.
Mr Neves has confounded pollsters before. On the eve of the first round they put his support some ten points below his actual tally. But they signalled that momentum was with him. Now it seems to be with the PT juggernaut. Mr Neves has his work cut out if he is to reverse it.
