In Brazil, Democracy is the Winner
An estimated 115 million Brazilians went to the polls across this enormous country on 5 October to decide who will get to govern them for the next four years. It was Brazil's (where voting is compulsory) seventh democratic presidential election since the fall of the military dictatorship that ruled the country with an iron fist from 1964 to 1985. But none of the candidates managed to obtain an outright majority, which means that the race will be decided through a runoff on 26 October.
The current President, Dilma Rousseff from the centre-left Workers' Party (PT), managed to get 42% of the votes, followed by Aécio Neves from the (misleadingly named) centre-right Social Democrats (PSDB) with 34%, and Marina Silva from the Socialist Party (PSB) with 21%. Rousseff is thus currently regarded as the favourite to win the second round battle against Neves.
But it is not necessarily the result that ultimately makes this such a highly intriguing election; it is the way in which the election campaign itself has unfolded. The process has consistently been marked by an unprecedented level of uncertainty among analysts and political pundits, with polls projecting a different winner on an almost weekly basis. One exasperated analyst from Estadão Dados even felt the need to claim that this election was ‘incomparable with anything that has happened anywhere in the world'.
So what is it that has made this campaign so exceptional? The story begins with the June 2013 protests, when more than a million Brazilians flooded the streets of cities across the country to loudly express their frustration with corruption, poor service delivery and the money being spent in preparation for the 2014 FIFA World Cup. These were by far the biggest demonstrations the country had witnessed since the arrival of full democracy in 1990. The political mood changed overnight, with approval of Rousseff's government being halved from 80% to 40%. Two-thirds of the population indicated to pollsters that they were in favour of ‘change'.
This was in spite of the fact that Brazil has undoubtedly made tremendous progress since the PT came to power under Luiz Inácio ‘Lula' da Silva in 2003. The government was able to lift more than 40 million people out of extreme poverty in the decade since then, partly due to innovative welfare programmes like the much-vaunted Bolsa Família, increases in the value of the minimum wage and prudent macroeconomic policies.